Baden-Baden

The Black Forest spa town of Baden-Baden is often described as gemutlich, the German adjective usually taken to mean comfortable or cosy. Stroll past the 19th Century casino and down the arcade of shops opposite the entrance to The Kurhaus, glancing at the window displays of mink ear-muffs and coquettish Dresden porcelain and you soon realise, however, that in this case it is the cosiness of a double-knit cashmere cardigan rather than that of a baggy old gardening jumper. Because while other European health resorts have run to seed, or cast off their straw-boaters in favour of the corporate baseball caps of the conference trade, Baden-Baden has retained the smart and slightly raffish appearance of an Edwardian Boulevardier. These days the visitors who come to bathe in the colonnaded beauty of the Friedrichsbad, or gamble at the solid gold roulette wheel in the winter garden may no longer wear spats or bustles, but every once in a while you find yourself sniffing the air, half expecting to catch the scent of pomade and moustache-wax.

The great, chateau-roofed 19th Century villas that line one edge of the Lichtenthaler Allee, that fastidious expanse of chestnut tree-lined parkland that runs alongside the river Oos, are freshly rendered in shades of jersey cream and royal icing; the flights of leisurely caprice – a gable-end decorated with a golden cockerel, Moorish pillared balconies, an ornate summer house that mimics an Ottoman pavilion – immaculately maintained.

The Brenners Park Hotel (“From Russian grand dukes to today’s sober bankers anyone who is anyone has stayed here and with good reason” remarks Rene Lecler in his guidebook The 300 Best Hotels In The World) has awnings in green-and-white blazer stripes. The famous rose garden’s manicured beech hedge is four feet thick, the art deco gateway decorated with leaping stags. Beyond a sand-filled dressage ring a row of bronze busts of famous local residents – Clara Schuman, Johannes Brahms – guide the way to a striking display of dahlias in ball-gown shades of scarlet, saffron and azure.

In Europe wealthy places have a tendency to quietness. In Baden-Baden nothing, save for the occasional, doleful clang of a church bell, is louder than the purr of the passing Mercedes’. Even the Oos, which looks the sort of brook that might, in less august surroundings, babble, confines itself to a low, respectful murmur.

The surrounding hills are likewise well groomed and stately. The two-hour walk up one of them, the Battert, leads to the ruined Burg Hohenbaden, once home to the rulling Margraves of Baden. It takes you through buttercup speckled meadows and woodlands of oak and yew, golden larch and silver birch half-hidden amongst which are burnished log hunting lodges of the type occupied by the handsome but heartless young barons in Victoria Holt bodice-rippers. To ensure ease of passage a council employee riding a small red and yellow motor-roller regularly flattens the gravel footpath. Baden-Baden is a place for brogues and loden not walking boots and Gore-Tex.

Lower down the Battert, through fruit trees, which in autumn are laden with rubicund apples and the plump, purple plums that are distilled into Pflumliwasser stands the vine-bearded Neue Schloss to which the Margraves repaired in the 1400s. The terrace overlooks the town. From here you can admire the ornate roofing tiles of the Stiftskirche with its octagonal spire and black cupola; the colonnaded walkway of the Trinkhalle; the twin spires of the Stadtkirche ornamented like the crowns of a pair of Coptic emperors. Near the ochre-coloured Rathaus of the Markt steam rolls across the cobblestones from the vents of the domed roofed bathing hall of the 120 year-old Friedrichsbad.

Baden-Baden has devoted itself to repairing the health of visitors since the 2nd Century AD when thermal springs were discovered here (the remains of the original Roman baths can still be seen, tucked away next to an underground car park). Save for a brief lull in the 16th Century when the church succeeded in banning public bathing on the grounds that it encouraged “unnatural practices” (a claim that the clergy unwisely backed up with a series of woodcuts showing naked young women cavorting lasciviously – a sight surely guaranteed to encourage male visitors rather than deter them) it has continued to do so ever since.

By the end of the 19th Century sanatoriums had sprung up everywhere in Baden-Baden under the guidance of medical men such as Professor Rumpf, who claimed to have learned his trade from the unlikely sounding Dr Turban of Davos. These monuments to Victorian valetudinarianism were packed with patented paraphernalia such as the Spaltsitzende Rumpf-Rolling exercise machine as well as assorted Heath Robinson-esque weightlifting contraptions with which, if the drawings are to be believed, men wrestled effortlessly while glad in jackets and ties. Those wanting to take home a souvenir of their stay could visit the Centralsanitatsbazar, a kind of healthcare hypermarket that offered everything from corsets to enema pumps via surgical stockings and rupture appliances.

The range of options for those seeking comfort of body and mind is equally as wide today, but nowhere near as painful. You may undertake a course of Romano-Irish bathing in the Friedrichsbad, shiatsu in the modern Caracalla Therme, (six floors of swimming pools, saunas and treatment rooms), or Reviderm cell regeneration, Caviar Power age-reduction, Dr Vodder’s lymph-drainage or, if you are brave enough, Pneumatron Saug-Pumpen-Massage.

Worthy and effective though these treatments undoubtedly are it’s hard to imagine anything that is likely to more fully to relieve stress, wash away strain and restore a sense mental and physical well being than sitting in one of the town’s cafes immersed in the aroma of coffee and freshly baked butterstreusel.

The Café Konig in Lichtenthalerstrasse first opened its doors 250 years ago, around the time that licensed gambling (Baden-Baden’s other main draw) came to the town. It has light peach and pink interiors and ancient gilded mirrors. Twin silver crocks (the word basin hardly coveys the epic scale of them) piled high with nuggets of frost white and fudge-brown sugar, adorn the tables. Outside the window a strapping blond man in lederhosen sings jaunty leder accompanying himself on the accordion.

In The Café Konig the Kapuziner is presented on a silver salver. The frothy topping is not milk, but whipped cream decorated with shavings of bitter chocolate. To accompany it there are heart-shaped Linzertorte, rasperry filling peeping through the snowy dusting of sugar, fruchtebrot in which the brot is so heavily outweighed by the glistering clusters of frucht it’s lucky even to get second billing and, of course, Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte, which they say was invented in the kitchen here.

The Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte served in Baden Baden is not the lump of semi-frozen stodge, viscous purple paste and unctuous UHT foam that once lurked on British sweet trolleys under the name Black Forest Gateau, but a cloud of cream, glazed cherries, flakes of white and dark chocolate and a crumbling sponge that is so heavily impregnated with Kirschwasser – the local eau de vie distilled from wild cherries – that anyone who eats more than a slice is likely to end up putting an arm round complete strangers and muttering “You’re my best mate, you are” into their ear.

The key figure in the development of Baden-Baden as a fashionable resort was Edouard Benazet. A dapper Frenchman with the look of a young Peter Ustinov, Benazet was to Baden Baden what Bugsy Siegel was to Las Vegas (albeit without the unsavoury connections). Benazet’s father Jacques had run the gaming rooms at the Palais Royal in Paris and in 1838 he brought with him to the Black Forest the kind of grandiose panache that had made the French capital the world’s most fashionable city. Benazet had the interiors of the casino styled in imitation of the salons of Versaille and the Tuilleries and built by Parisian craftsmen. Rococo portraiture, Hsien-Feng porcelain and raspberry silk wall-coverings imported from Lyon vie for attention with ceiling frescoes of Old Father Rhine, friezes of eagles and unicorns, gilded brass chandeliers and shimmering water fountains in the Deuxieme Empire style. In 1855 the casino running smoothly Benazet took time out to organise Baden-Baden’s first major horse race meeting, an event that would eventually become Germany’s equivalent of Royal Ascot.

Shortly afterwards a visit from Empress Eugenie of France, then considered the globe’s premier arbiter of good taste despite having married the diminutive and toad-like Napoleon III, confirmed Baden-Baden’s reputation for sophistication and the visitors flooded in. Many came from Russia and took up permanent residence (the town still has a Russian Orthodox Church complete with gold onion dome). Others passed through amongst then Tolstoy, Turgenev, Stravinsky and fanatical gambler Dostoevsky.

Another unnamed but infamous Russian visitor was a former aide to Czar Nicolas II who, it is said, visited the Royal treasury in St Petersburg one afternoon at the beginning of the 20th Century and absconded with 20 million rubles worth of gold and jewellery. He arrived in Baden-Baden a week or so later armed with his loot and an infallible system for winning at roulette. Nine days later he left, penniless.

The main gaming rooms that hosted the embezzler’s disastrous losing streak are still much as they were when Benazet designed them - brazenly opulent and so crammed with crystal, gold-leaf, red velvet and polished glass that it blurs the vision, creating the dreamy effect of a world filmed though a Vaseline-coated lens.

Baden-Baden’s casino retains a sense of decorum. It does not have slot machines (These are relegated to an unprepossessing modern building several hundred yards away where their blinking lights jostle for attention with pool tables and video games) and the dress code is formal and strict. Gentlemen must wear jacket and tie, ladies a suitable dress or trouser suit, army officers their uniforms. “Other ranks” the rulebook states loftily, “are not permitted in the casino”.

The draconian fashion regime is undermined by the presence of many hardened gamblers most of whose idea of elegant apparel involves combining a rhubarb-coloured blazer with a yellow-and-mint green striped shirt, a malevolent Batik-print tie, tan pants and shoes with quilted fronts in a particularly enervating shade of battleship grey.

The ceiling of the bar is chocolate coloured plastic. Wall-mounted electric screens flash up the roulette numbers in points of yellow and red light. A mirror is etched with the face of Marilyn Monroe. The brass lampshades have fringes (tassels and betting being indivisible). Marlene Dietrich said the Baden Baden casino was the most beautiful in the world. Plainly this bit was added after her time.

Highball glasses filled with drinking straws line the bar. These are not for imbibing champagne cocktails through. They are to place across the top of a half-finished drink when the urge to place a bet becomes too strong to resist. It is a sign that says, “I’m coming back for this”. The poker games start late and by nine in the evening men in fancy braces and the sort of waistcoats that pass for a personality are prowling around eager for action.

At a Baccarat table a South-East Asian with a moon-shaped and cratered face straightens his dog-sick yellow tie and scowls meaningfully at a jaunty German who has just drawn an extra card when the rules of gambling say he should have stuck. The card is a nine, it busts the German but would have taken the Asian to the coveted vingt-et-un. There is an etiquette at card tables it is best not to fool with. A cloud of bitter smoke hangs over the green baize like a judgment.

To rid myself of the casino’s toxins (the German passion for tobacco is attested to by the fact that Baden-Baden once produced no fewer than 9 brands of cigarettes – one with the far from reassuring name of Radium) I take myself for a session of Thalasso treatment at the Institute Mireille. I am blindfolded and smothered in mud that has been enriched with nutritious algae. The process sounds like a jellyfish being put through a mangle. I am then wrapped in what feels like clingfilm and left to listen to plangent celestial tunes that segue seamlessly into the sound of waves crashing against rocks. My body temperature begins to rise and for a moment I wonder if this is what it feels like to be a hedgehog cooked by gypsies. Three hours pass in what seems like 15 minutes. At the end of the treatment I feel so relaxed I practically have to be carried from the building in a bucket.

Later I walk along the Kurhaus arcade, past Baltic amber necklaces that glister like calcified honey and stop to admire a collection of Meissen figurines. The lady in the shop tells me that the super (she says it in the German way soaring up on the vowel like an excited dove, soooooo-pah!) thing about Meissen is that it’s so very hard wearing. “The dinner service,” she says, “you can just put it straight into the dishwasher every day and it will still be as good in twenty years”. I buy two dishes each no bigger than an oyster shell and hand over 200 euros.

Afterwards, sitting in the Café Konig munching a Coupe Monsieur (mocha ice cream, whipped cream, chocolate shavings and, a healthful touch, half-a-dozen rum-soaked prunes), I think about the Meissen figurines. A rosy cheeked girl in a French blue bodice and pink and white Regency stripe skirt winding up a music box on which a tiny clockwork bear dances. A grass green-coated Prussian dragoon sitting coolly on a prancing horse, and a group of rifle-armed Jaegers returning from the hunt, braces of fowl slung over their shoulders, pointers and retrievers skipping about their heels.
Expensive, decorative and not entirely serious they seem very much at home in Baden-Baden.