The Forgotten Mannheim Water Tower

     I am so happy that for most of my adult life I had taken the time to write a diary or when I was traveling, a journal.  During that time, I would often think, “I will always remember that,” but now, in my 70’s and reading through my diary, I keep coming upon things that I had totally forgotten.  Most of those things I had forgotten were not all that important, but once I read about them, some of my dozing brain cells where jarred causing additional memories to come back. 

    While recently going through my 1996 European travel journal, I read about our travel through Germany, where we went to see the Mannheim Water Tower.  While I did remember being in Mannheim, their water tower was a complete blank to me.  Below is what I learned about being in Mannheim from my journal:

    After seeing the Dom Cathedral in Klon, we took a train to Koblenz, Germany, then traveled on to Mannheim, a city we knew nothing about, but the map in our guide book showed it to be sort of a transportation hub, a place that offered a lot of train destinations.  

              Once we arrived in Mannheim we searched around for a hotel we could afford, and finally settled on a very nice one that was only 95 DM (Deutsche Marks)( $142.50 US) which was still expensive, but cheaper than all of the other hotels we had checked out.  (It should be remembered that a dollar in 1996 bought a whole lot more than it does today, so the prices I quote might not seem all that expensive these days, but back then they were very expensive)

    Eating was also expensive in Mannheim.  I had a salad with chicken strips ($22.50 US), my wife who grew up in Germany, went for one of her childhood favorites:  Rouladen ($37.50 US).  Rouladen is a German dish made of long trips of meat slathered with mustard, rolled and filled with bacon, onions and pickles.   Our two Cokes cost us $9.00 US.  We were not very wealthy people and the mealwhile very tasty, seemed really pricy to us.

    After our expensive meal we walked down to the Mannheim Water Tower, which our guide book had mentioned as a local landmark.  It was a  massive old stone water tower was built of stone in 1889, to solve Mannheim’s water problems.  The water table in the Rhine Valley was very close to the surface, but during the summer, the quality of the water was very poor and often caused sickness.  The municipality, created a construction project to pipe cleaner and safer water from the mountains and stored it in the huge stone water tower.

    The water tower was an impressive structure that was 60m (200 ft) in height and 19m (60 ft) in diameter.  It situated close to a spraying fountain.  Unfortunately, the impressiveness of the monuments were somewhat spoiled with a lot of sprayed on graffiti, something that I had always disgusted me.  

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