Boisserée Palace

The Baroque building on the north side of Karl’s Square along the Hauptstrasse was built in 1703-05, initially to serve as a home and office for Franz von Sickingen, a court official. The brothers Sulpiz and Melchior Boisserée lived in it extravagantly from 1810 to 1819, also exhibiting their collection of Old German and Dutch paintings.

Johann Wolfang von Goethe showed considerable interest in it, visiting the Boisserée brothers twice (in 1814 and 1815), which helped the collection acquire lasting fame. It was later to become the core stock of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. In 1826 the Baroque palace was taken over and remodeled in Classical style by the government of Baden. Owned since 1975 by the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, it now holds the university’s Department of German Literature (Germanistik).