Today we finally get to visit Bebenhausen here on Two to Tü. As I mentioned last week, it’s a popular tourist spot on the outskirts of Tübingen, a former monastery complex that later became a king’s hunting lodge. Oh, and in between it was a boy’s boarding school (after the Reformation, when the monasteries were shut down.)

It’s actually one of the primary things to visit in Tübingen, but Chris and I hadn’t managed to get there until earlier this month.  That’s what happens when you live in a place, you don’t visit the tourist spots until you get visitors (thanks, Stan and Judie, for coming to visit!)

Although you can wander around the grounds on your own, you have to pay to go into the cloisters, which are suitably atmospheric. At some point a duke came to do penance, or something, and there was a fancy private chamber that was built for him (there’s penance and there’s penance – compare the two photos of a monk’s bedroom vs the duke’s bedroom). At some point the cloister also served as government offices after WWII, but today I think it’s all just a spot for tourists.

You can also get a guided tour of the king’s hunting lodge. I should note that the king in question was not the king of all of Germany, but rather the king of this area of Germany, King Wilhelm II of Württemberg. That Wilhelm is not the Kaiser Wilhelm that you might be familiar with as the protagonist in WWI; the Württemberg dynasty was from a different part of the family. Well, at least I think it was a distant part of the same family – I don’t actually remember what they said, and a quick review on Wikipedia just now revealed that it requires more than a quick review to sort that all out.

Anyway,  because Wilhelm II was actually well-liked by his people, he was allowed to live out his days at Bebenhausen after the war; he died there in 1921. Of course, he was bitter about that, since he still had to abdicate and give up all the rest of his property. His second wife, duchess Charlotte of Schaumburg-Lippe, continued to live at Bebenhausen until her death in 1947.

I gather that Charlotte enjoyed living there more than her husband did, actually, as she was quite the avid hunter. In her private chambers, the walls were decorated with plaques of tusks taken from all the wild boar she had killed. Each tusk set was arranged into the letter “C”, for Charlotte. Well, it’s good to have a hobby, I guess. There were lots of plaques.

Below are some photos from our visit. Note that there were no photos allowed in the private chambers, so I can’t show you those plaques. Or the giant stuffed bear holding a lantern aloft that was actually a lamp. I don’t think they mentioned who shot that animal – or who the lamp maker was. But do look at the photo below of the dormitory floor. For reasons that were not explained, some giant stuffed animals sit at the far end of the room. Since all the signs called that level in the cloisters building a “monk dormitory,” I found it a bit disconcerting to look down the hallway and spot huge, stuffed, wild animals. Not the image of monks that I expected to see decorating that area, given the displays elsewhere extoll the importance of their book artwork. I guess the royal family ran out of room in the hunting lodge when it came time to store all their trophies.