Freiburg Bächle

This is the project page for the translation of Freiburg Bächle

Infrastructure

Tourism

The Bächle is an important characteristic of Freiburg’s old city center, which is why it is often used for touristic advertisement for the city and it’s many facets. The Bächle is one of many landmarks in the city of Freiburg and consequently a tourist attraction for young and old. It is also often in the focus of media representation of Freiburg as well as in artistic reception. Since October 2021 Freiburg’s very own drag queen Betty BBQ has been offering a specific Bächle-City-Sightseeing-Tour, which is accompanied by Stocky, an original “Bächleputzer” (≈ Bächle cleaner).

Accident Hazard

The city of Freiburg can maintain the existence of the Bächle without endangering the road construction. However, the Freiburg Automobile Club (FAC) demanded the removal of the “traffic obstacles” in 1952. In 1956, one visitor suggested that the town signs could mention the Bächle as a hint. Around the same time, a businessman from Mannheim filed a lawsuit against the city at the Freiburg district court after driving into a Bächle on Salzstraße and subsequently crashing into a house wall. The lawsuit for 2360 DM was dismissed. In 1964, a tourist, suing the city after breaking his leg falling into the Bächle on Adelhauser Strasse, was more successful. However, the city only had to pay two-thirds of the damage. The reason for this was that after staying in the city for a day, he must have noticed the Bächle and because they wanted the city to stick “to such a distinctive, beautiful and hygienic peculiarity as the city Bächle represent as long as possible”. Furthermore, on her way to the audience with Pope Benedict XVI in the Collegium Borromaeum seminary during his visit to Freiburg, Maike Kohl-Richter, the wife of Germany's former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, drove into a Bächle. The car had to be recovered by a tow truck, but the couple could still use it to get home.

As a consequence to the accidents at the end of the 60’s, the city decided to raise the streambed in some of the Bächle, including the ones in Salzstraße and Bertoldstraße. In 1973 the inner city center of Freiburg became a pedestrian area with tram lines. Since then the Bächle have not represented a severe obstacle for traffic, even though some of them are very close to the tram tracks. In 1986 the Bächle in Univeristätsstraße and Niemensstraße were opened.

In 2015 the Freiburg Bächle became subject of an April fool’s joke by a local newspaper. They reported that, after a lot of pressure has been initiated by insurances, the city had decided to fill up most of the Bächle and pave them in blue color. On that day, a citizen’s initiative was supposedly collecting signatures to stop that from happening.

Similar structures in different cities

Villingen and Bern were just like Freiburg founded by the House of Zähringen. Villingen still has Bächle, while Bern does not anymore. In Bern the water from the Bächle was used to extinguish fires by redirecting it. In 1954 the Bächle in the Hauptstrasse in Bern was the only one still existing, but it was already covered up with stone slabs. In cities like Schwäbisch Gmünd, which were founded by the Hohenstaufen are some water channels similar to the Bächle. In Schwäbisch Gmünd they were built with the construction of the city, in other cities they were put up afterwards. Examples for this are: Basel, Quedlinburg, Speyer, Niedermarsberg, Düren, the Lorenzerstadt of Nürnberg and Erfurt. The Bächle in these cities can be found on a map by Matthäus Merian (16th century), on a map from 1869 they are already gone. Other cities that have had Bächle in their centre since about the 12th century are Jena, Gotha, Langensalza, Chemnitz, Dresden, Weißensee, Forchheim and Mühlhausen.

City moats are distantly related to the Bächle. Due to the expansion of the cities, they were located in the city centre and served as an effluent disposal. This was the case in Würzburg and Cologne. In Aachen and Munich parts of rivers were channelled through the cities. In Munich these were used as effluent disposals as well as to gain hydropower.

In Bielefeld the old pipe system of the Lutter has been being recovered for a few years now. The goal is to lead away the dry weather flow in little streams that can be compared to the Freiburg Bächle.

Bächle in neighboring Staufen (Breisgau)
Bächle in Preetz (Schleswig-Holstein)
Bächle in Freudenstadt
Bächle in Alfeld on Markstraße