The bare interior
White walls and clear light instead of the expected ornament.
This is the Catholic cathedral church of the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, standing directly on Koenigstrasse, in the middle of the city's long shopping street. It was consecrated in 1811 under King Friedrich to a classical design by the court architect Nikolaus von Thouret, and it was the first Catholic church permitted in Stuttgart after the Reformation had kept Wuerttemberg firmly Lutheran for close to three centuries. The air raids of 1944 destroyed it, leaving little beyond parts of the walls. The parish worshipped for years in a patched-up wing of the art building on Schlossplatz until 1955, when the church reopened, not restored to its first classical form but rebuilt with modern plainness: white walls, clear light, and almost no ornament at all. That is what surprises people who step in expecting German baroque. It was raised to the rank of co-cathedral in 1978. Visiting costs nothing and the door opens straight onto the crowded street, and the contrast is the whole point: two steps out of the Koenigstrasse crush and you are in a still, bare, bright room. Behind it stands the house of the Catholic church with a quiet courtyard. This is a working church with daily services, so respect the times of prayer and do not photograph during them. Twenty minutes covers it; it is not a museum and does not pretend to be one.
White walls and clear light instead of the expected ornament.
Total quiet two steps from the city's busiest street.
Koenigstrasse 7, 70173 Stuttgart
Because the raids of 1944 left almost nothing of the original. When it reopened in 1955 the city chose to rebuild in the plain post-war idiom rather than copy Thouret's classical interior back, and that reconstruction is what you see today.
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