The original flat
Preserved behind the tailoring workshop.
Magnus Manske โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท Ralf Krebs โ CC BY 3.0 ยท flamenc โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท hh oldman โ CC BY 3.0
Because the exhibition around it is not only about Ebert but about the Weimar Republic as a whole โ and it is among the clearest accounts a visitor can read of how a young democracy collapses under economic crisis and political violence. If you are visiting Nazi-era sites in Germany, this museum explains what came before, the context most of them leave out.
Sign in to write your review of this place.
No reviews yet โ be the first.
This house is where Friedrich Ebert was born in 1871 โ Germany's first elected president and its first head of state from a working-class background. He was born in a small flat behind his father's tailoring workshop in a narrow old-town lane, and trained as a saddler before moving into trade union work and then politics. The distance between that flat and the presidency is the museum's whole subject. Ebert led Germany through its hardest years: he took office in 1919 after the collapse of the empire and defeat in the war, in a Weimar Republic caught between coups from the right, revolutions from the left, and runaway inflation, and he died in 1925 at fifty-four, worn down by a long campaign of legal defamation against him. The original flat is preserved with its modest furniture on the ground floor, and around it runs a modern exhibition on the Weimar Republic as a whole โ its birth, its fragility and its end โ which is among the best available explanations of that period for any visitor. Entry is free.
Preserved behind the tailoring workshop.
A full account of the republic's rise and fall.
Pfaffengasse 18, 69117 Heidelberg