Monuments of Memory: Bad Soden's Local Heroes and Remembrance

We're starting our tour here at the Brunnen des Kurgastes—the Fountain of the Spa Guest—created in 1980 by sculptor Bonifatius Stirnberg, who studied under Joseph Beuys. What you're looking at is really a visual history of Bad Soden itself. The fountain features five bronze figures, each representing a different era of…

From the fountain celebrating visitors, we now turn to someone who dedicated nearly four decades to caring for them. We're standing on Dr. Max Isserlin Straße, named for the physician who ran Bad Soden's Jewish spa institute from 1900 until 1938. Isserlin arrived here in 1900, a balneologist specializing in spa treatme…

File:Bad Soden am Taunus, Zum Quellenpark 6, Stolperstein Dr. Max Isserlin | 🔗 wikimedia.org

The Alter Kurpark opened in 1823, right when Bad Soden was beginning to develop as a spa town. What you're looking at is an English landscape garden—that style of deliberately natural-looking design that was fashionable across Europe at the time. The park has been expanded and redesigned several times since, but you ca…

Bad Soden Taunus Alter Kurpark | 🔗 wikipedia.org

The Kriegerdenkmal sits at the cemetery as a three-part stepped structure in cement stone, topped with a cross—a design you see repeated across German towns, each one marking similar losses. What makes this one distinctive is its dual purpose. The central monument honors both World Wars with the inscription "Den Opfern…

Israelitische Kuranstalt What you're looking at here on Talstraße is the site of one of Bad Soden's most important institutions—the Israelitische Kuranstalt, established in 1889. It was a sanatorium specifically for Jewish patients, many of them dealing with tuberculosis, and it was funded largely by the Rothschild ban…

We've moved from collective remembrance to individual memory—right here at Königsteiner Straße 39, you'll find a small brass square set into the pavement. This is a Stolperstein, a "stumbling stone," one of tens of thousands placed across Europe to mark where victims of Nazi persecution once lived. This one honors Lise…

File:Bad Soden am Taunus, Königsteiner Str. 39, Stolperstein Liselotte Strausser | 🔗 wikimedia.org

Gedenkstein Wendelin Bauer We've arrived at a quieter memorial in the Eichwald forest—one that marks a moment in March 1945 when the war was already lost, but the killing continued. The stone itself is modest: you'll find an information board on the forest path explaining what happened here, though there's also an unma…