
Studentenkarzer
Former university jail whose five cells are covered in students' graffiti, portraits and verses.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Studentenkarzer in Heidelberg follows Mark Twain in eighteen seventy-eight, when he set out to visit an American student doing time in the university's own jail and asked a stranger on the square for directions. It looks at why a university locked up its own students, and what sent them here, from midnight singing to naked swims in the market fountain. Best heard inside the cells, with the soot-and-chalk walls around you.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Alte Universität
Baroque university hall rebuilt after war, with a ceremonial aula, museum and student prison behind.
Hexenturm
Lone surviving tower of the medieval town wall, once a lockup for thieves, now in a university courtyard.
Gasthaus "Zum Roten Ochsen"
Historic student tavern with carved wooden tables, drinking horns and walls of nineteenth-century photos.