Heidelberg Tun

It has only rarely been used as a wine barrel, and in fact presently enjoys more use as a tourist attraction, and also as a dance floor since one was constructed on top of the tun.

[1] According to tradition and local legend, the eternal keeper of the enormous Tun remains Perkeo of Heidelberg, once a court jester and master of the castle’s spirit production (and a famously Herculean wine drinker).

The Tun is referenced in Rudolf Erich Raspe's The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Jules Verne's novel Five Weeks in a Balloon, Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, Washington Irving's The Specter Bridegroom, Mary Hazelton Wade's Bertha, Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad and Wilhelm Busch's Die fromme Helena.

The vast but empty vat, purposeless and deprived of its original use, is made to "rhyme" with the emptiness of war and the poet's own need to be filled with human companionship, of which he was deprived while incarcerated in the US Army Detention Center outside Pisa, Italy.

The English writer Jerome K. Jerome visited it in 1890, during his return trip from Oberammergau: What there is of interest in the sight of a big beer-barrel it is difficult, in one's calmer moments, to understand; but the guide books says that it is a thing to be seen, and so all we tourists go and stand in a row and gape at it.Anton Praetorius, the first Calvinistic pastor of the parochy of the wine-producing community of Dittelsheim, visited nearby Heidelberg, the centre of Calvin's theology in Germany.