Heidelberg Tun - The Barrel in Literature

The Barrel in Literature

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 Miserables, Washington Irving's The Specter Bridegroom, Mary Hazelton Wade's Bertha and Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad. It can also be found in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as well as in Lyrisches Intermezzo by Heinrich Heine, later used in the song cycle Dichterliebe by Robert Schumann for the final song "Die alten, bösen Lieder (The old evil songs)".

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. Impressed by the immensity of the Johann-Casimir-Fass, he wrote a poem in 1595 praising the barrel as an apparent proof of the superiority of Calvinism, entitled Vas Heidelbergense (Poem on the Great Wine Barrel in the Castle of Heidelberg).

Everybody has heard of the great Heidelberg Tun, and most people have seen it, no doubt. It is a wine-cask as big as a cottage, and some traditions say it holds eighteen thousand bottles, and other traditions say it holds eighteen hundred million barrels. I think it likely that one of these statements is a mistake, and the other is a lie. However, the mere matter of capacity is a thing of no sort of consequence, since the cask is empty, and indeed has always been empty, history says. An empty cask the size of a cathedral could excite but little emotion in me.

— Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, 1880