Zum Roten Bären, Freiburg im Breisgau

The claim

A hotel and restaurant at Oberlinden, below the Schwabentor, whose cellar is older than the city around it. The house dates itself to 1120, when the dukes of Zähringen founded Freiburg, and its foundations belong to the manor house that stood here before that. Landlords are named in the records from 1311. The baroque front is eighteenth-century; the arcaded cellar beneath it, seen through a glass panel by the door, is not. The bar serves a glass without a meal.

What the records show

The Bären calls itself the oldest inn in Germany and dates itself to 1120, the year the dukes of Zähringen founded Freiburg. What 1120 dates is the ground rather than the trade. German Wikipedia and the city's own tourist service both say the foundations, and the three-storey cellar with its arcades and pillars, belong to the manor house of the Zähringer court that stood here before the city did; the cellar can be seen through a glass panel in the entrance floor, and a column in it is said to have been cut in 1263. The drinking house is documented later, and well. Johann Bienger is named in a land record of the Adelhausen convent in 1311, and his grandson Hanmann in a court document of 13 March 1387 as "Würt ze dem roten Bern" — the landlord at the Red Bear — which is the earliest record traced that names the house and its trade in the same breath. The Bienger family held it until about 1406, and the house counts more than fifty landlords since. Two encyclopedias disagree about the rebuilding: the English one has the present baroque house finished in 1718 for the landlord Andreas Pflug after French soldiers damaged the older one, the German one has the Romanesque and Gothic arcaded house pulled down after the French razed Freiburg's fortifications in 1744. Either way what stands above ground is eighteenth-century, and the grade rests on the cellar rather than the front. Whether the public can be served a drink here without ordering a meal is answered by the house itself, which describes a bar under the old vaulting to lean against for an espresso, an aperitif or a glass of wine, and a room where a spontaneous drink at that bar is the first of the three things it offers. Its published hours run from midday to eleven at night, with the kitchen open for four of those hours. Two other German houses claim the same title: the Herberge zum Löwen at Seelbach and Zum Riesen at Miltenberg, which has a page here and claims 1158.

Dated evidence for Zum Roten Bären, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1120	Claimed founding	The pub
c.1120	Present building	https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zum_roten_B%C3%A4ren
1387	First record of a drinking house here	Wikipedia

What to look for inside

A three-storey cellar of arcades and pillars, seen through a glass panel in the entrance floor
A Gothic cellar column dated 1263, its rotted foot replaced with a stone plinth in 2012
Landlords named in the records from 1311, and at the Red Bear itself in 1387
Long the guild house of the shoemakers, whose window is in the Minster

Visiting

Zum Roten Bären is in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, at Oberlinden 12, 79098 Freiburg im Breisgau. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

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