Theodor-Heuss-Haus

Description

On the slope of Stuttgart’s Gähkopf stands the Theodor-Heuss-Haus, a museum dedicated to the life and work of the first President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Theodor Heuss (1884–1963). It is located at Feuerbacher Weg 46 in the Feuerbacher Heide and is used as both a venue and an exhibition space.

In the early 1950s Theodor Heuss and his wife Elly Heuss-Knapp decided to spend their retirement in Stuttgart; for this purpose the couple had a bungalow built in a preferred hillside location. After his wife’s death in 1952 and the end of his second term, Heuss moved into the house in 1959 and lived there until his death in 1963. In the years that followed the building served the newly established Theodor-Heuss-Archiv for the cataloguing and research of his estate; this archive was dissolved in June 1971 and the house was privately rented out in the 1970s and 1980s. In the mid-1990s the Stiftung Bundespräsident-Theodor-Heuss-Haus acquired the building and had it converted, renovated and extended. A first permanent exhibition opened in 2002 and remained on view until 2021. From November 2021 to May 2023 the foundation carried out a comprehensive renovation of the house.

Today the Theodor-Heuss-Haus presents, among other things, the permanent exhibition Demokratie als Lebensform. Theodor Heuss und Elly Heuss-Knapp, as well as a dedicated room illustrating the office of the Federal President. The originally furnished living rooms, furnished with numerous works of 20th-century art, provide insight into Heuss’s lifestyle and middle-class domestic life around 1960; the study houses the Federal President’s private library on history and politics. Supplementary educational programmes, workshops for schools and a mobile exhibition convey aspects of history and democracy regionally and nationwide.