The little house on a cuckoo clock is a railroad building. I cover that on my page about German cuckoo clocks: the shape came out of a design competition held in Furtwangen in 1850, won by a signalman’s hut with a clock face stuck on the front.
The man who ran that competition was Robert Gerwig, an engineer the state had put in charge of the local watchmaking school to rescue a trade in trouble. He started collecting old clocks in 1852, which is the only reason the Deutsches Uhrenmuseum (German Clock Museum) exists. Then he went back to his actual profession and built the Schwarzwaldbahn, the railroad that still climbs through these same valleys.
So the Deutsche Uhrenstraße is not a route somebody invented to fill hotel beds. It runs through one man’s working life.
What You’re Actually Driving
A loop of 267 km (166 mi) through the middle and southern Black Forest and out onto the Baar plateau, touching two dozen towns, signposted in brown, and carrying the European Route of Industrial Heritage label. Being a circle, it lets you start anywhere.
Start in Villingen-Schwenningen anyway. Best rail connection on the route, and it puts the two heaviest museums early, while you still have patience for them. Give it three days. You can drive the circle in one, but then you’ve driven a circle and seen a windshield.
The Four Stops That Carry the Route
Schwenningen once called itself the largest clock city in the world and wasn’t entirely bluffing: Kienzle, Mauthe, and Bürk all built here. The Uhrenindustriemuseum occupies Bürk’s original factory halls, and the machines still run: staff take a piece of raw metal through to a finished mechanical alarm clock while you watch. Outside the town hall stands a sculpture the locals renamed the Olfewiib, the eleven o’clock women, after the workers who ran out at eleven, shopped, got lunch on the table at home, and were back at the machines by one.
Schramberg is where Junghans grew from a family firm founded in 1861 into the largest clock manufacturer on earth, turning out nine thousand timepieces a day before the First World War. The Terrassenbau is cut into a hillside in nine stepped stories so that nearly every workbench sits at a window—because fine mechanical work needs daylight. The last Junghans clocks were assembled there in the 1970s; it’s a museum now, with a clockmaker’s workshop from the 18th century and some 300 Black Forest clocks.
Waldkirch looks like the odd one out until you see the connection. Ignaz Blasius Bruder built flute clocks first, then barrel organs, then moved his workshop here in 1834 and made the town an organ-building center it still is. The Elztalmuseum holds the collection, and the whole trade grew straight out of clockmaking.
Then Furtwangen, which has the big one: Gerwig’s collection, now more than 8,000 objects, including the single surviving clock built to the original 1850 drawing.
Check before you go. The museum closed in August 2024 for a full renovation and is expected to reopen in 2027, which takes the anchor out of the middle of this route for now.
Cuckoo Country
Four towns in a row do nothing else. Schönwald claims to be the birthplace of the cuckoo clock, which is disputed and always will be. Schonach is the working town, where small firms have supplied cases, whistles, and movements for over a century—and a hiking trail carries the untranslatable pun U(h)rwaldpfad. Triberg has the shops, the waterfalls, and the crowds.
The giant clocks are a contest that got away from everybody. Josef Dold built a walk-in cuckoo clock in Schonach in the 1980s, Eble answered near Triberg in 1994 with a bigger one, and three years later Hornberg came in from a completely different angle with the Hornberger Uhrenspiele on the B 33: twenty-one moving figures across 11.5 m (38 ft), which took the record for widest. Everybody has a superlative. Nobody has to back down. :-)
My favorite thing anyone has done with all this was in 2010, when a garden show in Villingen-Schwenningen put a cuckoo into a genuine signalman’s hut from 1869. Which quietly makes the point that the giant clocks haven’t enlarged anything. They’ve returned the little house to the size it started at.
Hornberg also gave us Hornberger Schießen, our phrase for a great commotion that ends in nothing at all.
The Smaller Stops
The rest of the loop is villages, and each has exactly one thing. Unterkirnach was building orchestrions by 1820 and has the museum for it. Vöhrenbach keeps its clocks in a clockmaker’s cottage from 1725, and the firm Welte started there before setting the world standard for player pianos. Eisenbach has a world clock that Johann Baptist Beha built into an inn in 1865, showing London, Paris, St. Petersburg, and Eisenbach.
At Titisee-Neustadt, on a farm at Waldau, the Kreutz brothers were making wooden-geared clocks before 1667, which is about as close to a beginning as the record allows.
Lenzkirch shows what survived of its famous factory, including a flute clock that plays eight tunes on 42 wooden pipes. It also gave German a verb. To sit alone at a table in a restaurant is to Lenzkircherle machen—after the clock peddlers who learned that cheerful new friends and a full purse tend to leave together.
St. Märgen and St. Peter are the monasteries, and they belong here because educated monks pushed the craft forward in the 18th century. St. Peter has Baroque clocks in the church and the abbey stairwell, plus a Rococo library worth the stop by itself.
Simonswald still makes cuckoo clocks and weather houses, and is where Bruder worked before Waldkirch. Gütenbach, all 1,200 residents of it, is the unlikely home of Hanhart stopwatches and Faller model railways. Lauterbach made clock cases until 2009 and lets its church tower strike through the night: at midnight you get twenty-four.
Sankt Georgen shows what came next. The clock trade there turned into record players, Dual and Perpetuum-Ebner led the world at it, and the German Phono Museum is the result. Königsfeld, founded by the Moravian Church in 1806, has a square sundial on its meeting hall and keeps Albert Schweitzer’s house. Niedereschach ran on clockwork until the 1970s and now answers with a town hall carillon of 24 bells and 17 tunes.
Rottweil—oldest town in Baden-Württemberg—does the theme in stone, with sundials on the Heilig-Kreuz-Münster, in the old council chamber, and on the town archive.
Deißlingen made clock parts until 1992 and keeps an exhibition in the town hall.
Trossingen closes the circle with Hohner harmonicas, a clock collection in the Auberlehaus, and the oldest electric railway anywhere that still runs.
Doing It Without a Car
A good part of this works by rail, and the reason is Gerwig again.
His Schwarzwaldbahn runs from Offenburg to Singen. It puts Hornberg, Triberg, Sankt Georgen, and Villingen on one line, climbing through spiral tunnels that were serious engineering in the 1860s, and still make for a good hour at the window. The Höllentalbahn (also his) connects Freiburg with Titisee-Neustadt. Between them you reach most of the towns worth reaching, and buses fill in Furtwangen and Schonach. Gütenbach, Eisenbach, and Lauterbach are the awkward ones; I’d drop them rather than build a day around a bus timetable.
Expect a landscape of former industry either way. Quartz movements took the region apart in the 1970s and cheap imports finished the job in the 1990s. So, several firms named on the signposts are gone, and some museums exist precisely because the factory behind them shut.
It isn’t a ruin, though. The gear-cutting shops that once supplied clockmakers now ship into medical technology, and the international business program in Schwenningen is taught inside the old Kienzle factory. That beats nostalgia as a story: the clocks stopped, and the skill went somewhere else. ;-)
More of these are collected on my page of scenic routes in Germany. For the object rather than the region, start with German cuckoo clocks or Made in Germany.