A little earthquake woke me up this night at 2:52am. Even the center of the earthquake was about 175 km away from my current living place Ludwigsburg my bed was shaking quite a bit. In fact the center was only 25 km away from my hometown Endingen (which is 175km away from Ludwigsburg) and had a value of 5.4 on the earthquake scale.
Why do we have earthquakes in that part of Germany? Well, about 50 million years ago the Black Forrest (in Germany) and the Vogesen (in France) have been separated and a 40km wide valley was created with the river Rhein in the middle. And there we have tectonic plate movement today. The old vulcano Kaiserstuhl is also a relict of that.