On May 28th, the City of Hof will hold its 586th Schlappentag

The most distinctive feature of Hof, Germany, located at the top of East Bavaria, is its annual Hofer Schlappentag. This year on May 28, it will hold its 586^th celebration to mark that day.

 

Sign advertising Schlappentag, showing the wooden
shoes (Schlappen) and the special Schlappenbier

Before explaining what the Hofer Schlappentag is and why it has been around for more than half a millennium, I want to mention some other notable features of this hilly city of 48,000 people that sits on the banks of the Saale River. An important one is its location. Following World War II, after Germany was divided into sectors, Hof was a border town in the American Zone. Across the border was the Russian Zone, which in 1949 became the German Democratic Republic. 

From that time until 1990, Hof was on the front lines of the Cold War, facing a heavily fortified border. Its train station was full of relieved travelers who had successfully weathered the ordeal of passing from East to West Germany, and stressed passengers who were about to undergo the indignities attended upon travelers who wished to enter the DDR. 

Another important aspect of Hof’s location is that it lies a few miles distant from the western finger of Bohemia that probes into Germany big southeastern belly. This part of Bohemia, now in the Czech Republic, is a narrow peninsula surrounded on three sides by the ocean of Germany. For decades, until 1917, it was part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and a large percentage of its residents had a Germanic heritage and spoke German. After WWI, it became part of Czechoslovakia. (On the map above, the peninsula is located in the western part of the Cheb region, which is in the far west of the Czech Republic. Hof is a few miles north of the top of the peninsula.) 

 

Hof Center Center, with St. Mary's Church

The boundaries and ethnic makeup of the Bohemians in this isolated peninsula caused few problems until the early 1930s. Then, some Germans – adherents of the Nazi Party -- living there and in neighboring parts of Bohemia started complaining of mistreatment by Czechoslovakians, demanding to be brought into the German Reich.  Their rabble rousing provided one of the flimsy excuses Hitler used to justify sending the German army into Czechoslovakia in 1939. When the 1000-year Reich was disassembled in 1945, Czechoslovakia – under the guidance of the Soviet Union – expelled all ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland (including the peninsula), even those whose families that had lived there for centuries and who had not supported the Nazis.  Many of those expelled settled nearby in cities such as Hof and Marktredwitz and in the land surrounding them.

 

Hof City Center

(One city in the Czech peninsula is named Aš  [in German, Asch], and it is a thirty-minute ride from Hof on a slow train. From Asch and surrounding area, about 27 persons from the Reichardt, Geyer, Penzel, and Wunderlich families emigrated to Little Rock from 1848 to 1856, where many became prominent citizens. But that is another story.)

 

Detail for Hof's Turnhalle 

Present-day Hof is a pleasant city with the distinctive architecture of Eastern Bavaria that features multi-story buildings of different colors standing next to each other. Also it has a welcoming city center, anchored, as expected, by the largest and oldest church in town. The city center offers, among its mixture of businesses, two large book store. It is a pedestrian zone, so many restaurants offer outdoor seats from which to watch the parade of Hofers. Scattered about the center city are men and women (known locally as Wärschtlamo) with brass cauldrons filled with hot coals to boil wursts for hungry patrons.  

It is in the city center that much of the Schlappentag celebration takes place. The story of Schalppentag begins in January 25, 1430. On that sad day, Hof was attacked by Hussites, who easily routed the Hofers, who apparently did not put up much a fight. After the Hussites ransacked the town and moved on, the pitiable Hofers came to beg the Prince of Brandenburg for relief from taxes they owed him. They had nothing they could pay. The Prince was a bit irked, but granted ten years of relief from taxes with the condition that the Hofers would arm themselves and prepare to defend the city in the future.

Wurst seller with his brass Cauldron 

They agreed to the condition, and in 1432, the city government required its healthy male residents, most of whom were tradesmen, to join the protection guard and attend at least one instructional session on musket shooting a year.  As time passed, the protection guard members grew less enthusiastic about their annual training requirement, but continued to show up to avoid paying a fine. Many men put off the training until the last day possible, the first Monday after Trinity Sunday (which falls in late May or the first part of June). In 2018, Trinity Sunday is May 27^th.

At first, only a dozen or so men, wearing their work clothes and wooden work shoes (clogs), known as Schlappen, walked down the street as the work day began to the indoor shooting range for their instruction. They would wait their turn for their musket-shooting lesson.

Over time, more of the men waited until the Monday deadline for completing training, and they would meet up to walk together to the shooting range, clopping down the street in their wood shoes. Finally it became a tradition for most of the protection guard to march together early on Trinity Monday to receive their training.

So on May 28, 2018, Hofers, joined by other volunteers in wooden shoes, will form for the 586^th time a marching line and proceed through the city to the training site. That re-creation of the long tradition is followed, I understand, by many opportunities for merriment, especially if you enjoy beer, because that day – and only on that day -- an especially strong locally brewed beer – Schlappenbier – can be sold in the city. By tradition, however, the beer cannot be sold to visiting Hussites,. 

For pictures and videos from previous Schlappentag celebrations (in German), see:

https://www.hof.de/hof/hof_deu/57-hofer-schlappentag.html

https://www.tvo.de/mediathek/video/hofer-schlappentag-2017-hof-feiert-seinen-nationalfeiertag/

September 5, 1967: Leaving On a Jet Plane -- The Institute of European Studies Adventure Begins

I know what I was doing fifty years ago today, and I cannot think of anything else I would rather have been doing. Thanks to my good fortune, I was getting on a flight to London to embark on a two-week study tour of Western Europe with about 200 other college students from throughout the United States.

I say it was my good fortune for several reasons. First, I was fortunate that the faculty and staff of the Vienna campus of the Institute of European Studies (IES) were brave enough to load a large group of college students on five buses to show them (I should say, "educate them about") Western Europe. This study tour kicked off IES's year-long "study abroad" program in Vienna, and it was a great start to the school year. Also, it was my good fortune that at the time such a trip was financially feasible. The dollar was strong and the costs of gasoline, hotel rooms, and meals were a fraction of the cost today, even considering the impacts of inflation. Finally, I was most fortunate to be on one of the buses, thanks to an IES scholarship honoring Sen. J. W. Fulbright. Without that, I would have been back on the University of Arkansas campus. 

The IES Tour Bus at the White Cliffs of Dover Waiting for a Ferry
September 14, 1967

Below is the agenda for the "Western European Field Study Trip." It took the group in my bus to London, Oxford, Stratford-on-Avon (where I saw McBeth at the Globe Theater), Bruges, Paris, Trier, Munich, Salzburg, and Vienna. At different locations, we had lectures from IES faculty members (Porhansl, Benesch, Mowatt, Balekjian, Arndorfer, Fellner), plus local specialists. Of the group, I especially liked Dr. Benesch, who had a relaxed manner, a notable sense of humor, and did not take himself too seriously, as was common among Austrian faculty members.

IES Students in Paris, September 17, 1967

The trip was made more enjoyable by the group of students traveling together in our assigned bus. The long trips provided an opportunity to get to know a bunch of students from campuses scattered throughout the United States. I had a chance finally to meet some Yankees and Californians, about whom I had heard rumors but rarely talked to. 

IES Students at the Salzburg Castle, Sept. 24, 1967

Yep, fifty years ago I was getting on an airplane to start one of the best years of my life. Probably before I departed someone should have told my parents, "Don't send your kid to Study Abroad unless you are prepared to welcome home someone you don't recognize."

Documenting the Nazi Years in Cologne

Have you ever wondered what a Gestapo prison looked like?  At the NS Documentation Center of the City of Cologne (in German, Köln), you can visit one in the basement of a building that was the headquarters of the city and district Gestapo from 1935 until 1945. It has ten cells that held prisoners brought in for what the Gestapo called “intensive interrogations,” the Gestapo's preferred euphemism for torture.

 

Sign for the
NS Documentation Center of Köln

In one of the ironies of war, despite intensive Allied bombing of Cologne, the Gestapo's building survived with little damage, leaving, according to the Documentation Center, “one of the best preserved detention centers from the Nazi period in Germany.” The dark and squalid cells are sobering enough by themselves, but the walls pack an emotional punch: on them are about 1,800 inscriptions left by the prisoners using pencils, chalk, lipstick, nails, screws, and fingernails. 

These inscriptions bring home the sober realization that thousands of people were tortured in this basement. The prisoners were not only Germans, but included many men and women brought from Eastern Europe and Russia to be slave laborers. Of the 1,800 inscriptions, about 600 are written in Cyrillic. The inscriptions include messages of desperation, despair, frustration, and anger. Some were written just to tell people the writer had been there, maybe hoping someone would read it and let their friends and relatives know.

From the cellar cells, a passage leads to the inside courtyard. According to the Documentation Center, this courtyard is where executions were carried out. There, during the eighteen months of the war, about 400 prisoners were murdered.

 

Example of Inscriptions on the Gestapo Prison Cell Walls 

The Gestapo Prison Memorial was first opened in 1981. In 1988, the NS Documentation Center moved into the building. In addition to the prison museum, the Center has a permanent exhibit “Cologne during National Socialism” and it also hosts shorter-term special exhibits. When I was there in late October, the special exhibit was on Hitler Youth. The nicely-designed exhibit examined the rise of Hitler Youth and its activities. One of its features was interviews with several older men and women who had been members of Hitler Youth describing why they joined the organization and its roles in family, school, leisure and other aspects of life.. The exhibit’s photographs and artifacts are titled in both German and English, but the interviews are only in German.

 

Part of the Hitler Youth Exhibit. To the left is a post about HJ advertising to the right is propaganda on
"Race Types" used in school

Poster for Hitler Youth special exhibition

One purpose of Hitler Youth was to prepare
young men to be dedicated and disciplined solders; this
poster "We all pitch in" was intended to urge HJ members
to take part in the war effort

The Center has a large research library and offers numerous lectures and discussions. Also, it has an excellent website, including a 360-degree tour that offers visitors a chance to travel around the center and see its exhibits as well as the prison. The website is available in many languages, including English. Go to http://www.museenkoeln.de/ns-dokumentationszentrum/pages/315.aspx?s=315

or http://www.museenkoeln.de/ns-dokumentationszentrum/start.aspx?s=314#

 

Courtyard of the Gestapo Prison where prisoners were executed

With its exhibits, well-preserved Gestapo prison, library, active research program, and lectures, the Center appears to be an excellent resource for educating people, Germans and visitors, on the horrors of the Nazi period.

Büsum, From 1966 to 2016

They are all gone: the hole-in-the-wall on Alleestrasse where I ate my first luscious currywurst; the nearby café that usually was blaring “Monday, Monday” by the Momas and Papas as I walked by; the little bakery by city hall where I too often bought a huge nusskranz (wreath-shaped pastry) that should have lasted a week, but disappeared in a day.

Hotel Nordseehalle from across the habor in front of it, 2016

The bottom left part of this postcard from the middle 1960s shows Hotel Nordseehalle from across the harbor; note
the lawn in front of it 

Also gone: the ice cream shop under the terrace of Hotel Nordseehalle, across from a finger of the Büsum harbor, were I sold soft ice cream and struggled with my German. And the people I worked for and with at the hotel during the summer of 1966, including my roommates, the members of an Austrian rock band; Fay Franklin, a college student from La Jolla, who cleaned rooms at the hotel; Adriano and Rosa, the kitchen workers from Italy; and the “old bastard” an ill-tempered sea-farer employed by the hotel to order people around.

Yes, the Büsum I knew in 1966 as summer help for the Hotel Nordseehalle is not the same as it was fifty years ago. In late October, I found out during a visit there how much this small town on Germany’s North Sea coast has changed and what remains.

Picture of the lighthouse taken from in front of the Hotel Nordseehalle in 2016

Picture of the lighthouse from a similar location as above, about 1965

For one thing, the town is not so small any more: its boundaries have expanded and it has many more houses and people crammed into a small area. Among the post-1966 additions to the town are a large, intrusive bath house on the high ocean bank that serves as a seawall against flooding. Even worse is a huge skyscraper built along the ocean a couple of decades ago. It is a monument to bad taste and poor judgement, an ogre looming over this sedate village made up primarily of single family houses.

North part of the beach at low tide with people walking in the mud flats, 2016. Note 20+ story building.

Postcard showing different parts of Büsum in about 1965

Even with it changes, I still recognize Büsum. It seems the same in many regards as when I lived there for a couple of months fifty years ago. At low tide, people still walk on a vast expanse of mud to get from the beach to the water. People continue to stroll along the paved trails, stretching for miles, overlooking the North Sea. People still flock to the stores and restaurants on the main street that runs from the railroad station to the North Sea beach. Even on cool late-October days, the resort was packed with people walking here, walking there, eating ice cream, shopping, and dining on fresh fish.

Downtown Büsum, Alleestrasse, 2016

Fortunately, Büsum still has its picturesque harbor with colorful working boats, some going daily to trawl for shrimp and fish, others taking tourists to Helgoland, to see the otters, or just to cruise around the area. For visitors who like fresh shrimp, they can buy them in cone-shaped bags at stands by the harbor. Also, freshly caught fish of all kinds can be purchased at scattered fish stores.

Finger of harbor in front of Hotel Nordseehalle (to the left), 2016

Finger of habor in front of Hotel Nordseehalle, about 1965

Away from the harbor, I was glad to find, amid all the construction of the past fifty years, some houses from the earlier years of the town. The most interesting ones have roofs made of straw.  Others have tile roofs that are narrow inverted-V shapes. They all are distinctive reminders of the life during the old days of Schleswig-Holstein.

Old house in Büsum

During my three days in Büsum, it was pleasing to revisit many places I remembered from 1966. For example, I lodged at Hotel Nordseehalle, which is still going strong, but seems smaller. It is located by the harbor near the entrance to the North Sea beach, and every morning it serves a tasty breakfast in a second floor room with picture windows providing views of the harbor and the Sea. In 1966, this room was part of a large night club/dinner restaurant area that offered, on most evenings, food, drink, dance, and entertainment by my roommates, the Austrian pop band. Sometime in the past fifty years, most of the night club was converted into guest rooms, leaving only the smaller remaining space as a dining area. In addition to its night club, Hotel Nordseehalle had in 1966 a first-floor restaurant with a large outdoor seating area. I spent my first weeks at the hotel washing dishes in the restaurant’s kitchen. Now, the restaurant serves Chinese food.

Hotel Nordseehall  2016

Also, I revisited the house in which I lived with other temporary Hotel Nordseehalle staff members. It is located on a side street (Hohenzollernstrasse) off just the main street (Alleestrasse), a short walk from the hotel. In 1966, this street was lined with worn two-story residential buildings. Most of those buildings – including the place where I lived -- have been turned into upscale restaurants.

Nordseehalle, about 1965

One other place I remembered from 1966 was a funky restaurant (Zur alten Schlosseri) up the street from Hotel Nordseehalle. This restaurant (whose name may have been different at the time) had an unhappy American female student working as its bartender for the summer. There I had my first taste of real bouillabaisse soup. Obviously, it was a memorable experience, since 50 years later I  recall eating it. The restaurant still has lots of character, but it no longer has bouillabaisse soup on its menu.

     

Restaurant Zur Alten Schlosserei (To the Old Locksmith)

After a fifty-year absence, I did not expect to find anyone who had been around Hotel Nordseehalle when I worked there, but I still had a vague hope that it would happen. When I checked in, I casually mentioned that I had worked at the hotel in 1966. The young man at the desk expressed very mild curiosity about that and let it drop. I also said some words about my experience at the hotel to the woman serving breakfast. Again, only mild curiosity.  

After these dispiriting encounters, I gave up hope of finding some human link to the past, but as I was checking out, something about the woman at the desk seemed vaguely familiar. So, with nothing to lose, I again mentioned that I had worked for the hotel in 1966. This time I was surprised to find out that the woman had been at the hotel in 1966 and remembered the Americans (Fay and I) working there. She said she had fond memories of buying soft ice cream every day from an American. That was me!

It turned out this woman had not worked at the hotel in 1966; she had been only about ten years old at the time. However, her mother had worked for the hotel, and the girl had lived with her and her father in a small room there. (A little while after talking with this woman, I remembered her mother as the efficient, no-nonsense assistant to the hotel manager. We got along fine.) Finding our connection, we spent some time recalling details of the old days at the hotel and remembered how good the ice cream had tasted during the summer of 1966.

******

 For the story of my work at Hotel Nordseehalle in 1966, see this blog entry: http://www.eclecticatbest.com/2011/08/washing-dishes-at-hotel-nordsee-halle.html

More pictures follow.

 

Fish restaurant in downtown Büsum, 2016

Fish for sale

Restaurant Zur alten Post (The Old Post Office)

Old thatched roof house

Amother thatched roof house

Typical house with inverted-V roof

Another house with inverted-V roof and colorful external pattern

This post that stands behind the dyke shows how high the water rose during various flood years. The bottom
band show the level at which a flood occurs. The highest water level was reached on January 3, 1976.
The second highest was in February 4, 1828

 Buesum's first lighthouse 

Selling fresh shrimp by the harbor

My heart beats for Büsum

Harbor in front of Hotel Nordseehalle

The German Emigration Center in Bremerhaven

One of the first places I headed when I arrived in Germany in October was to Bremen and nearby Bremerhaven. I had never been to these cities, but had read about them when researching the lives of several German immigrants who came to Arkansas in the nineteenth century.  It was from Bremen that the George Family and Rev. Gustav Klingelhöffer departed in March 1833 for Little Rock as part of the Mainzer Immigration Society seeking to establish a new German state. The journey and the first years in Little Rock were difficult, but the George Family became prominent citizens of the city. Klingelhöffer lived a long life as a farmer in nearby Perry County (see http://www.eclecticatbest.com/2016/11/the-failed-quest-for-new-german-state.html ).

Likely, Bremen or Bremerhaven (both are on the Weser River that flows into the North Sea; Bremerhaven is at the mouth of the river about thirty-five miles upriver from Bremen) was the point of embarkation for other Germans who came to Arkansas, including Peter Paul Loetscher and his family (see http://www.eclecticatbest.com/2016/04/the-swiss-vintner-prohibitionist-mayor.html); Philip Dietzgen, a contentious man who edited the Arkansas Staatszeitung (see http://www.eclecticatbest.com/2016/07/the-trouble-is-in-existence-philip.html) ; and Friedrich Kramer, who came to the United States in 1848 and after serving in the U.S. Army settled in Little Rock in 1857.  He was a successful merchant who was elected as a Republican to be mayor for a term lasting from late 1873 until 1875; in 1881 he was again elected as mayor, this time as a Demcrat, and held office until 1887.  

These men and their families were among the nearly eight million Germans who from the late eighteen century into the early 1970s departed from Bremen and Bremerhaven as emigrants.

The German Emigration Center

As the port from which so many Germans left their country, it is fitting that Bremerhaven is the site of an emigration museum that is part of the Deutsches Auswandererhaus (German Emigration Center). The museum opened in 2005 and expanded in 2012. In addition to the museum, the Center has a small library and a collection of donated materials (e.g., photos, artifacts, books) related to emigration. http://www.dah-bremerhaven.de//ENG/english.php

A Wing of the German Emigration Center with the
Bremerhaven Harbor in the Background

The museum describes itself as an “experience,” “family,” and “migration” museum.  The experiential part of the museum starts when you buy your entry ticket and are given a boarding pass. With this boarding pass, you embark on a journey that parallels the emigrant journeys that are the museum’s focus. First, you enter a hall that is the waiting room for the travel to the new homeland; then you are on a wharf – the year is 1881 -- in front of the bow of a large boat that you will enter on a gang plank. After you are on the boat, you see how you will live in the crowded confines of the often squalid third class. Also, you get a look at how the better off lived in second and first classes. After the journey, you are at the Ellis Island immigration arrival hall seeking permission to enter the United States. When you are admitted, you find yourself in New York’s Grand Central Station. (See this site for some pictures of the inside of the museum: http://www.dah-bremerhaven.de//ENG/en.museum.php 

Your understanding of the journey is helped with recorded information that you can access in German or English. In fact, all exhibits and information provided to visitors are bilingual, so English speakers can have the same experience as German speakers. 

To enhance to the experiential part of the visit, each person entering the museum is assigned the name of German emigrant whose life story unfolds as the trip is made through the museum. The story is told in annotated documents, pictures, and recordings.  My assigned person was Richard Morgner (1926-1999), who, I learned, was born and raised in Bremerhaven, had been a German soldier in World War II, and had emigrated with his wife to the United States in 1954, traveling third class with just a few dollars in his pocket. In the U.S., he later became a millionaire.

In addition to the emigration experience, visitors have the opportunity to investigate an immigration experience by crossing a hall into an addition to the center that was added in 1912. This part of the experience is set up as a small shopping center from the late 1960s with a hairdresser salon, a used book store, a travel agency, and a department store.  Aside from the fun of looking at realistic old stores, the shopping center plays a role in researching another person assigned on the boarding pass, a person who immigrated into Germany. In my case, this person was Wilhelm Somplatski, a Pole living in East Prussia, who traveled every summer from 1881 to 1910 to work as a coal miner in the Ruhr region.  The story of his life, as well as some artifacts from it, are to be found in the “shopping mall.” For example, his picture is in the hairdresser salon and different personal items are in the vintage book store, etc.

The experiential element of the museum is engaging and seems especially valuable in making the Auswandererhaus a family museum. When I was there just before noon on a Thursday in late October, it was jam packed. A large portion of the attendees was comprised of families with children, plus a group of teenagers on a school trip made their presence known.

The museum is not cheap. The entry price is 13.80 Euros for adults. It is operated by a private company, though its building costs were financed largely by the Bremen and Bremerhaven governments. 

The museum has some impressive elements. For example, more than a dozen realistic mannequins dressed in 1880s garb stand on a dock in front of the hull of a large ship. They are waiting to board it on a gangplank that is visible. The inside of the ship is realistically depicted, including a view of the roiling ocean through port holes. Also mannequins are shown sleeping and dining in second class.

This experiential exhibition, in all, provides a good taste of what it was like to board a ship that would take you away from your home to live in a foreign land.  This experience is probably especially poignant for people whose ancestors made the trip.

In the Years to Come

At some point, the museum will likely need to update itself to address the experiences of more recent immigrants. It has recently added a short movie in its immigration section about the movement of Turks into Germany, which started in the late 1960s. At present, about 3 million people of Turkish ancestry live in the country. And, of course, more recently, Germany has been the destination for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa. In a hundred years, their stories will likely inspire the same emotions among their descendants as felt by descendants of earlier emigrants today as they reflect on the emigrant experiences of their ancestors.