I spoke of eating informally on a bench in the church yard. Sometimes we ate a bit more formally at noon, and selected food from a Speisekarte (menu). One lunch so impressed Eleanor that she took a picture of it. It was a salad, and the Germans do good things with them. We were there during Spargel (asparagus) time. If you go in May, Spargel is a word that you will soon learn, because a madness falls over the Germans to eat white asparagus. Restaurants post special signs letting the world know that they have asparagus.
Our next stop after Cleebronn was Gross Sachsenheim (Germans spell it as one word). The church, though there was no question about its being a church, was done a bit differently. There is even a medieval-looking round tower at one corner. One date seemed to say MCCCCLXXXIIII (1484) and another AD1718. In the written record, the earliest mention is 1265.
On our next stop, we thought we had reached Ötisheim (See Ötisheim Photos) , which was a reasonable deduction, because there was a roadside sign, official looking, which said Ötisheim. We had great fun at the church, and in the Friedhof. Their war memorial had a Fink and a Scheible. Most of all we got a kick from a life-sized statue of Pfarrer Henri Arnaud (1643-1721), who was being honored because he was the first to plant potatoes, a daring move at the time.
As we traveled on across the railway tracks, we discovered that we were just approaching the real Ötisheim. Previously we had been in a suburb called Schönenberg. As is typical, the church is right downtown. Because it is on a rise, we could get respectable pictures of John and Ursula Broyles as they came out. (Well, we could have, had they been there.) One date carved in the stone read 1562. The Friedhof had a Scheible.
Ötisheim had a more interesting Wappen than most towns. A Wappen is the symbol, or shield, that denotes the town. Some of them are old, while others were generated just yesterday. The one for Ötisheim looks old as it consists of a lizard crossed with a key or pin. Maybe it has a meaning for the residents, but it escaped me. The May Pole was the best that we saw in Germany. The guilds and trades, which are usually represented on the May Pole, were carved figures at work, not just painted signs.
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For more on the history of May Poles (Maibaums, or Maibäume) and how they are raised, and to see some great pictures of them, go
here
.
)
This concluded most of the villages that we could easily reach from Schwaigern. We omitted villages west of the Rhine River, or which are now in Stuttgart. This had taken us two days. We did visit a few villages on the way from Heidelberg.
We observed the rather standard practice for announcing deaths and funerals. Typed notices will appear around the town on bulletin boards and in windows. For example, one from Ötisheim told us that Herrn Rolf Mauch, 44 Jahre alt of Ötisheim, Enzberger Straße 13, had died. His service would be (more exactly, was) held on Tuesday, 16 May 2000, at 13:00 at the Friedhof in Enzberg. Every Friedhof has a building, usually just a room, for holding funeral services.
(16 Jun 00)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.