Discovering Germany: The Treasures of Beer, Castles, Food and Friends

By Maureen Mahan Copelof

Maureen Mahan Copelof and her husband, Sylvan, fell in love with Germany while stationed there with the US military. Refusing to let the adventure end with their military tour, they embarked on a journey to purchase a home in a small German town on the Neckar River, well outside the usual haunts of American tourists. Here they share their discoveries of unexpected treasures with the people they got to know;
the beer, wine and food that they experienced; and the history, art, castles and fables that came alive for them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469150000

Maureen Mahan Copelof

Maureen Copelof received a BA in religion and an MBA from the University of South Carolina and an MS in Political Science from Auburn University. Joining the United States Navy at age 24, she served 29 and a half years retiring with the rank of Captain. During her military career she lived overseas in Sicily, northern Japan, central Japan, Puerto Rico and Germany as well as in San Diego; Montgomery, Alabama; Washington DC and Norfolk, Virginia. She is married to Sylvan Copelof, a retired Chief Warrant Officer Four, USN. They live in Brevard, North Carolina and Gundelsheim, Germany.

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Copyright © 2012 by Maureen Mahan Copelof.

Cover photo: Vineyard and Schloss Horneck in Gundelsheim

Library of Congress Control Number:       2012900409

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4691-4999-8

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4691-4998-1

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4691-5000-0

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CONTENTS

Prologue

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1  Crazy Ideas

Chapter 2  Bad Wimpfen

Chapter 3  The Neckartal

Chapter 4  Gundelsheim

Chapter 5  German Beer Towns

Chapter 6  Seasonal Pleasures—Spring

Chapter 7  Living on the Lava Field

Chapter 8  Trulli and Sassi

Chapter 9  Intrigued by a Train Model

Chapter 10  By Train along the Rhine

Chapter 11  Seasonal Pleasures—Autumn

Chapter 12  English Conversation Club

Chapter 13  Winter Pleasures

Chapter 14  Treasured Paintings

Chapter 15  Into the Odenwald

Chapter 16  Red Brick and Marzipan

Chapter 17  Fasching

Chapter 18  Bohemian Beer Trip

Chapter 19  Running into Martin Luther

Chapter 20  Three Tapestries

Chapter 21  It’s All in the Approach

APPENDIX—Recipes

To Sylvan, whose support and love made this dream come true.

Prologue

I’ve always loved to travel. I just never realized how this desire would end up influencing and shaping much of my life.

I graduated from the University of South Carolina, with a BA in religion and a master of business administration (MBA) degree. I had planned to find employment in the textile manufacturing industry that, at the time, was a major industry in the Carolinas. What I didn’t count on was a recession that continued for several years and the difficulty I would face trying to convince employers that a woman could be a capable manager in an industrial setting. It didn’t take long for me to figure out what I was up against.

So I took a new approach and changed my life. Instead of working in industry, I looked to the military. Since my father was teaching at The Citadel, the military college in Charleston, South Carolina, I had met and interacted with a number of military officers and, of course, the Citadel Cadets. The military looked like an opportunity as they were just starting to open new career fields to women. Then I found the navy and their Join the Navy and See the World campaign. That’s all it took.

I spent the next twenty-nine and a half years serving in the navy. They kept their promise, not only to provide challenging job opportunities, but also the promise to help me see the world. My first assignment was to an aviation squadron, VR-24, based in Sigonella, Sicily. It was here that I met my husband Sylvan, a chief warrant officer 4, who worked in aviation maintenance. We were married in Sicily (not an easy process with all the Italian forms and processes), departed on our honeymoon to Rome and Assisi along with my new mother-in-law, the best man, and the priest from the wedding. But that’s another story altogether.

Sylvan and I spent the next twenty-nine years living in different locations around the world. We went from Sicily to a rural town, Misawa, in northern Japan just across the sea from Hokkaido. We lived there when the Russians shot down the KAL007 flight and helped with the military search and rescue effort. Years later, we returned to Japan and lived in the large Yokohama/Tokyo metropolitan area where I was the officer in charge of a small military base. In order to effectively work with my Japanese counterparts, they had to make me an honorary man as women were still not allowed at many of the Japanese functions I had to attend. We were fortunate to do a tour in Puerto Rico, returned for another tour in Sicily fifteen years after our first adventure there, and finally for my twilight tour, the navy offered me a job in Stuttgart, Germany.

On every tour where we lived overseas for several years, we realized what a tremendous opportunity we had been granted. Instead of just experiencing a place for a short time as a tourist, we had the chance to really get to know the people and the culture as we went and experienced the places.

One of the drawbacks to living overseas with the military is you often end up living in military base housing. This was the case in Stuttgart where my job required that I live on base so I could quickly respond back to work if needed. We had a beautiful house that was built prior to WWII when the base was a German Army Kaserne or post. After the war, the post became a US military base that now houses part of US European Command.

This military base, however, operates like a little piece of small-town America sitting in the middle of Germany. Everything is in English, most of the food and products for sale in the commissary and exchange come from the USA, and all your neighbors are American. While this is good in that it creates a sense of community and allows folks to adapt and feel at home, it can create a safe world where families don’t go out and explore the host country or get to know the people.

We were fortunate that we met and became friends with a number of Germans who welcomed us into their homes and their lives. Every opportunity we had, we left the military base and went out to discover more about Germany. When our military tour of duty was about to end, we realized that we wanted to continue to be part of the German community. This book tells the story of our approach to making Germany a permanent part of our lives by purchasing an apartment in a small town in the Neckar River valley and the people who helped and continue to help us in this quest to really discover Germany.

Acknowledgments

Many people have been instrumental in making our life and adventures in Germany possible. A special thank you to Dr. Hanno and Liselotte Monauni for welcoming us into their lives and their home, showing us around the Neckartal, teaching us about Germany, and helping us achieve the purchase of our apartment.

Thank you to all the members of the Gundelsheim English Conversation Club for welcoming us as members and sharing news and history about the town. A special thank you to Sabine März for sharing the history and folklore of the region and patiently answering my many questions. A special thank you to Gabriele and Manfred Blum for opening their kitchen and teaching us the fine points of Spätzle and Schupfnudeln cooking and to Emmi Deschner for sharing her Schupfnudeln expertise.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Alex Deschner, another member of the English Conversation Club, who provided critical editorial assistance that helped ensure I had details and spelling of facts in German correct. A special thank you, Alex, for taking all the time to go through and edit a manuscript in a foreign language.

Thank you to Edith Hoffmann who has never given up trying to teach us German and whose friendship, advice, and support have been a tremendous help.

Thank you to my father, Dr. Thomas Mahan, for teaching me to embrace the joy in life, showing me that nothing is ever impossible and for encouraging me in whatever crazy adventure I attempted.

To my husband, Sylvan, thank you for sharing the past thirty odd years of adventures, travels, fun, and friends. None of it would have been possible without your love and encouragement.

Chapter 1

Crazy Ideas

Why would anyone buy property in Gundelsheim? asked the middle-aged man, dressed all in white, as we waited with him for the southbound train. This was the third time he had asked the same question, and it was beginning to annoy me. He wouldn’t accept our answer, and he had an air of superiority about him that rang false. I kept waiting for the hourly train to arrive. He kept looking at us as if we were crazy.

Maybe we were. Many of our friends asked the same question three years ago when we purchased a small apartment in southwestern Germany. No, we didn’t have any relatives who lived in the area, and no, we didn’t have any business ties to Germany. But we had fallen in love with the area and the people and wanted a permanent bond that would bring us back as more than just tourists. In other words, we wanted a home in Germany and wanted to be part of a German community. We ended up in Gundelsheim, a small out-of-the-way town on the Neckar River, with one train every hour going south and one going north.

"Why don’t we buy an old German half-timbered house or Fachwerkhaus?" I asked my husband, Sylvan, one day as we enjoyed a weekend sightseeing in Weinheim. We had left the military base in Stuttgart where we were stationed to spend a few days in the small town of Weinheim located on the Bergstrasse. For some reason, many of the roads in Germany are given names that reflect a theme about the area. There is the Romantic Road, the Fairy Tale Road for Brother Grimm fans, the Castle Road, the Baroque Road. One of my favorites is the Nibelungen Road named for the mythic German hero-warriors Siegfried and Hagen along with the beautiful Kriemhild and Brunhild and, of course, the lost Nibelungen gold. A must-see for Wagner fans. This weekend we were on the Bergstrasse or the Mountain (Berg) Road (strasse), which runs from Heidelberg in the south to Darmstadt in the north following the Rhine rift valley through the hills of the Odenwald. Numerous fascinating small towns lie along this route, and this weekend we had picked Weinheim as our stopping point. The name itself encouraged us to stop. Wein = wine; heim = home. It sounded like our type of town.

Our hotel, the Markplatz, was a centuries-old Fachwerkhaus that faced the main market square in the small town. The square also contained the Rathaus or town hall, restaurants, cafes, and since it was a Saturday morning, the local market with flowers, vegetables, and fruit vendors. Although an early autumn day, cafe and restaurant patrons continued to enjoy outdoor seating. Dragging ourselves away from the lively and colorful square, we wandered through the old alleys and cobblestone streets of Weinheim looking and admiring the well-preserved medieval buildings.

Germany has an extremely large number of half-timbered houses dating from the fourteenth through the nineteenth century. Many of these are in small towns and villages that escaped the bombing campaigns of WWII. Half-timbering became a prominent method of house construction in Germany because of the availability of wood and the ease with which timbers could be cut with a felling ax and then roughly shaped using a broadax. These rough wooden beams provided the actual support for the house and the space between them was then filled with everything from clay to straw to rubble to bricks. These half-timbered houses or framework houses leave their skeletal wooden frames exposed.

Different areas of Germany developed different styles of these houses with the Alemannic and Frankonian styles being the most prevalent in southwestern Germany. The Frankonian style has very elaborate and often highly decorated diagonal crossbeams while the Alemannic style maintains large spaces between the upright posts using just diagonal struts at the top and bottom for support. As the styles continued to develop in the Middle Ages, the decorative aspect continued to increase as it reflected the wealth and status of the owner, and the beams were often carved or painted. Today you can often see different styles sitting next to one another in the same town.

Chapter 1-1.jpg

Alemannic half-timbering style.

Chapter 1-2.jpg

Frankonian half-timbering style.

I loved looking at each and every one of these houses to see how they were constructed and how they had been maintained. Look at how this one tilts. I’m surprised it’s still standing. Look at the carved timbers on this one. Everywhere we looked, we spotted new details. The most fascinating houses in Weinheim were in the Tanners Quarter or the Gerberbachviertel (Gerber = tanner; bach = brook; viertel = quarter). Here in medieval times, the tanners lived and worked using the presence of the brook for their tanning process. Every house looked unique and, to our eyes, beautiful. We puzzled over how anyone could live in the Schmalste (small) Haus (house) as it was only 2.1 meters (6.89 feet) wide! I wondered how anyone could ever find the right furniture for such a miniature house. Our day passed quickly, gazing at these amazing houses and imagining the centuries of living that they had weathered.

Of course, this weekend, Weinheim also hosted the Weinheimer Weinmeile (wine mile) for which the main pedestrian shopping street was lined with booths where local vintners from Weinheim, Bensheim, Heppenheim, and Heidelberg sold Riesling, Sylvaner, and Trollinger wines by the glass. It made sampling easy. Maybe too easy. It was also early October and the Federweisser or feather wine sat bubbling at many of the booths. Federweisser is the early fermenting stage of new wine. It remains in large containers where the fermenting gas can escape. The fermenting process fills the wine with small bubbles, and it tastes as if you are drinking feathers. The name Federweisser (Feder = feather and Weiss = white) comes from the appearance of the yeast and the bubbles that are suspended in the wine as it ferments, giving it a white or cloudy and feathery appearance. Every fall, we looked forward to enjoying this transitory treat as it only remains available for four to five weeks. You must, however, be careful with Federweisser as the alcohol content varies greatly depending on how far the fermenting process has progressed. A glass or two of Federweisser can be deceptively powerful.

Also, along the Weinmeile stood traditional food stands. Paired with the Federweisser were the Zwiebelkuchen or onion cakes. Vintners plant onions beside the grapes in their vineyards as the onions will show a soil problem before the grapes, thus alerting the vintner to take action. The onions also ripen at the same time as the new wine begins fermenting, so autumn menus traditionally pair the two. Zwiebelkuchen resemble an onion quiche made with yellow onions, eggs, sour cream, and bits of bacon cooked in a pie shell. It has the added benefit of being a very mobile food that can be eaten as you stroll along. We walked up the entire length of the Weinmeile, sampling from wine vendors lining one side of the street and then made our way back down the other side. Thank goodness, our hotel conveniently sat right at the end of the Weinmeile.

Maybe it was the wine, maybe it was the fact that we were scheduled to leave Germany in four months, but suddenly, it felt like we were going to lose something important when we left Germany. I’m sure there are regulations concerning who can buy property in Germany. Have you heard of any Americans buying houses here? replied Sylvan after he recovered from the initial shock of my proposal.

I read books all the time about Americans buying old houses in France and Italy. It sounds wonderful. I’m sure we could do the same thing here. Well, I hoped we could do the same thing in Germany, but truthfully, I had not seen any books about Americans purchasing homes in some romantic part of Germany and restoring them. Maybe they were all too busy working on their houses or enjoying the local food and wine to write about it. I hoped so.

Look at these houses, I continued They are so beautiful with the half-timbering, the way many of them are crooked, the narrow lanes they sit in, the cobblestone streets. These are real houses with individual stories and histories. Instead of just keeping money in a bank, let’s buy something real with it that we can enjoy.

OK, agreed Sylvan after a weekend full of house gazing and wine drinking. Ask Hanno when we get back to Stuttgart and see what he says about German regulations. Remember, we’re leaving in four months, so you don’t have much time to find this house.

Hanno, our closest German friend, holds a doctorate of jurisprudence degree, although he was the CEO in various international corporations for the latter part of his career. We met him and his wife, Liselotte, Lilo for short, when they attended the US Navy Ball in Stuttgart two years earlier. Every year on the Navy Birthday (Oct. 13), navy communities around the world hold dress balls to celebrate the Continental Congress establishing the US Navy back on October 13, 1775. All the high-ranking navy admirals, generals from the other military services, and select German dignitaries attend the Stuttgart Navy ball. The German guests were especially important in terms of keeping good neighborly relations between the US military base and the local communities.

We were living in Germany because as a navy captain, I was stationed at US European Command (EUCOM) in Stuttgart. With twenty-seven years of military service, I was one of the more senior navy captains and worked as the deputy director for command, control, and communications. EUCOM is a joint command with members from all the military services as well as some of our NATO allies. Sylvan had retired from the navy ten years earlier and was living the life of a man of leisure, househusband, or as the military put it, an accompanying family member. We lived in a house on Patch Barracks, a US Army base in Vaihingen, a Stuttgart suburb.

That year, I violated one of the unwritten navy maxims, namely Never Volunteer for extra assignments. Vice Admiral Gallagher, the senior navy officer in Stuttgart, needed someone to coordinate the annual Navy Ball. He had twice asked for volunteers. Silence. No one was stepping forward. This was embarrassing. Where was everyone’s navy pride? I couldn’t stand it any longer. I raised