A Family Reunion in Steinbach-Hallenberg

On Saturday, June 20th I finally met my German cousins in Steinbach-Hallenberg. Separated by two World Wars, and the division of Germany into East and West until 1990, it has taken three generations for our families to reconnect, but the sense of kinship was palpable when I cross the main street of my ancestral hometown and shook hands with Rolf, Helmut, Werner, and Lothar Wahl.

Steinbach-Hallenberg is a small town nestled in a valley inside the Thuringen forest in Central Germany. In winter, it is a ski area, but in summer, it is host to many German hikers (or Wanderers). Its red roofs stand out in colorful contrast to the green hills surrounding it and many of the houses are covered with beautiful slate siding in intricate designs. The valley seemed quite narrow and deep as we entered it, and despite the fact the river running through it, die Hasel, is hardly bigger than a small stream, you often catch the sound water flowing by as small stone canals (literally “steinbach”) carry mountain runoff through the town.

Driving into Steinbach-Hallenberg sent a chill down my spine because I'd felt as if I were fulfilling not only a dream of my own but also of my father who died in 1978, long before reunification was even dreamed of. I had anticipated this meeting with much excitement and not a little trepidation. Would my cousins be as eager to meet me as I was to meet them? What would I learn about my family history? What would they want to know about the American side of the family? And most of all, would my recently resurrected German suffice to make conversation possible?

I need not have worried about the warmth of my welcome, and it was clear that Rolf Wahl had planned our visit with great care. First we toured the Metalwerksaftmuseum (Museum of Metalcraft) with Veronika Jung, the Museum's Director. This is one of the many new museums that are springing up in small German towns, as their inhabitants express their pride in their heritage by creating a place to document a way of life that is fast disappearing in more urban centers.

Inside the museum, Veronika began by greeting us in English, but she gave most of the tour quite slowly in clear German so that I could understand just about everything she told us. The museum is located in two houses, one of which was moved from another site with everything intact – the nail-making apparatus, all the tools, and a number of patents. The family (die Recknagel) had no children, and they wanted to give the remains of their business to the museum to preserve. It was impressive to see how much thought and energy had gone into a preservation process that required raising one of the buildings off its foundation and then moving it through small village streets to its new site.

For me this discovery of the tool-making history of Steinbach-Hallenberg generated a good deal of emotion.. In the museum I found the first tangible piece of evidence about my paternal great-grandfather, Peter Wilhelm Wahl who died in 1893 at the relatively young age of 52. I knew that his death had precipated his family's departure from Germany when his widow, Marie Bauerschmidt, decided to take her children, including my grandfather, Adolph, aged 8 and travel to America.

Peter Wilhelm had been a master locksmith, and museum has in its possession a book that recorded sales of special tools. So here I was actually holding history in my hand and seeing the page where Peter's name was written and the number of corkscrews he sold. I was almost moved to tears thinking what it would have meant to my father to be able to hold this document as well because I knew he had always longed to return to his homeland.

At the end of the tour we watched a smith make a corkscrew and then a hand-mail nail. It sounds like such a simple thing but it was back-breaking work when people in the town had to make thousands of nails a week just to survive. My cousins who are about about twenty to thirty years old than I am remembered seeing men who literally bent over from the effects of such hard labor, and Rolf emphasized that the nail-makers were the poorest of the townspeople and lived in the smallest houses, often with eight or ten children, all of whom helped out with the family trade.

Many of these hand-made nails were beautiful objects with different decorative heads on them for use in fine furniture. My father's autobiography mentions that a nail factory had closed down in Steinbach-Hallenberg in the years before Peter Wilhelm's death, but Veronika Jung told me that there were actually many nail and corkscrew factories in the area, almost all of them small family firms.
By the turn of the century, it was getting harder and harder to make a living from nail-making. A cigar factory opened up which used imported tobacco from Florida and Cuba and employed many women in the town, including Rolf's grandmother. Metalworking expanded to include production of many different kinds of tongs and other specialized metal implements.

Today in Steinbach-Hallenberg you can still see these small family enterprises, like the metal workshop whose very modern equipment is located in a house once owned by Rolf's great uncle. But it delighted me to see that in a small town where records of my ancestors as date back to the 16th century, the spirit of the family entrpreneur continues to reinvent itself. Just down the street from the metal workshop, Rolf pointed out to me a sign hanging on the house of another probably Karen Wahl, advertising not metalworking but IT services!

From Blogger Pictures