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 586th celebration to mark that day.
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| 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.)
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| 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.
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| 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.)
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| 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.
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| 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 27th.
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 586th 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:
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