A Trip to Staufen

The little town of Staufen, 20 kilometers south of Freiburg, is well known to many American friends. The following photo dates back to June 2004 and shows a group in front of the town hall.

In the background is Staufen's town hall before its renovation.

Last Saturday, Red Baron took the train to join a guided tour to Staufen's secular places of interest organized by the local historical society. I was early with only a few visitors present, but when we left the train station to start the tour, our group comprised at least 60 people despite the cold and rainy weather.

I learned that the name Staufen has nothing to do with the famous Hohenstaufen nobility, for their mountain and castle are located in the Swabian Jura.

The Hohenstaufen in Swabia (©Kreuzschnabel/Wikipedia)

Still, the form of the mountain top of Hohenstaufen is similar to that of Staufen's castle hill. The two peaks look like a turned-over stauf, an old German word for the goblet.

Staufen's Schlossberg, as seen from the train station

Our group first visited the Fark'sche* Werkstatt of 1892, with some old machine tools dating back to the 19th century.
*Note the Deppenapostroph

Entrance to the Fark workshop

In Staufen, they take pride in this preserved workshop and keep lathes and drilling machines operational.

Manfred Kiefer is proud of "his" machines explaining them to a packed house.
A picture of the original water wheel is shown in the back.

In 1892 one water wheel coupled to the main transmission by a sophisticated belt system with clutches drove all the machines.

A labyrinth of wheels and transmission belts

Standing drilling machine: a museum piece still working.

An old lathe in operation

An even older lathe

Later, a steam engine replaced the water power until, in the 1920s, one small electric motor took all the load.

The small electric motor

The next stop on our tour was in front of the Gasthaus Krone.

The painting on the wall shows a scene from the revolutionary year of 1948 when the landlord of the Crown Inn involved in the local uprising told soldiers fetching him under martial law: Ich dulde nicht, daß ich erschossen werde! (I will not tolerate being shot!). Red Baron learned the real story. The commanding general of the government troops, Friedrich Hoffmann, had not yet received the written authorization for executions under martial law. And indeed, the landlord of the Crown Inn was spared while other freedom fighters, not knowing about the missing paper, had already been shot.

Note the little cannonball marked 1848 high on the left.

A passageway near the Gasthaus Krone carries the name of Gustav Struve, the leader of the revolutionaries. They had occupied Staufen but were rapidly defeated by government troops. Struve was arrested, brought to justice at Freiburg's Basler Hof, incarcerated in Fort Rastatt, and liberated by revolutionaries in 1849. Although having emigrated to America only in 1851, he is counted among the most influential Forty-Eighters in the States.

Concerning a well-preserved cannonball, Freiburg does better than Staufen. Our cannonball stuck in the wall of the Loretto Chapel is bigger and more than a hundred years older.

Cannonball from the French siege of Freiburg in 1744
stuck in the wall of the chapel on Lorettoberg

On our way to the town hall along Hauptstraße (Main Street), our guide showed us the spot from where to take the best shot of Staufen, even when the weather is terrible.

Bächle (narrow water channels) in Staufen's Main Street

Next, we stopped at the Gasthaus zum Löwen (Lion's Inn), where Dr. Faustus had lived for four years before he died a violent death in 1540 or 1541. The legend goes that Mephistopheles broke Faust's neck one night after their twenty-four-year contract had expired. Having heard a big bang, worried citizens entered the Lion's Inn. When their noses were irritated by a sulfurous smell, they were convinced that the devil had killed the learned Doctor, whose body was in a grässlich deformiertem Zustand (horridly deformed state).

Note the red sticker glued over cracks plastered in a makeshift way:
Staufen darf nicht zerbrechen (Staufen must not break)

The real story about Faust's death is less magical. The count of Staufen was bankrupt. Looking for money, he came to Freiburg in 1535, where he met Erasmus of Rotterdam, who was indignant, sitting on his suit- and bookcases waiting for his move to Basel. To get rid of his visitor, the great savant told the count that Doctor Faustus was on the brink of making gold. So the count invited Faust to Staufen, paying him food and a bed at the Lion's Inn for five long years. When he met the Doctor in the street, the count set a deadline: I shall give you another three days to make gold. After that, you will go with a bang. Desperately Faust started new experiments, but apparently, he used too much sulfur the following night. The resulting big bang killed him.

Staufen's redecorated town hall showed many cracks.
One is pasted over by the red sticker (©joergens.mi/Wikipedia)

Eventually, our group moved to the Rathaus. We were entertained at the old council chamber on the town hall's first floor with Apfelschorle (apple spritzer) and Nusszopf (plaited nut loaf).

Rathaus square-facing Renaissance window with Staufen's coat of arms
showing three golden staufen (goblets). To the right, the Austrian colors
and the double-headed eagle stand for 437 years of  Habsburg rule.

The upper floors of the Rathaus serve as a museum full of memories of the 1848 Revolution. Taken during an earlier visit, here is a photo of a rifle bullet that passed through the window, wounded the town clerk, and then stuck in a book. Luckily, Albert Gysler survived the shooting and died peacefully in his bed in 1904 at the age of 81.

Bullet in a book

We were then informed about the disaster that is actually striking Staufen. In 2006 - the town councilors had just beautifully redecorated their Rathaus - they decided on a drilling operation to be conducted in the spring of 2007, providing geothermal heating to the town hall. We read on Wikipedia: The drilling perforated an anhydrite layer and caused high-pressure groundwater to come into contact with the anhydrite, which then began to expand. The geochemical process called anhydrite swelling has been confirmed as the cause of these uplifts, i.e., the transformation of the mineral anhydrite (anhydrous calcium sulfate) into gypsum (hydrous calcium sulfate). A pre-condition for this transformation is that the anhydrite is in contact with water, stored in its crystalline structure. In July 2013, no end to the rising process was in sight. By 2010, some sections of the town had risen by 30 cm, causing cracks in the buildings of the old town center. In the meantime, relief drillings have reduced the water pressure and, subsequently, monthly uplifts from 11 to 2 mm.

Vestigia Mephistopheles

At the end of the visit, everybody wanted to see Mephistopheles's footprint on the staircase on the third floor of the town hall. Was the lousy drilling in 2007 the devil's late curse upon Staufen?

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