GERMANY: GIENGEN

 May 20, 2025

Halfway into this trip, Bob and I and my sister Chris and her husband Stan met up in Giengen, Germany, with the rest of my siblings (three more), two of their spouses, a cousin, and a nephew for a total of eleven family members. What a blast! 

Giengen is where my mother was born. In fact, I can work my way up the family tree and find the following births in Giengen: my mother's mother (1895), her father (1848), his father (1817), his father (1785) AND mother (1793). both sets of their parents (1748, 1760, 1759, 1761), and five more generations before that dating back to as early as 1585! Pretty incredible. 

Giengen is located in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg less than 20 miles from the much larger and more famous city of Ulm. Today, Giengen has a population of around 20,000, but it seems to always have been somewhat of a sleepy city, and as we walked around, it felt like it had a population of about 500.

Giengen's claim to fame is that it is the home of the toy stuffed animal factory Steiff, founded in 1880 by Margarete Steiff (1847-1909). Confined to a wheelchair because her legs had been paralyzed by polio as a child, she took up sewing and began making stuffed toys for friends, then opened her own store in 1877. In 1902, her company began making stuffed bears with movable joints. The bears took off in the United States. Some sources claim they were nicknamed after the then President Teddy Roosevelt, becoming the first "teddy bear," but other sources credit a political cartoon and a Brooklyn candy store owner with creating the nickname and the first bear. The two events appear to have occurred simultaneously.

While most cities have a statue of a king or famous political or religious figure in the town center, Giengen has a teddy bear (or two). 

What looked something like a Chamber of Commerce building had this image in the window. It translates to "Capital of Teddy Bears, Giengen on the Brenz [River]."

The stone bear in the chair and the bear in the image above both look a lot like the bear Mom had sitting on the living room shelf in my childhood home, and which she gave to me when our first child was born.

I had no idea that Steiff stuffed animals came from Giengen, and now I understand why my mother had a small collection of them!  When she moved out of the home I grew up in and into a smaller place, I claimed three more Steiff stuffed animals--a fawn, a terrier . . . 

. . . and a squirrel that's quite a bit larger than the other three toys. I think she had one more, a larger deer, but one of my siblings must have that.  Steiff toys are identified by the brass button usually found in an ear. Because of their sentimental value, I never let the kids play with them, which is too bad.

Giengen is a fun little town with a good sense of humor. I loved this fountain where the figure on top is pouring water into the bowl of the man below.

The monster lurking in front of a bank is Sulphur the Terrible, a dragon of legend who was challenged by a little unicorn named Panschi.

We have a 1980s photo of our mother standing in front of a house in Giengen we think must have been the family home. We were hoping to be able to find it as we walked around.

We checked in with the tourism office or whatever the chamber of commerce-y building was, and they suggested a few possibilities.  We started down the main street of the old town area that had buildings of about the same vintage as the one in the photo. What a charming place with its tall, colorful, steep-roofed buildings and cobblestone streets!

We found the Giengen Protestant Church, a prominent local landmark that has existed in some form for 700 years (starting as a Catholic church, of course). I'm guessing some of my ancestors were baptized here.

We found a few houses we thought resembled the house in the photo, but we don't think we found the actual house

We had to find a way to make up for our disappointment.

We also found the Stolperstein of a victim of the Aktion T4 program at Grafeneck--which I will tie in to the purpose of our trip to Germany in a future post. 

We headed back to the center of town to get some dinner at the restaurant in the red-roofed white building below left, passing by this interesting sculpture of trains and vehicles on horizontal bars and people hanging from the circle. It has something to do with Maibaumfest, or the Maypole festival.

I was impressed by Giengen--such a picturesque village. I wish I had been able to go there with Mom.

We had reserved a large four-story VRBO in the village of Neubulach, located about 25 miles from Pforzheim. It actually had more bedrooms than we could use, and it was perfect for our needs.  

On the left is the oddly-shaped but quite spacious dining area with two tables (one in the foreground that is cut off in the picture) and lots of seating. On the right is a pile of SOME of our shoes, which we took off when we came in to minimize clean up. Fun, fun!

Up next: Meeting Alex and visiting Grafeneck