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]."

GERMANY: AN OLD POST, A NEW FRIEND, AND MANY LITTLE MIRACLES

 May 2025

And now I come to the part of the story of this trip to Germany that is nothing short of a miracle.

The very beginning of the story (if there is such a thing as a beginning of any story) was 85 years ago near a castle on the top of a rather remote hill in Southern Germany, but my part of it began just 25 years ago in December 2000 when Bob and I took our two sons, ages 15 and 12, to Europe with two objectives in mind: pick up our daughter from her study abroad program in France and spend time with my mother in Germany. 

Mom, our daughter, our sons, and I in the
Pforzheim cemetery, December 2000

My mother grew up in Pforzheim, a city that was bombed on February 23, 1945, killing 17,600 people, which was over 30% of the town's population. We met up with her in her hometown, spent the day seeing places that had been important to her, and then moved on to other cities in Southern Germany.