Cuckoo clocks

Today we saw the "World's First Largest Cuckoo Clock" in Schonach, next to Triberg, near Furtwangen. It was the first of its kind until it was preempted by the World's Subsequent Largest Cuckoo Clock, located who knows where. The good people of Schonach earn points for their honesty.

Unfortunately, by the time I saw the sign for the clock and pulled off the main road, Stefan had a raging headache, and Elias was tired and didn't want to get out of the car. Thus it was up to me alone to visit this important landmark. I grabbed my camera and trudged the half block from where we had parked, through the cold, damp, high-altitude air, only to discover that the clock is closed until "at least December 13." More points for honesty.

Despite my disappointment at not being able to enter this monument to kitsch, our trip demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that Americans don't have a monopoly on goofy roadside attractions. Indeed, you could probably fit quite a few jackalopes and world's-largest-hairballs inside Schonach's claim to fame.

Schonach was a likely place to find a World's Largest thing of this type. We ended up there because rain thwarted our plan to hike the Belchen. (According to all our tour guides, the Belchen "is reputed to be the most beautiful mountain in the Schwarzwald." I'm intrigued by the repeated use of "reputed" around here--as in "Freiburg is reputed to be the sunniest city in Germany" and "Linzer Torte is reputed to be the oldest known torte in the world"--as though no one can think of standards by which to objectively evaluate any of these things). We browsed through our reliable guide to the southern Schwarzwald and decided to take in a little local culture by visiting the Deutsches Uhrenmuseum (German Clock Museum) in Furtwangen.

Furtwangen has been a clock-making center for centuries. During the Industrial Revolution, the town's residents found themselves unable to compete with new factory-produced clocks. In 1850, Furtwangen's Baden Grand-Ducal Clockmaking School sponsored a competition seeking a more modern clock aesthetic--and thus was born the Bahnhaeusle-Kuckucksuhr ("wee train house clock"), a wooden cuckoo clock designed by architect Friedrich Eisenlohr and modeled on a railway signalman's house.

By the 1860s, Eisenlohr's design had pushed laquered metal shield cuckoo clocks and picture frame cuckoo clocks off the market, and had paved the way for the ornately carved wooden cuckoo clocks famous around the world today. The popularity of the clocks played a major role in pulling Furtwangen, Triberg, and other Black Forest communities out of poverty during the 19th century.

One of the many other interesting things we learned at the clock museum today was that prehistoric Stonehenge was a dangerous place to be a sheep.