Schwäbisch Hall (Germany)

...museum built, the Kunsthalle, in Schwäbisch Hall, 20 km away, it´s regarded as a kind of ´sister institution´. For the Danish architect Henning Larsen, ´the challenge in Schwäbisch Hall lay in creating a building that dared to be modern and yet was in harmony with the architecture and scale of the medieval town.´ He has certainly won the challenge!

The massive reinforced concrete structure is clad in local Muschelkalk (this German ...
...using an new technique that produces interesting effects. The individual slabs are not simply hung on the face of the structure but are layered, with the split edges overlapping one another. A striking façade of steel and glass sets off the stonework and provides an effective contrast, and gives an open view of the town.

The museum sits very close to the neighbouring houses; when strolling through an exhibition the visitors can look ... more

Berlin, the capital of Germany, is also the biggest city of the country (this is not a superfluous remark as Bonn, the old capital, is only a medium-sized town), seen from there, Stuttgart, the capital of the land Baden-Württemberg, is province.

What do we find beyond Stuttgart, say, about 80 km to the north-east in the direction of ´Swabian Siberia´ bordering Bavaria? The town Schwäbisch-Hall, for example, about 35 000 inhabitants. But that´s not the end of our journey, about 20 km farther is the town Künzelsau, still not our destination, we´re looking for a village, Gaisbach (meaning goats´ brook).

If the term ´anus mundi´ comes to your mind, you´re not far off the point. This is Latin and sounds educated, ´arse of the world´ is English and means exactly the same.

Why have I guided you to Künzelsau-Gaisbach of all places? Of course, culture-wise, the province doesn´t offer much (if it did, it wouldn´t be the province), but if it does offer something, you can be sure that it´s noticed. I bet many inhabitants of Künzelsau have seen more world-class artefacts than many Londoners living in Zone 1 who, for too much choice, rather stay at home in front of the box! How´s that?

Good Man Reinhold Würth must be thanked.

He is the chairman of the Advisory board of a firm which is a world-wide business with 37 000 employees in 80 countries in the field of assembly and connecting technology with a product range of 50 000 products concentrating on screws, screw accessories, chemical-technical products, dowels, insulation etc., etc.

(I see some of you leaving, pity, btw, I just love the English language!)

What does a man like him do with all his money? Collect art, for example, (he´s got around 6 500 artefacts) and show his collection to his employees and visitors. Three to four changing exhibitions with works of art from the own stock as well as exhibitions providing an overall view of an artist or a specific issue are shown annually. The Museum Würth, integrated in the administration building, reports more than 50,000 visitors from outside every year, and this number is increasing steadily. There are two museums in fact, ´besides works of art, the museum complex also accommodates an unrivalled collection of screws . . . it documents the cultural, historical and technical aspects of this extremely diversified theme.´ (from the home-page)

One of the highlights was the large installation by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1995 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the firm (83 000 people came to see it). They packed the interior of the office building, the roof has glass panes onto which they glued light brown packing paper with the effect that the hall was bathed in a honey coloured light, the floor, the staircase, tables and chairs were covered in off-white cotton cloth, tied with string of the same colour, a breath-taking effect of the same kind all works by Christo have. During the installation Würth showed drawings and paintings from his private collection.

I was there around noon on a working-day and had a snack in the cafeteria. I asked some employees if they could imagine what it would be like to work again in ´naked´ surroundings. They said they had been sceptical before the installation, but knew already that they would miss it.

In 2001 Würth had an extra museum built, the Kunsthalle, in Schwäbisch Hall, 20 km away, it´s regarded as a kind of ´sister institution´. For the Danish architect Henning Larsen, ´the challenge in Schwäbisch Hall lay in creating a building that dared to be modern and yet was in harmony with the architecture and scale of the medieval town.´ He has certainly won the challenge!

The massive reinforced concrete structure is clad in local Muschelkalk (this German term is also used in English), which has been split using an new technique that produces interesting effects. The individual slabs are not simply hung on the face of the structure but are layered, with the split edges overlapping one another. A striking façade of steel and glass sets off the stonework and provides an effective contrast, and gives an open view of the town.

The museum sits very close to the neighbouring houses; when strolling through an exhibition the visitors can look out of the large windows directly into the people´s homes if they haven´t drawn their curtains, they, on the other hand, can look at the artefacts from their living-rooms without getting up from their sofas. Good, you may say, so they save the money for a ticket. But no, they can´t derive any pleasure from that, the admission is free anyway. Herr Würth is a genuine benefactor!

I was in Schwäbisch-Hall in 2002 to see the exhibition ´Woman Portrayed - Portrayals of Women in the Würth Collection´ with over 80 exhibits raising such interesting questions as (from the catalogue): ´Do women have to be naked to get into the museum?´, this from a poster the ´Guerilla Girls´, a group of New York activists plastered over half the city in the 1990s. They highlighted a discrepancy that continues to hold true, ´Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.´

Before I returned home I walked through the very nice town passing a wooden replica of the Globe Theatre standing on an island of the river Kocher. Can you guess which play was performed that year? It´s too good to be true! I´m afraid of writing down the title, because I´m afraid of a typo slipping in! It was ´The Taming of the . . . ´ !

Want to come with me? Hall lies on the rising banks of a small river, the Kocher (the ´ch´ is pronounced like the ´ch´ in the Scottish ´loch´), the museum is situated on the top of one hillside overlooking the old town centre. The view we have from there looks like the illustration of a fairy tale by the brothers Grimm. Hall was not destroyed during WW2, only a few stray bombs hit some buildings, a fact worth mentioning when writing about a German town. Some houses are more than 600 years old, crooked half-timbered ones which you find picturesque from the outside, but wouldn´t like to live in. No straight horizontal level in the whole building, in case you drop something, it´ll roll across the floor!

I thought that behind the old facades the flats had been modernised, but a woman told me that wasn´t done, in fact was forbidden, modernisation is only permitted if the lives of the dwellers would be endangered otherwise, for example by broken staircases, railings, tumbling walls, holes in the floor.

When I had descended the stairs from the museum and came to the river, I felt I had gone back in a time machine, I saw some men punting on a raft! There´s a site where you can rent rowing boats and rafts on the opposite bank, just to the left of the wooden covered bridge (one of seven, no German town has more; is there a town in GB with more?). If you´re into photography we may lose you here.

Let´s cross the bridge and see the house where the real Dr Faustus used to sit and drink with some of his mates, and then we stand on the market place in front of the 54 steps leading up to the entrance of the Church of St. Michael. The Steps! Since 1925 every summer professional open-air theatre has been performed here. According to a bystander no actor has ever broken a leg or sprained an ankle when running up and down, amazing!

I wanted to visit the church, but couldn´t, because the steps were cordoned off for the rehearsal of the play ´Kasimir und Karoline´ (first performed in 1932) by Ödön von Horvath. I heard the sentence ´´Tonight I´m getting drunk and then I´m going to hang myself, so the world will know what it has lost´´ so often that it comes to my mind now whenever I think of the steps. The author is one of those Austrians who are experts in Weltschmerz (pain and suffering of and from the world), obviously a typical German thang, because the term has entered the English language.

I had to wait until 2 pm, so I went to the Café on the market place and sat down beside the fountain and the former pillory. Hall had its own jurisdiction in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as the name ´Gallows Hill´, the house of the former executioner on one of the bridges and this pillory from 1509 show. Some steps lead onto a small platform with a minuscule Gothic roof where the victims had to stand - offenders who had committed petty crimes - to be mocked and spat at.

The buildings round the market place are nothing for stylistic purists, they´re all old, but belong to different periods, the Gothic one, the Renaissance and the Baroque, the overall effect is homogeneous, though.

I couldn´t sit in the Café for too long, it was hot and there weren´t enough umbrellas, so I went to the Hällisch-Fränkisches Museum of local history. Here I learnt why Hall was such a rich town, its former wealth is obvious in each building. Already 2000 years ago the Celts had found and mined salt in the area, and salt meant money.

As luck would have it I had been in Southern Italy, in Apulia, two weeks before and visited the salt-works there where salt is won from the water of the sea. Ask me something concerning salt, now I have answers to questions which I never even thought of before! The salt industry in Hall came to an end in 1924 when the fact that Hall is out of the way of every major transportation system finally made the production unprofitable.

An entire floor of the museum is dedicated to the history of the Jews who lived in that town. Near Hall was a concentration camp where the Jews who had been ´saved´ from the infamous ramp in Auschwitz because they were seen as fit to work had to build aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. I knew that already because there´s a plaque in the railway station with information about their destiny. Then there are painted wooden panels from 1738 which had covered the walls of a private synagogue, only one other specimen exists, it´s in a museum in Jerusalem.

Back to the market place, all sights are only minutes from each other, at last I could visit the church. It was begun as a Romanesque (don´t tell me that isn´t the correct term, I´ve got it from the *English* leaflet!) basilica and dedicated to Michael in 1156, it was finished only in 1718 (!), so that all the following styles can be found in the building. It is richly ornamented and you need some time to study all the artefacts in the church.

´nuff history! On my way back to the station I strolled through the side streets and felt Italian all of a sudden, on one small square I found three Italian restaurants and cafés! I opted for one with tables and chairs under a gigantic chestnut-tree (the sun was still hot), had an espresso and recapitulated the day. I had to think of friends of ours who live nearer to Hall than we do. They spent many years in Asia and whenever they have visitors from there, they treat them to a day in Hall. Their last friend was a Chinese lady from Hong Kong who seriously considered not returning home and asking for asylum in that cute German town!
 

...less