The tour starts directly at the MÜHLENWEGMUSEUM Allensbach and leads through the villages of... Allensbach on Lake Constance
Take your time and visit the MühlenwegMuseum directly at the train station and find out about Fritz Mühlenweg (1898 - 1961). He incorporated his experiences of three Asian expeditions into his successful book for young people ‘In geheimer Mission durch die Wüste Gobi’ (1950). With this, but also with his adventure novel ‘Strangers on the Path of Thoughtfulness’ (1952) and the translation of Chinese poems, Mühlenweg, who settled in Allensbach with his wife, the painter Elisabeth Kopriva, in 1934, made a cultural contribution and gave important impulses to German Asian studies, especially Mongolian studies.
... Gaienhofen
Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962), who had had ample experience of therapy in his youth, which was dominated by life crises, came to Untersee in 1904 under different circumstances: influenced by “a rather lively movement in Germany at the time of urban flight and country life with moral and artistic justification”. Hesse had achieved success with the novel ‘Peter Camenzind’, which enabled him to become a freelance writer. He rented a farmhouse in Gaienhofen, “somewhat primitive and also somewhat neglected, but pretty and quiet”, and stayed on the Höri for eight years, newly married to the photographer Maria Bernoulli, who was inclined towards life reform ideas. In this first house of his own, Hesse “had the feeling of settledness for the first time, and therefore also sometimes the feeling of imprisonment, of being bound by boundaries and orders”. Today, the house is part of the Hermann Hesse Höri Museum, which presents the Höri as a literary and artistic landscape and also displays the desk that Hesse had built especially for this house and which accompanied him on all his subsequent moves. Thanks to a steady income, after three years Hesse was able to build a bourgeois house A with water pipe and bathing stove, which was recently reconstructed on a private initiative - including the garden created by Hesse himself. The sketch ‘A September morning on Lake Constance’ shows that here in Erlenloh there was a place not only for harmony with nature, but also for isolation and solitude. Even though, looking back, he said that this was the best time of his life: The idea of being able to “create and acquire something like home in a place of one's own choosing” was a self-delusion. Hesse's marriage showed the first signs of crisis, which are reflected in the novel ‘Gertrud’ (1910), which was written here. When the writer returned from a trip to India in 1912, he knew that Gaienhofen was “exhausted” for him. The family moved to Bern and left the “vast, light, unspoiled landscape” of the Höri, which the painter Otto Dix (1891 - 1969) found “sickly beautiful”. (Dix came to Gaienhofen in 1936 after the Nazis had listed his art as “degenerate” and revoked his teaching license). The doctor and writer Ludwig Finckh (1876 - 1964), who had already visited his friend Hesse on Lake Constance in 1905 and also settled here (Ludwig-Finckh-Weg 5), later glorified their years together as a ‘Gaienhofen idyll’ (1946). The pacifist Hesse clearly distanced himself from Finckh's initially national-conservative and, after 1933, openly fascist positions.
... Wangen
Jacob Picard (1883 - 1967), however, had already lived in Wangen “for three centuries”. The man born here (Hauptstrasse 60) wrote this from his exile in New York, where he said he always thought of Untersee when he saw the Hudson River. Picard's home town is one of those Hegau communities where Jews and Christians lived together comfortably until 1933. His stories, which made him a chronicler of southwest German rural Jewry, open up a completely different view of the Höri and its history. Hermann Hesse said of the volume of novellas ‘Der Gezeichnete’ (1936) that it demonstrated the newly awakened sense of German Jews for their uniqueness, a uniqueness, of course, that differed from shtetl and ghetto Judaism through their coexistence with Christians and their attachment to their rural homeland. Picard described his childhood and youth at Untersee, already under the impression of the threat, in ‘Erinnerungen eigener Lebens’ (1938). Picard survived the Holocaust. In 2007, a memorial was set up in the old town hall in Wangen for him, who returned to his homeland in 1960 and received the Lake Constance Literature Prize four years later.
In Stein am Rhein, the route crosses the border into Switzerland
... BERLINGEN
ADOLF DIETRICH (1877-1957) was reluctant to leave Untersee. Even the train journey to Ludwigshafen to visit his brother was anathema to him. His paintings eventually traveled as far as New York and made him the best-known painter in the region alongside Dix. It is little known that he also wrote poetry. BEAT BRECHBÜHL (*1939), who was deeply impressed by an obituary of Dietrich as a teenager, set off on a fictitious ‘Foot Journey with Adolf Dietrich’ across the Thurgau Seerücken at the end of the 1990s, which he published in 1999 as a sensitive homage to the painter and poet.
...STECKBORN
Adolf Dietrich was an exception among the artists of Untersee. Those who were born here were driven out into the world: whether it was Paul Ilg as a child of the Verdingbub or OTTO FREI (1924-1990) (MORGENSTRASSE 14) as a schoolboy hungry for education. Frei made his debut in 1973 with his childhood memoirs ‘Jugend am Ufer’, the first part of the Steckborn cycle. In a succinct style, he tells of the national socialist threat, but above all takes a critical look at everyday life on Untersee. MARIA DUTLI-RUTISHAUSER (1903-1995) (SEESTRASSE 45), who moved to Steckborn in 1927, saw her home as being too narrow and therefore placed her literary work at the service of “spiritual national defense” in the 1930s, which brought her Swiss Heimatroman ‘Der Hüter des Vaterlandes’ (The Guardian of the Fatherland) high circulation.
Hermann Hesse, who “never saw the border through the Untersee as a natural one”, often rowed from Gaienhofen (Literary Cycle Route 04) to Steckborn to go shopping. He knew the customs tariff by heart, but “preferred smuggling where possible”.
