The Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life: Christmas Town in a Time Machine

(From the Christmas issue of The Atlantic Times)

200 years after the birth of its founding father, Frankenmuth in Michigan is still very German – clean, safe, efficient

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Two centuries ago this coming February 21, the Rev. Wilhelm Löhe was born in Fürth in Franconia, which later spawned Henry Kissinger. Like Kissinger, Löhe had a significant impact on the U.S.A., a country he never visited, though. A Lutheran village pastor, he sent missionaries to set up colonies in the Michigan wilderness. The largest of these is Frankenmuth (Frankish courage), one of the safest and cleanest towns in America. It has also evolved into the nation’s Christmas capital.

If you attend divine worship on any given Sunday at 9:30 a.m. in Frankenmuth’s huge St. Lorenz Church you might wonder whether a time machine had propelled you back to the Sankt-Lorenz-Kirche in Nuremberg, circa 1908. Accompanied by a roaring 50-rank pipe organ, some 1,000 men, women and children belt out their hymns lustily, rolling their “R’s” the way Franks do. And this would already be the third service that weekend, with yet another one to follow.

They bear the unmistakable features of the Frankish people, a Western Germanic tribe whose main contribution to European history was Emperor Charlemagne (742-814 A.D.), founding father of both Germany and France. Like Charlemagne, these Michigan Franks are men with strong, square faces, while many of their comely womenfolk are of the strapping variety prevalent in the northern Bavarian countryside. In Nuremberg, rarely more than 150 faithful sit in the Sankt-Lorenz-Kirche on ordinary Sunday mornings. By contrast, in Frankenmuth, congregants fill every pew in the nave and most seats on the balconies as well.

And they pay attention to the preacher in a white pulpit high above the chancel. They listen assiduously as long as nothing disturbs their routine. “I am sorry, pastor, I could not concentrate on your sermon this morning,” one woman apologized recently as she shook the minister’s hands at the door, “you see, somebody else had taken my seat.”

With 4,700 baptized members, five pastors and three organists, St. Lorenz is clearly the 600-pound gorilla among all institutions, religious or otherwise, in Frankenmuth, a town of 4,800. Some of its congregants live in outlying communities, of course. Still, the congregation’s membership roll reads like a Midwestern equivalent of the genealogical register of Mayflower families, except of course that the German colonizers of Michigan’s wilderness arrived 225 years after Pilgrims from Plymouth, England, had landed on Plymouth Rock, Mass.

But there were parallels. Like the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, the German colonists endured a grueling journey on their sailing ship, the “Caroline,” as it circumnavigated in thick fog iceberg upon iceberg in the North Atlantic, where at one point seven successive storms forced Captain Volkmann to remain on his bridge for 48 hours without sleep.

And like the Plymouth Pilgrims, these southern Germans came for reasons of faith. Following a Notruf, or appeal, from the Rev. Friedrich Wyneken, a Lutheran minister in America, Neuendettelsau’s pastor Wilhelm Löhe sent them out in 1845 to establish model communities whose perfect Christian lifestyle would so impress the Chippewa, a native American tribe, that they would readily convert to Christianity.

In a sense, Löhe’s settlers succeeded at first. One year after the Franks’ arrival, 30 Indian children inhabited the home of their exacting first pastor, Rev. August Friedrich Crämer, known to all as “the iron man.” But being nomads, the Chippewa eventually moved on – and certainly not into a life of destitution. Today, though led by a stalwart Methodist chief, they are immensely wealthy thanks to their gambling casinos that would not normally be allowed in Michigan, except on autonomous Indian reservations such as the ones in Mount Pleasant and Sault Sainte Marie.

So there are no American Indians at prayer anymore at Frankenmuth’s St. Lorenz Church, a redbrick sanctuary wedged in between streets named after Löhe and Neuendettelsau. But the Franks are plentiful – wealthy Franks, too. Four generations of the Zehnders are there, for example, always filling the same pew. The Zehnders, whose ancestors’ tombstone is among the most visible on the graveyard next to the St. Lorenz church, own two of America’s largest restaurants. These are good, old-fashioned German-style eateries where all the Zehnders young and old work diligently in good, old Germanic fashion six days per week, and that includes Dorothy Zehnder, the sprightly 80-year old matriarch of the giant “Bavarian Inn,” whose kitchens she supervises.

Then there are the Bronners – whimsical old Wally Bronner, another octogenarian, and his wife Irene, and their offspring Wayne, Carla and Maria with their wives and children. And guess how the Bronners make their living? Well, they observe Christmas 361 days a year, from January through December. They own and run “Bronner’s CHRISTmas Wonderland,” the largest Yuletide specialty store anywhere on earth. The salesroom alone is the size of almost two football fields, and that’s only a fraction of the Bronner buildings’ 320,00 square feet of floor space located on 45 acres of elegantly landscaped grounds.

You have got to see this giant supermarket filled with unparalleled glitter, running up an electricity bill of $900 every day. It sits on a piece of real estate almost twice the size of a football field. Two million people drop by every year in hundreds of thousands of cars and motor coaches. They come to be stunned by artificial snowstorms twice every hour even at the height of the summer at the store’s south entrance. They gawk at 500 different nativity scenes and 150 styles of nutcrackers. And they buy, and they buy, and they buy – anything from the most expensive wares here, such as17-foot Santa Claus figures for $7,000 a piece, to trinkets costing less than two bucks. Altogether, the Bronners have 50,000 Christmas items for sale.

He is a marvelous old guy with eyes twinkling as brightly as his Christmas candles, Wally Bronner is. Dressed in a bright red blazer like the rest of his staff he bustles about armies of animated figures, and forests of Christmas trees with their blinking lights. You can tell he feels like a kid in a candy store as he lovingly takes in all those toys, and those Yuletide ornaments imported from around the globe – the cheap stuff from China, the more valuable wares from the Erzgebirge in eastern Germany. “He really does celebrate Christmas every day,” insists his oldest son, Wayne, “and he has done so ever since starting this business back in 1945, gradually building it up from his miniature commercial sign painting enterprise he began in his father’s basement to earn pocket money as a high school boy.

Up the road at the local Historical Museum, director Mary Nuechterlein and Dave Maves, an amateur local historian, smile benignly at the way the Zehnders and the Bronners have transformed their part of town into a wannabe alpine wonderland, albeit one that in part also looks like a German spa. Let it be known that while Franconia is politically part of Bavaria, it has little in common with the yodeling, thigh-slapping, lederhosen-wearing, beer-guzzling natives of the southernmost corners of the German-speaking world many Americans associate with everyone saying “ja” instead of “yes.”.

If Wilhelm Löhe rose from his grave in Neuendettelsau and flew into Frankenmuth he’d be baffled to find at Bronner’s the exact replica of the St. Nikolaus Church of Oberndorf in Austria, yes, Austria, where ten years after Löhe’s birth Father Joseph Mohr, a Catholic priest, and his organist Franz Grüber wrote the lyrics and music of what today is the world’s most beloved Christmas carol: “Silent Night.”

It was Wally Bronner who had a copy of this edifice erected on his grounds to give thanks to God for “CHRISTmas Wonderland’s” huge success; he also had wooden plaques bearing the lyrics of Silent Night in 300 languages planted along the walkway leading up to the chapel where loudspeakers play this hymn over and over again, and where on Christmas Eve he, Wally, personally leads hundreds of visitors in singing it.

With all this you might be forgiven for thinking that Löhe’s Frankenmuth has “gone Roman.” But no! Remember of Garrison Keillor’s famous quip? “The whole Midwest is Lutheran. Even the atheists in the Midwest are Lutherans. The God they don’t believe in is Luther’s God.” Keillor coined this adage for Minnesota, his own corner of America. But he might as well have had Frankenmuth in mind.

Though the Bronners and the Zehnders and David Maves can’t think of a single Lutheran atheist in their community, this town is so awesomely Lutheran that even the second church in town, St. John’s, is Lutheran. It belongs to a still more conservative branch of Lutheranism than St. Lorenz, to which the Bronners and the Zehnders belong, and which is a founding congregation of the strictly confessional Lutheran Church Missouri Synod that counts Löhe and Crämer among its fathers.

In fact, so Lutheran is Frankenmuth that when the Roman Catholics finally set up a parish in 1963, they asked the elders of St. Lorenz for advice on how to name their new sanctuary, and received a very Lutheran answer: “Blessed Trinity, of course!” Now, there is nothing un-Catholic about these two words, but lumped together as one name, they sound quintessentially Lutheran, at least in America. At any rate, in Frankenmuth a reversal in the historical trajectory occurred. The Catholics took their cue from a much younger branch of Christianity, and everybody seems happy.

Now, if you talk to the Rev. Mark Brandt, senior pastor at St. Lorenz, he will sound a cautionary note. Yes, he readily admits, while there are no longer any Chippewa to convert, Frankenmuth by and large had clung to the values handed down from its Frankish founding fathers (perhaps, one might add, even more so than their cousins in the old country). Yes, yes, this is a wonderfully safe place almost free of crime, which is why so many people from nearby Saginaw, Flint or Detroit went to retire here. Yes, there is practically no crime in Frankenmuth, although “there is sin here, too,” pastor Brandt insists, “drunkenness, for example,” but then one must allow that this is a place filled with German Lutherans, and German Lutherans drink.

True, true, the Lutheran parochial school, with 500 students the largest in the Missouri Synod, is as excellent as ever, as is the local public school, which was founded much later. So good is the educational system in fact that 98 percent of Frankenmuth’s high school graduates go on to college, an extremely rare phenomenon in America. And yes, local census figures show that the town’s divorce rate is well below the national average and is share of two-parent families well above.

“But,” warns Rev. Brandt, “church attendance is in decline, even though our membership remains stable. When I came here 17 years ago, 2,000 came to our services at least once a week, and now only 1,700 show up” – a complaint, which every pastor in Germany would comment thus: “I wish I had your problems.”

But one thing is definitely in decline in Frankenmuth and the neighboring Frankish settlements called Frankenhilf (Frankish help), Frankenlust (Frankish pleasure) and Frankentrost (Frankish comfort): More than one and a half centuries after the first settlers’ arrival, the gnarling Frankish dialect is finally fading. The older generation still speaks is with such purity that it brings tears to the eyes of tourists from Franconia, Germany. And German is still a compulsory subject at the parochial school.

But only 30 or 50 worshipers show up for the German-language service on every second Sunday of the month, a service inscribed in the congregation’s constitutions. And, as local historian David Maves grumbles, while 300 people still come to the annual meeting of Frankish-speakers at the Bavarian Inn, fewer and fewer still master the dialect. Imagine the dire consequence, according to David Maves: Most participants, Americans all, now communicate in High German.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, a veteran foreign correspondent from Germany and Lutheran lay theologian is scholar-in-residence at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.

10 Comments

Hi,
This is an interesting article. My grandfolks and I attended St. Peter's LC in Huntington, IN. That congregation was founded by F. Wyneken who I believe had some roots in the Saginaw area. My grandfolks were members at St. Pete's. My best to you and all at Concordia.
Pr. George T. Rahn

Posted by: Pr. George T. Rahn | January 01, 2008 at 01:05 PM

I'm looking for my fathers uncle, who emigrated from
Neuendettelsau, Franken, Germany to USA. Can you help me
or do you know someone, who can help my. Thankyou !

Posted by: Anita Ludwig | January 13, 2008 at 06:40 PM

I'm from Franken in Germany and I'm looking for my fathers uncle, who emigrated from
Neuendettelsau, Franken, Germany to USA.
His name was Konrad Gattinger, he was born 13.10.1892 in Wernsbach, Franken, Germany.
Can you help me?
Do you know someone, who can help my. Thankyou ! Sincerly.
Anita Ludwig

Posted by: Anita Ludwig | January 13, 2008 at 06:41 PM

Frankenmuth about 10 years ago: sehr kitschig.

Frankenmuth now: They really "germaned the place up."

Really, they did.

When I go there I manage always to find some older German speaking folks to talk to - they always get enthused and misty to talk to a younger person who can converse in their muttersprache.

My aunt came from Frankenmuth, (at nearly 90 she now lives in the outskirts of Detroit). German didn't stop being the official language there until WWII.

And Uwe -- you came to Michigan and didn't tell me. I would have driven across state to buy you a drink.

Come to Detroit and I will show you the German heritage that still exists here, although sometimes hidden in the architecture of the Lutheran churches that punctuate the east side of Detroit.

Jon

Posted by: The Unknown Lutheran | January 19, 2008 at 04:30 PM