The everyday clock also brought worldwide fame to Junghans. It was one of the first everyday clocks and was affordable even for average earners. It was produced in the 19th century and occasionally travelled as far as China. The lacquer plate clock, a flat wall clock with a brightly painted face, was the major export. Incidentally, although the cuckoo clock is iconic for the region, it wasn’t the Black Forest’s most successful clock, but constituted maybe three to five percent of total production output. The most successful design was by an architect, who shrank a signalman’s house, decorated it with ivy, added a clock face and put the bird in the attic. Robert Gerwig, the founder of the Clockmakers’ School in Furtwangen, launched a sort of design competition at that time. To continue the story: in 1850, the cuckoo clock finally found the form in which it even today travels the world as the Black Forest’s envoy. Because for us, figuratively speaking, it’s not just the clocks that are important, but also a particular view of the Black Forest and of how the people here used to live.” “I love it when visitors see the Black Forest through new eyes after coming to the museum. “The clocks give a real insight into the landscape that the clockmakers used to live and work in,” the clock expert enthuses. Some even strike the hour and a couple dances round them. Some have a metal pendulum behind glass, some have elaborate little towers and tips, others are brightly painted. Clocks in every shape and size and with every imaginable decoration hang here. Eva Renz stops in front of a wall almost entirely covered in wooden clocks. On one of them is mounted a 1.8-metre (almost 6 feet) long cuckoo, whose call echoes through the open-plan museum every 15 minutes. Of the 1,300 on display, a mere 30 are in operation. The German Clock Museum in Furtwangen has an enormous collection of Black Forest clocks. Approximately 100 years after cuckoo clocks first appeared in Saxony, they made their debut in the Black Forest. “It is very old and was likely developed in Italy in the 16th century.” One of the earliest cuckoo clocks is said to have hung in the art chamber of Johann Georg I, Prince Elector of Saxony, she reveals, but unfortunately we know nothing about what it may have looked like. The cuckoo clock mechanism was definitely not invented in the Black Forest, she explains in the German Clock Museum in Furtwangen. When she’s asked about the history of the cuckoo clock, historian Eva Renz has many anecdotes to relate. Maybe Christophe will let slip which animal this was during his tour of the workshop. But its call required too many tones, so a decision was made to use the two-tone cuckoo instead. Originally, a different animal was meant to announce the hour. This is how Christophe’s family tells it: the cuckoo clock was invented in 1737 by Anton Ketterer in Schönwald, a village only a few kilometres from Schonach. “Our craft has such a long tradition and history that it would feel very wrong to make modern clocks.” The story of how the Black Forest discovered the cuckoo clock is probably told slightly differently in every clockmaker family. “I think it’s important to revive all motifs,” says the qualified wood sculptor. He designed most of these models himself, but some are inspired by clocks that his grandpa designed. What he is currently working on hangs in the wood-decked room: beautiful pieces in different shapes, sizes and colours of wood. You can buy the clocks online or in Christophe’s shop, which is in his house next door to the workshop. The chimes,for example, which make the typical cuckoo noise using bellows, are crafted only a few hundred metres away. Even now, there are several clock suppliers based in Schonach. Although they are made by a specialist company today, they were originally produced by local farmers in their yards, to supplement their scanty incomes from agriculture. And why cuckoos? Like the clockmakers before him, Christophe Herr does not produce the individual parts of the clock mechanism himself. He is the fifth generation to keep the tradition alive. And they learned from their ancestors, Christophe’s family has been making cuckoo clocks since 1868. Christophe learned his trade from the best – his dad and grandpa. “It works!” He nods happily, presses the back cover of the clock into the casing and carefully hangs it on the wall. If he has bent one wire incorrectly, this could mean that the music doesn’t play, or the cuckoo doesn’t come out of the door. Christophe Herr is sitting in the upper storey of his workshop in Schonach im Schwarzwald, and focusing his attention on checking a clock mechanism.
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