Donald
Trump, Bavaria’s disfavored son
In
the idyllic hamlet of Kallstadt, there once lived a man named
Friedrich Trump. Now his grandson is running for president, and these
tolerant Germans want nothing to do with him.
By
Janosch Delcker
9/23/16, 5:30 AM CET
KALLSTADT, Germany —
Few places in Germany are as representative of the country’s
heartland as Kallstadt, the village in which U.S. Republican
presidential candidate Donald Trump’s grandfather was born — and
from which he was later deported.
The hamlet of 1,200
people lies nestled among vineyard-covered hills, about an
hour-and-a-half’s drive southwest of Frankfurt. It has one bakery
and one butcher. Every year, Kallstadt holds the Saumagenkerwe in
celebration of the eponymous local delicacy: pig’s stomach filled
with pork, herbs, bratwurst and diced potatoes.
Trump may have
captured a large swath of the American electorate with his signature
blend of populism, nativism and brazenness. And yet, in the hometown
of his forefather, he remains distinctly unpopular.
In fact, few
politicians are less popular in Germany than Trump. A study by the
Pew Research Center found out that only 6 percent of the country
finds him trustworthy.
Since a local
newspaper discovered that Johannes Steiniger, a member of the German
parliament, was distantly related to Trump, the 29-year-old has done
all he can to distance himself from the presidential candidate. “With
his statements about gay people and foreigners, or with the language
he uses, and with his derogative statements about Hillary Clinton,
Trump seems to do everything he can so that we get a negative image
of him,” Steiniger tells POLITICO.
Trump’s rhetoric
regarding immigrants and racial minorities is especially unpopular in
Kallstadt. “He stands for everything that’s bad,” says Sarah
Bühler, yelling to be heard over the 20-person brass band
celebrating the Saumagenkerwe in the town’s main square. Bühler is
a former local “wine princess,” the 2009 victor of a beauty
pageant to promote the local wine industry.
This year, a new
dish appeared in the town’s annual festival: Saumagen-Döner, a
fusion of the local specialty with a Turkish kebab. “Everyone is
welcome to join us here, no matter what color they are,” says
Bühler. “Pink, purple, doesn’t matter.”
Tanja Huber, the
24-year-old incumbent regional wine princess, nods her head in
agreement. Since the prospect of a Trump presidency first became
evident late last year, reporters have descended on Kallstadt,
seeking a bit of local color, a quote or two, and perhaps some
hometown pride. “They don’t get that we really don’t give a
damn about Trump,” says Huber. “He’s never been here, and he
apparently doesn’t care about us, either.”
* * *
Donald’s
grandfather, Friedrich Trump, was born in Kallstadt into a vintner’s
family on March 14, 1869. Previous generations of the Trump family
used variant spellings of the name, including “Trump,” “Dromb”
and “Trumpff,” according to local historians, or even “Drumpf,”
according to a 2000 family history by Gwenda Blair; but by the time
Friedrich was born they had settled on “Trump.”
Germany did not yet
exist as a nation; Kallstadt was part of the province of Palatinate
in the Bavarian Kingdom. The region was going though rough times.
Unemployment was high. Those who had the courage, left.
Friedrich’s father
died when he was eight years old, and his mother struggled to make
ends meet. At 16 years old, Friedrich decided to follow his sister
Katharina, who had emigrated to the United States two years earlier.
He arrived in New York on board the Eider on October 19, 1885.
A gravestone with
the inscription of the family name Trump picture at the cemetery of
Kallstadt | Uwe Anspach/EPA
A gravestone with
the inscription of the family name Trump picture at the cemetery of
Kallstadt | Uwe Anspach/EPA
He entered the U.S.
through official channels, but he had left Bavaria illegally. “Both
he and his mother must have known that he would not have been granted
official permission to leave the country unless he had paid a bail
guaranteeing that he would later return to do his mandatory military
service,” said Roland Paul, the recently-retired director of the
Institute for Palatinate Regional History and Folklife Studies in the
city of Kaiserslautern.
According to
documents uncovered by Paul, Friedrich was stripped of his Bavarian
citizenship “as his own request” four years after arriving in the
U.S.
But Friedrich was
not done with Palatinate. Seven years after his citizenship was
withdrawn, he visited the land of his birth to attend the wedding of
his sister, according to the 2000 family history by Blair. Five years
after that, he returned once more to Kallstadt, where he met
20-year-old Elisabeth Christ; they were engaged, and Friedrich came
back a third time to marry her in August 1902.
But while the couple
moved back to New York soon after the marriage and had a daughter,
Friedrich had promised his wife that he would sell his property in
the U.S. and return to the land of their birth. “My grandmother
said, I will marry you, but I will not go back to America with you,”
Donald Trump’s American-born cousin John Walter told German
filmmaker Simone Wendel in 2012.
Friedrich seemed
intent on keeping his promise. In 1904, he applied for permission to
travel to Kallstadt. And although he claimed in his application that
he intended “to return to the United States within a year with the
purpose of residing and performing the duties of citizenship
therein,” he took all his savings from the U.S. with him, according
to Blair’s family history.
Back in Kallstadt,
Friedrich attempted to get his citizenship back. But though he
secured the support of local authorities, the district government put
a halt to his plans. On February 27, 1905, a deportation notice was
sent to the town office of Kallstadt declaring that Friedrich was “to
be told he has to leave Bavarian state territory by May 1 of this
year, at the latest.”
Friedrich was able
to obtain a three-month grace period because his daughter had fallen
ill. But eventually, he and his wife — pregnant once more — had
no choice but to board the ship Pennsylvania on July 1, 1905, and
return to New York. Shortly after that, Donald’s father, Fred Trump
Junior, was born.
“[The authorities]
said, ‘You are not a German citizen, you gave up your citizenship,
you have to leave,” says Walter. “So they left and they went back
to America, and that’s why Donald and I are here.”
Friedrich — now
named Frederick — died in May 1918 of the Spanish flu. His widow
survived her first husband by 48 years and visited Kallstadt many
times during her life.
* * *
In February 2012,
Simone Wendel, the German filmmaker from Kallstadt, was given an
audience with Donald Trump. Roughly two years earlier, she had begun
work on “Kings of Kallstadt,” a documentary about the two most
famous sons of her tiny hometown: Donald Trump and Henry John Heinz,
the inventor of Heinz Ketchup.
Tanja Huber,
regional wine princess of Kallstadt, says locals "really don't
give a damn about Trump" | Janosch Delcker/POLITICO
Tanja Huber,
regional wine princess of Kallstadt, says locals “really don’t
give a damn about Trump” | Janosch Delcker/POLITICO
For months, Wendel
had tried to arrange a meeting with Trump, but his office had not
replied to her letters. She was only able to secure a visit with the
help of Walter, Trump’s cousin, who had visited Kallstadt and
seemed happy with the attention she was paying to the family history.
On the day of her
visit, Wendel stood nervously next to Walter in a conference room on
one of Trump Tower’s top floors. She had brought a Linzer torte and
two bottles of wine with screw-on tops.
Her plan was to sit
down with Walter and Trump for coffee and cake, the traditional
afternoon snack in her home region. But when she asked Trump’s
staff to make some coffee, the only reaction she got was irritated
faces. “His assistant just couldn’t be bothered,” she says.
“Hello, John,”
Trump said, when he entered the room, shaking his cousin’s hand and
looking confused at Wendel in her loose turtle neck and the lonely
cake on the huge table in front of her.
Trump sat down in
front of a one-meter-long model of his Boeing 757-200 airliner and a
panoramic window overlooking New York’s Central Park. Wendel,
trying to remedy the situation, pushed the cake in his direction and
asked him to smell it. “Afterwards, I just kept on thinking, ‘What
on earth did I do?’” she says.
“The cake looks
really good,” Trump said, and he and Wendel ended up talking for
almost an hour.
The lights of
passing cars in the quiet town of Kallstatd | Thomas Lohnes/Getty
Images
The lights of
passing cars in the quiet town of Kallstatd | Thomas Lohnes/Getty
Images
Until 1990, Trump
still claimed his family was Swedish, a version of his family history
first introduced by his father in reaction to the anti-German
sentiment in the U.S. during the two World Wars. But by the time
Wendel visited, he had become proud of his German roots. “They grow
them well in Kallstadt,” he told her during their meeting. “They
grow them very well. Believe me. It’s good stock.”
“Wow, it’s
beautiful,” Trump said when she handed him a picture of the house
where his grandfather was born, an inconspicuous one-story building
with a gable roof. “That’s fantastic. See how well-maintained it
is? Everything is perfectly maintained. It’s great.”
When their interview
was over, Walter took Wendel on a tour of Trump Tower. On one of the
floors, they ran into Trump’s son, Eric Trump.
“Have you ever
heard the word Kallstadt?” Wendel asked him.
“Kallstadt?”
Trump Junior replied, “No, what is it?”
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