Postscript on Hohentruedlingen and Oettingen

One of the great thing about being hosted by locals is get­ting some of the local sto­ries. The Reicherts told us a great tale of Hohen­truedlin­gen, the lit­tle town where we met the friendly farmer. Some years back it grew a lit­tle in pop­u­la­tion so they decided they needed a big­ger church. How­ever, they didn’t like the thought of knock­ing down the walls of the old one. So a log­i­cal solu­tion emerged: they just built a big­ger church all around the smaller one, a church in a church. Could there be an ecu­meni­cal anal­ogy here?

We also learned that Oet­tin­gen itself, back in the day, was on the bor­der of com­pet­ing ter­ri­to­ries of two princes, one Catholic and one Lutheran. The com­pro­mise they set­tled on was divid­ing the town down the mid­dle. On one side of town all the houses are Baroque, and thus Catholic; on the other side they’re all half-timbered houses, and thus Lutheran. The divi­sion was so clear that they even referred to the local Jews as “Catholic Jews” and “Protes­tant Jews,” depend­ing on what side of town they lived in!

The other inter­est­ing tid­bit we learned is that this whole region is called the Ries, a sort of flat dip in the hilly land, caused by an enor­mous mete­orite that hit the earth about 15 mil­lion years ago. In Noerdlin­gen, where we’re headed next, there’s a museum about it, promi­nently fea­tur­ing a bit of moon­rock that some Amer­i­can astro­nauts brought to com­pare with frag­ments of mete­orite found in the earth here.