​

"Cuckoo, cuckoo" calls from the clock.

 

The cuckoo clock is the symbol of the Black Forest par excellence. The wall clock in the shape of a little house, from which a cuckoo peeps out through a flap and proclaims the hour, is known all over the world and a popular souvenir for tourists to Germany from other countries.

 

It is believed that a first form of the Black Forest cuckoo clock was created around 1738 in the workshop of Franz Anton Ketterer, a clock-maker from Schönwald. Possibly, however, the idea goes back to Ketterer's father. Michael Dilger from Neukirch and Matthäus Hummel are also said to have built cuckoo clocks in the Black Forest as early as 1742. Of Friedrich Dilger, at least, it is known that he deepened his knowledge of clockmaking in France in 1712.

 

Whether the concept of a clock with a bird call originally came from the Black Forest can no longer be determined with certainty. It is said that the Elector Johann Georg I of Saxony already had a clock with a cuckoo call in his collection anno 1619. There is also an artistically decorated clock with a crowing rooster in the Strasbourg Cathedral. This might have been an inspiration for the cuckoo clock.

 

At the time of the clock-makers Ketterer, Dilger and Hummel, the cuckoo clock did not look like it does today. It was initially a wooden clock with a cuckoo call in the form of two small organ pipes. The external design of the cuckoo clock, which is known all over the world and is common today, is the result of an initiative of Robert Gerwig. From 1850 to 1857, the ingenious designer of the Black Forest and Höllental Railways was the first director of the Duke of Baden's Clock-making School in Furtwangen, which had been founded in 1850 specifically for the needs of small clock-makers in order to provide a counterweight to the increasingly industrial mass production of clocks. In a kind of competition, Gerwig searched for designs for new, contemporary clock models and the result was the so-called "Bahnhäusleuhr" ("railroad cottage clock"), whose main characteristic is the sloping roof. Designed by Friedrich Eisenlohr, it is essentially modeled on a railroad guard's cottage, which was something very modern at the time.

 

Over the years, various workshops added all sorts of ornaments and sometimes elaborate carvings to this basic concept, so that the cuckoo clock is always individually designed, despite its railroad cottage shape. There are even versions that, in addition to the cuckoo, have more figures that move or indicate the quarter hours by call.

 

Most cuckoo clocks are quite small, only one is very huge. It is located in Triberg and is over fifteen meters high. Its movement weighs close to six tons, but the greatest thing is that you can enter its interior. Isn't that great? It's like a look-through puzzle, only big.