Border hops to Bavaria

I arrived in Bad Wörishofen on 14^th October, a date that by sheer coincidence would have been Katherine Mansfield’s birthday.  Albeit, she would have been 146 years old – a feat nothing short of miraculous.

Mansfield was born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1888.  It was in Bad Wörishofen in Bavaria that she penned some of her formative and most acclaimed work, but we’ll come back to that.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of living in Switzerland is the ease with which one can border hop into a neighbouring country and discover both another culture and some often-odd history.  

Zip around the tip of Lake Bodensee, dash through Austria, continue into Germany, and provided the trains are running on time (good luck with that), you will arrive in Bad Wörishofen.  Its fame is partly due to a chap called Pastor Sebastian Kneipp. His hydrotherapy treatments drew in vast numbers of the afflicted during the latter part of the 19^th century.  They’re still coming, well not the same people obviously, but tourists and ailment-ridden members of society who hope to gain better health and recapture their youthful looks.  Kneipp’s ideas were and still are rather brilliant, so were his incredibly long and bushy eye-brows.  In fact, I wonder if some people came just to see them and take measurements!

On arrival in Bad Wörishofen, you cannot help but notice the ageing population and lack of children.  This does make the town’s sensational selection of excellent restaurants a tad quieter.  Well, that was the case before we arrived with our three year old.

You will note that the town’s gentlemen mostly drive expensive sports cars and, in typical octogenarian fashion, reach terrifying speeds of 15km per hour.  The elderly ladies, in contrast, slowly and cautiously manoeuvre through the streets, clutching zimmer frames.  I believe there’s a race at 2pm daily, though the starter pistol has been banned!

We’d travelled to the town to visit ‘Grossmutti’, who had recently turned 100.  This almost made us local.  We would have achieved this accolade had we refrained from speaking English and Swiss-German.  I kept slipping up with the Swiss, ‘Guete Morge’ and ‘Merci’ instead of the German, ‘Guten Morgen’ and ‘Danke’.  

The town boasts a fine selection of very impressive hotels, inexpensive restaurants, stunning parks and walkways and just a few kilometres away an enormous spa centre known as the ‘Therma’.  

The local Bavarian beer in the region is famous and plentiful, but don’t skip the wine.  On several occasions ‘Spätburgunder’, think Pinot Noir, fell into my glass, and then needed a quick refill.  Remember to take a few bottles home.  It’s easy to see why this type of wine is so popular in Germany.

Enough about the highlights of Bad Wörishofen, let’s get back to Katherine Mansfield, whose characterisations were quite often based on real people.  Her book, ‘In a German Pension’, set in Bad Wörishofen, contains some fascinating characters, many of whom carry you back in time to a very different Bavaria, where behaviour was determined by class and gender.  Mansfield wasn’t perturbed by either.  Her marriage to George Bowden lasted one evening and apparently, was not consummated.   She was pregnant, courtesy of a chap named Garnet Trowell.  Later, she wrote passionately about her female partners.  Now, before you conclude that there’s enough here for a film script – wait! – there’s more.

In 1909, Mansfield’s mother dragged her to Bad Wörishofen.  Following a miscarriage, Mansfield set out on a quest to write and my goodness she succeeded.  Despite labelling her German-inspired collection of stories ‘immature’ – her work, ‘In a German Pension’ remains both a shocking and yet persistently amusing piece of literature.

In 1917, at the age of 29, Mansfield was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis.  

By 1921, she had moved to Switzerland, where she wrote more wonderful pieces including, ‘At the Bay’ and ‘The Garden Party’.  Her short life of just 34 years embraced a tumultuous journey of exceptional creativity. Her work has been translated into 25 languages.

Now – back to the film idea.  We’re too late.  Vanessa Redgrave played her in the BBC mini-series, ‘A Picture of Katherine Mansfield’, and Jane Birkin portrayed her in the film, ‘Leave all Fair’.  Perhaps it’s time for a remake!  Can I please play Herr Doctor?  I’ll take payment in Spätburgunder.

Bad Wörishofen – Rating: 9/10 for a 3 to 4-day visit.  Definitely visit the Therme.

SwissMeUp Top Tips: 

Here’s a Pinot Noir from Adank Fläsch for just CHF24.

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