Niederwiesa

You'll notice there's a day missing. I was sick. Like wiped out, unable to get out of bed sick. So sick we missed our concert at the Frauenkirche, so no Bach live in Germany for me. No idea what it was, but it was a complete and epic crash, that I was almost fully recovered from the next day.

Good thing too, because we picked up a car in Dresden and headed south for the hills. Literally, because we were going to the Erzgebirge, the Ore Mountains. We set off a bit after eight, into a mixture of fog and snow. As we got out of Dresden, the roads got narrower, the center lane disappeared, and we started to see some snow flakes mixed in with the rain.

Originally, we were only going to take a day trip down to the town of Seiffen, then go one town over to Olbernau, the place my grandmother was born in 1903. The trip expanded. The more I read about the region, and passed on the Steve, the more we wanted to see. For one thing, the Erzgebirge is considered by many to be the source of many modern German Christmas traditions, and is really popular with Germans who want to experience "authentic" and "traditional" Christmas markets. So the visit down here was a no-brainer for us.

First stop, Grünhainchen, a village known as the home of Wendt und Kühn, the company who produced and popularized the Elfpunkt Engel: little wooden angels with eleven dots on their wings. The company was founded in 1915, by a local woman named Grete Wendt after returning from her studies at the Royal Saxon School of Applied Arts in Dresden, and her friend Margarethe Kühn. It became famous for a playful, childlike take on the local Erzgebirge traditional woodcarving traditions. W and K survived World War II by making models for officer training, was back in limited business after the war, and managed to avoid nationalization by the DDR until 1972, when the Wendt family was for all intents and purpose forced out. The family regained control of the company after Reunification, and today it's run by a third generation of the Wendt family.

We couldn't tour the factory, but did watch all the videos showing how the figures are made. We did get to watch them being painted in the shop though. Once we fought our way through the hordes of Germans from the multiple bus tours that had disgorged them just ahead of our arrival, that is.
The figures are adorable, and they do all sorts of things: the eleven-dot angels, more elaborate angels, Easter things, and various seasonal child figures. They're also still all made by hand, painted individually so therefore expensive. The same basic angel figure, say one playing a trumpet, can vary in price by ten or more Euros based on the paint job.

Interesting place, but it would have been better to visit in the off season, which apparently is September through early November.Read more