The Cobbler's Coup d'etat or the "Schuster-Putsch"

In 1949, I lived in a village on the extreme eastern edge of what was then called West Germany, in the Rhoen Mountains. It was a dead-end place within walking distance of the “Iron Curtain”, the divide between east and west. This was a fortified border with minefields, machine gun emplacements and armed watchtowers, manned by East German guards with shoot-to-kill orders should anyone try to get too close to the barbed wire. Gunfire from that border was a common, nightly occurrence. It was aimed at desperate people trying to escape to the West. Some made it across, most didn’t. We got used to it. It was like background traffic noises.

About a mile and half east, along the main road out of our village toward the boundary line, lay the little hamlet of Maierhof. The frontier ran along the edge of the fields surrounding this place. A Meier in medieval times was an estate manager or leaseholder, Hof means farmstead. This hamlet belonged to a baron, for whom my father worked as a forest manager. The main buildings of this place used to be part of a fortified farm, one of three this titled gentleman owned. There were no stores of any kind in Maierhof, no pub, only the farm, a smithy, a barbershop and a cobbler’s workshop. The rest of the inhabitants were pensioners, peasants and day laborers, who mostly worked for my father as loggers and handymen. The farm was run by a German refugee, who’d been kicked out of the ethnic German region of the Banat in Romania in 1945.

The barbershop was the main draw in this hamlet. The barber’s name was Willi Albus. He was not a real licensed barber, but had learned his trade in the army and his haircuts showed it, but he had a monopoly. There were no other barbers around. His shop was open only on Saturdays. Herr Albus was on the road Monday to Friday plying his other trade - black marketeering and smuggling. He was a veteran of the recent war and had rescued a German army motorcycle with sidecar, which he used on his scavenger hunts, as he called them. Herr Albus had great organizational skills. He was a man who could get you pretty much anything your heart desired, if you had the cash or something worthwhile to barter.

Once a month, early on a Saturday morning, my father and I would trek to Maierhof to visit the barber. In those days a haircut cost the equivalent of two bits and a brick of coal to help heat the shop. I liked going to the barber, because it was gossip central, even though the haircuts were pretty much below par. Anything and everything that went on in the surrounding villages was discussed in depth. My father usually went under the scissors and hand-held clippers first and then he would visit Albus Sr., who worked for him as a foreman on one of my father’s logging crews.

Once my father was out of the room and I had been sworn to total silence about what was about to be revealed – the villagers feared my father and didn’t want him to know what went on after his departure -, the conversation in the barbershop switched to sex and the barber would open the top drawer in his desk and pass around the latest sex magazines and pictures he had picked up in his weekly travels and he’d let everyone look at – never touch – his collection of “Parisers,” French condoms, which were his pride and joy. He had them in all colors of the rainbow, with and without warts and protuberances, made from vulcanized rubber or sheep gut. We were fascinated. We couldn’t think of anyone who’d possibly use these things. “Nur die Franzosen” - “only the French,” was the common conclusion. They were much too exotic for our remote neck of the woods. It was sort of a glimpse at a totally foreign and forbidden outside world about which we knew next to nothing. Obviously, we were rubes.

These Saturday mornings were for men and boys only. Women were not allowed and when someone’s wife, mother or girlfriend had the audacity to knock on the door and demand entry or, God forbid, barged in unannounced, the barber would tell her in no uncertain terms to leave “our sanctum” at once and get lost. As odd as this may seem today, his rule prevailed. There was no bra-burning in front of the barbershop, no outraged women waving placards or throwing eggs.

On one of those Saturday mornings in the fall of that year, a man named Alfred Bittermann, who lived next door to Herr Albus’ hair-cutting emporium, was part of the barbershop crowd. He was a cobbler and a bitter old man and a bit of a drunk. He was bitter, because until the end of the war he had been the local Nazi party boss in Maierhof. He had been important and he’d got to wear a fancy brown uniform with its swastika armband and he’d had an official title and he could tell people what to do. He told the barber that he was disgusted with his French trash, “Franzosendreck”, he called it, and that in Adolf’s time smut like that would have been burned in the village square and the purveyors of such un-German vulgarities would have been shipped to the Eastern Front forthwith or to the nearest “KZ” (concentration camp) for re-education. Everyone laughed and ignored him.

You may not know this, but titles and uniforms are big in Germany, always were and probably always will be. To give you an idea of how absurd things are over there when it comes to titles, consider this: I have a friend who was a colonel in the Bundeswehr, the new Germany army. His wife, who was not in the army, was and is addressed as Frau Oberst, Mrs. Colonel. If you have a PhD in, say, botany, you are addressed as Herr Doktor and your spouse is Frau Doktor. If you were a department head in your business or with the local government, you were the Herr Direktor and, of course, your wife was the Frau Direktor. It’s that Prussian thing about one’s place on the social ladder and the need to let everyone know that you are better than the next guy.

Now Herr Bittermann was a nobody. His lofty position, his fancy uniform and his fear-inspiring title were gone. To compensate for this loss of status and change in fortune, he’d turned to booze to drown his disappointments and sorrows. He was a tiny man. If he topped five feet he was tall and I doubt that he broke 100 pounds. He also had the disgusting habit of taking snuff up his nose. He didn’t believe in using a handkerchief in purging his schnozz, but used his fingers to empty both nostrils at the same time in a noisy explosion of snot into the coal bucket by the stove. This created a bit of awkwardness, because no one wanted to volunteer to root around in that bucket to feed coal into the stove to keep the place warm. It took an order from the barber, who, of course, was the boss of his little empire there, for someone to gingerly fish a lump of coal out of the bucket and into the stove. Nevertheless, Herr Bittermann was a very good shoemaker. Every year around Christmas, as long as I can remember, my father had him cobble a new pair of boots for him.

Anyway, Herr Bittermann and his son Christof, who was a couple of years older than I, were both into their cups already that Saturday morning. You’re probably wondering how an under-aged teenager could be drunk in public. That was nothing special. In those days there was no minimum drinking age. If you had the cash and were tall enough to reach the counter, you could buy beer in any pub, no questions asked. It’s probably still that way.

The elder Bittermann announced to the assembled patrons that he had enough of this new government in Germany and that he, Alfred Bittermann, former “Ortsleiter” (village leader) of Maierhof, was going to do something about this deplorable situation. He was going to lead a “Staatsstreich,” a coup d’état, against the incompetents who were running things these days to restore the proper order to things “wie zu Adolf’s Zeiten” - as during Adolf’s time. The men laughed at him and told him he was a drunken fool and to go sober up somewhere. This really infuriated the would-be putschist. He staggered to his feet and told one and all: “You are all traitors and should be shot out of hand,” he yelled, as he made for the door. “Tomorrow is the day of reckoning. You watch me.” We laughed and thought no more of it.

Maierhof’s main connection to the outside world was the bus line, operated by the Postal Service, like all bus lines at that time in Germany. The bus stopped twice a day in Maierhof, at 8:00 in the morning and at 6:30 in the evening. The way I heard it, the next morning, a Sunday, Herr Bittermann, dressed in the full Nazi regalia of his former position and armed with a handgun, hijacked the bus, attached a large swastika flag to the front of it and forced the driver, who didn’t know whether he should laugh or be afraid, to drive the bus back and forth through the village and the surrounding farm country along the border. Herr Bittermann, waving his pistol wildly in the air and taking long pulls from a schnapps bottle, exhorted passengers and the gaping villagers and border guards to take up arms and follow him to the county seat to topple the enemies of the people who were running things into the ground these days. He was going to restore proper order in the Reich. Not surprisingly, no one took up his call to arms. No one followed him. Maybe he should have brought a megaphone to spread his message.

The East German VoPos (People’s Police) on the other side of the border didn’t know what to make of this farce and thought it best to get prepared for an attack. Maybe they saw the threat as real. In any case, they set up machine gun and mortar emplacements and their officers were running back and forth yelling out orders. Some among the onlookers on our side got nervous and there was talk of getting their guns out of hiding and prepare for combat. Most farmers in those days had military hardware stashed in their hay piles. I knew one, who had a functioning “Tiger” tank hidden under his hay in his barn. People were looking for our border police. But, of course, there were no border guards on our side of the line. No one was trying to escape to the East, so there was no need for guards. After a while, when the VoPos didn’t see anyone else armed on our side, calm was restored in their ranks and they started digging foxholes and watched the drama play out. Peace prevailed.

In any case, after about an hour of this, the schnapps got the better of him and Herr Bittermann ingloriously passed out in the front of the bus. A gendarme – that’s what the rural policemen were called -, who’d at last made an appearance on his bicycle and had been pedaling in pursuit the bus, disarmed him and tried to arrest him. But how do you arrest a passed-out drunk, if all you’ve got is a bicycle for transport? This cop had obviously been in similar situations before. He got some bystanders to help him lift the unconscious and sagging would-be putschist onto the handlebars of his bike facing backwards, then got on himself, placed the drunk’s head and arms over his shoulders and started zigzagging down the road to the police station in the valley. When last seen, the former Ortsleiter Bittermann was draped over the policeman, with his head and arms dangling over the constable’s back, disappearing down the road.

Nothing much came of the “Schuster-Putsch”, as the local paper called it. After a couple of days, the court released Herr Bittermann from the county jail due to his age and booze-related problems, but without his uniform and shooting iron, which pissed him off to no end. He became known as the “Putschist” and a minor celebrity in Maierhof and surrounding towns and villages. His new found notoriety helped his cobbling business pick up too.