Heinrich Kipper
Translation by Google, Needs Editing
From:150 Jahre schwäbische Kolonisten in der Bucovina 1787-1937
25. und 26. September 1937
Reprinted by Deutsche Zeitungsgenossenschaft, Czernowitz (Stuttgart: Raimund Friedrich Kaindl Gesellschaft e V., 1987): 17-21.
Originally posted on June 24, 2006
Posted in English on March 12, 2021
Since the reunification of the Reich and because of the not always friendly treatment by its host peoples, German abroad has placed more emphasis than usual on maintaining German customs, the dialect and the old folk costumes. The more pressure the German experiences from outside, the more he glows inside for his high goals, the more he stirs, armies and defends himself. The German people owe their toughness and strength not to their friends or to their enemies.
Since I have no literature or any other scientific resources available to me, I can only write what I have observed and experienced myself.
The now living Bucovin Swabians, from whom I am spatially separated, are said to have strayed a long way from our national costumes. This is also confirmed by the photographs in the book “Deutsch-Illischestie in Bilder in the year 1931” published by Hans Dreßler. In the whole album I find saying and writing in all group pictures – two, which increase to three with the half-length portrait of the guild master Franz Sauer, who died in 1930 at the age of 81. I cannot help but mention the Swabians who still remained Swabian in their clothes in Dreßler’s book – two compatriots here as role models. The first is called Fritz Ast from – Braschka not from Illischestie, the second Johann Hartmann, who is the only one who saves the “traditional honor” of the Illischestier in Dreßler’s beautiful album.
Therefore, if I want to describe a characteristic costume of the Bucovin Swabians – as in Illischestie the conditions in Itzkany, Fratautz, Tereblestie, Rosch and in the other Swabian communities – I have to go back a few decades.
Neither our costume of today nor that of twenty or more years ago is really typical. Because what we call Swabian or German costume also came to us from France. Our ancestors, who left the German mother country 150 years ago, still wore German clothes, and they kept this costume until the middle of the last century. Bright and bright colors and household products predominate in clothing. The costume is likely to have been very similar to that of the Transylvanian Saxons that is still preserved today. When he was a boy, my father still knew and probably wore the woolen or cotton Spenzer. Since our, the Swabian, original costume has gone under and we all, farmers and townspeople, no longer dress in German but in French, we fight only for the retention of the traditional, but even more against the luxury and the over-refinement in the costume and also in other ways in our way of life, which prove to be the stranglehold of the German peasantry. To impoverish the peasant, to impoverish a people, to ruin the peasant, is to extinguish a people.
Until the end of the World War, the French influence in Swabia mainly only affected the male costume. The women, namely the Swabian peasant women, have defied the Welschen fashion impact for almost a hundred years longer. The clothes of the Swabian peasant girls according to the Paris fashion journal, as shown by Hans Dreßler, begin with all their exaggerations and excesses only after the war.
And yet the costumes of our mothers and grandmothers are not dead yet. Most of the old costumes have been preserved for the working day, in the poorer class and in the more remote Swabian settlements. And what has really been revealed lives in our memories and in the images of our ancestors and awaits resuscitation.
The house and body linen is hand-spun and sewn in-house and woven by the village weaver. Only the duchent and upholstery are covered with purchased, different colored Gradel. It was only in the seventies of the last century that skilful girls’ hands quilted seams and folds on the shirt front for the groom from Oxford linen. My mother met that particularly well and was therefore not a little envied by her numerous sisters-in-law and bases. The Swabian woman wears her head carefully tied up in summer and winter, the scarf around her neck in winter, and knotted under her chin from thin fabric in summer. Barely, she would feel half-naked – in contrast to her granddaughters, who are only dressed when they are not wearing anything. The upper body is enveloped by the “Jankelche”, two sewn together, Leaves cut out of blueprint at the neck and sleeves. The calico skirt is many yards wide, therefore very rich in folds, and it is a sign of wealth and refinement to wear several skirts on top of one another. On Sunday the virgin still wears a stiff white petticoat, edged with self-crocheted lace. The apron belongs to the work suit as well as to the festive suit and is bright, colorful and light for the girls, for the women it is heavy and gloomy. The Swabian only wears self-knitted stockings, at the time laces, later shoes with elastic bands – preferably “to change”, ie built according to the same last for both feet. The heels are not as slim as those of the Illischestier Parisian, but not a little lower and the shoes may be even tighter. My mother took the corns from her girlhood with her to the grave in the 80th year of her life. The tied, heavy “polka” made of brown fabric is a winter outer garment of foreign, as the name suggests, of Polish origin. When the girls walked through the Zwölfergasse to “the church” on Sunday with faked (“pistoned”) white clothes, lace handkerchiefs or shawls around their blond heads, flowers and a triangularly folded, large snuff in the hymn book, the judge pushed her curd strudel in the pipe and hurried to the window and the Sauer-Hansel with his beautiful nags at the fountain searched through a “Hoh, Elfitafi!” or to make it noticeable by a click. “Nothing about the Bawiche be red cheek” he thought and turned the fountain wheel with one hand so quickly and so easily,
As far as I can remember, the wedding dress, veil and myrtle wreath are no different for the Bucovine Swabians than in the city. Dreßler’s album does not tell whether the daughter of the curator or the judge is already having a train carried today.
The double-breasted waistcoat, “the bodice”, closed at the top, is characteristic of men’s clothing. The skirt and winter skirt are also double-breasted. My grandfather only wore “German” boots with two side seams on the tubes, which he “opened” every day. We younger people have already worn the “Polish” pleated boots, later the “Hungarian” sliding boots with stiff tubes and a single seam. I have often seen felt boots in old people who are sensitive to the cold. The “Stiewelknecht” (boot puller) and the sticks were missing in his house. “Mei Knieling-Jochann-Vetter” was able to sit for hours in front of the mirror to put on the black scarf and bring out the “sixty-six” with the Strähl. “Struwlicher Hoor” as with us “Gstudierte” would have exempted like a greasy boy’s cheek. Pork lard helped older people, and Hannadam, who wanted to please Gerbers Bertha, smoothed his “Bersch” with rose oil.
Only the pastor, the teacher and the gendarmerie guard had suspenders in the whole village. Because the trouser strap is a sign of masculinity here in Swabia, we boys “definitely” took off our suspenders in fourth grade.
The brown winter skirt is bordered with black, silky-shiny bands. When he was younger, my father wore red fur that was not covered with fabric. This Swabian piece of clothing was supplied by wandering furriers from the Hungarian Slovakia. Until the 1980s there was no German furrier in Illischestie. The first was my former schoolmate Josef Ast from Erlengasse, his teacher was his brother-in-law Hriwniak, a Protestant Slovak who had married a Swabian woman and who became down-to-earth with us. Hriwniak had finished four middle school classes in his home country and was fluent in written and spoken German, so that he later left skinning to his brother-in-law and accepted the vacant position of community secretary. The Swabian fur caps,
Much could be said about the Swabian folk costumes when dealing with folk customs. Far ahead of us Swabians are the Transylvanian Saxons who immigrated 800 years ago, because they still cling to their old, species-appropriate folk costumes, which often have not even been preserved in their original German homeland. The same is true of the Germans in the Zips. But the Swabians have not succumbed to the fashion devil everywhere either. Every year they organize their Swabian Ball in Hungary, which is also a wonderful costume show. Last summer, the Swabians held a large costume festival in the southern Slavic Banat and in the Baschka in the municipality of Hodschag. In addition to the costumes, one could admire the performed German folk dances, round dance, folk music and folk songs. One saw processional girls in traditional costumes, wedding groups, boys with ribbons and decorated hats. Girls with self-embroidered, valuable bonnets, delicious handicrafts, hairdresses, etc. Wherever there is such precious German folk good, it should be cared for, animated and expanded by the people’s appointed leaders and teachers and recommended to other people, including the townspeople, for imitation. The beautiful traditional costumes of the Austrian mountain dwellers, the Styrians, the Upper Austrians, the Salzburgers etc. are copied by the townspeople. Even the furnishing of the farmhouse parlor is very common in apartments and restaurants in the big city. The leading Germans, who know and understand what it is about, should also advocate that in our housing culture, Art and costume become popular again. These are not “folk fantasies and quirks of national zealots”, but exhortations from those who know and see to a severely tested people, to bring everything popular, plain and true, namely really German, back up and to honor for our salvation and healing; Also no trifles and trivialities, but dividing coins, which together make up the gold thaler, valuable parts of the whole and large, manifestations of our German nature. Our German soul changes with the foreign language, traditional costumes and art. That is why we want to reflect on ourselves in these matters too. We have to recover from the German core and essence before we release it to the rest of the world to want to get well from it. These are not “folk fantasies and quirks of national zealots”, but exhortations from those who know and see to a severely tested people, to bring everything popular, plain and true, namely really German, back up and to honor for our salvation and healing; Also no trifles and trivialities, but dividing coins, which together make up the gold thaler, valuable parts of the whole and large, manifestations of our German nature. Our German soul changes with the foreign language, traditional costumes and art. That is why we want to reflect on ourselves in these matters too. We have to recover from the German core and essence before we release it to the rest of the world to want to get well from it. These are not “folk fantasies and quirks of national zealots”, but exhortations from those who know and see to a severely tested people, to bring everything popular, plain and true, namely really German, back up and to honor for our salvation and healing; Also no trifles and trivialities, but dividing coins, which together make up the gold thaler, valuable parts of the whole and large, manifestations of our German nature. Our German soul changes with the foreign language, traditional costumes and art. That is why we want to reflect on ourselves in these matters too. We have to recover from the German core and essence before we release it to the rest of the world to want to get well from it. for our salvation and healing, everything that is popular, simple, true, namely really German, to be brought up again and to honor; Also no trifles and trivialities, but dividing coins, which together make up the gold thaler, valuable parts of the whole and large, manifestations of our German nature. Our German soul changes with the foreign language, traditional costumes and art. That is why we want to reflect on ourselves in these matters too. We have to recover from the German core and essence before we release it to the rest of the world to want to get well from it. for our salvation and healing, everything that is popular, simple, true, namely really German, to be brought up again and to honor; Also no trifles and trivialities, but dividing coins, which together make up the gold thaler, valuable parts of the whole and large, manifestations of our German nature. Our German soul changes with the foreign language, traditional costumes and art. That is why we want to reflect on ourselves in these matters too. We have to recover from the German core and essence before we release it to the rest of the world to want to get well from it. valuable parts of the whole, manifestations of our German nature. Our German soul changes with the foreign language, traditional costumes and art. That is why we want to reflect on ourselves in these matters too. We have to recover from the German core and essence before we release it to the rest of the world to want to get well from it. valuable parts of the whole, manifestations of our German nature. Our German soul changes with the foreign language, traditional costumes and art. That is why we want to reflect on ourselves in these matters too. We have to recover from the German core and essence before we release it to the rest of the world to want to get well from it.