Mühlacker

Mühlacker is the home town of the Amos family, where my paternal grandfather comes from. My paternal grandmother came from the nearby town of Dürrmenz. As you can see there are still Amoses living there today, in the very house that my grandfather grew up in (although the house has been greatly expanded over the years). Being a rather small town, most people know one another. This was brought home when we arrived at our hotel, the Scharfes Eck (Sharp Corner), and the proprietor, Mr. Frommherz, came out and helped us with our bags. When I told him our names, he asked if we were relatives of Peter Amos, who lives here and is pictured below. I said that we were, and he mentioned that Peter was a rather good soccer player!

$Mühlacker Library\Museum$ Mühlacker Library\Museum	our painting	early 1900s front view	front view today
early 1900s side view	side view today	Peter, Ursel, Martin, & Doris	the family early 1900s
great-great-grandfather	great-great-grandmother	Great Uncle Gustav	WW2 era photo
Mühlacker Library	Roman League Stone	League Stone translation	cool banner
for the kids	Mühlacker Museum	Museum plaque	funny statue
Mühlacker Library	1850 proverb	Mom by our hotel	bottle over Dad's head
1950s visit	two "Amos"es	group photo	one last farewell

I learned a few interesting things about local dialect here as well. As much as I enjoyed talking with my relatives, my normal difficulties with lack of German fluency were compounded by the Swabian dialect some of them had. As I mentioned on my Hamburg page, in school one always learns to speak Hoch Deutsch (High German). This is like learning "the King's English". As I tried to talk at one point Aunt Doris smiled and said exactly the same thing my paternal Grandmother said to me the first time I tried to say a few German phrases to her back when I was in middle school -- "Er sprichst Hoch Deutsch!" (He's speaking High German!)

One of the things one learns in German is the diminutive ending, "-chen". Adding this on the end of a word makes it "small", like the Ampelmännchen I saw in Berlin. They are not Ampelmänner (Walking Men), but Ampelmännchen (Little Walking Men). Readers familiar with Japanese will note this is similar to the effect of the Japanese suffix "-chan". But in the Swabian dialect they say something different. Here they add "-le" on the end of words. It took me time to understand why they were calling my Dad "Onkel Mäxle" (Uncle Little Max). Since my dad is Max, Jr., and his father was Max, Sr., my grandfather would have been "Onkel Max", and my father got the diminutive because he was a Junior. Seems obvious now but I didn't understand it at first, and I had never heard this -le ending used before in any of my classes. I think it's interesting learning about how people really speak a language beyond just what you learn in school.