How the Rosengaertchen in Oberursel got its Name

When we still got letters by regular post, friends sometimes commented on the beautiful street name: Im Rosengärtchen (lit: In the Little Rose Garden).

If they did come for a visit, they were a bit surprised to see this high-rise settlement. Well, we do have some roses climbing up on the side of our building.

I started asking around who might have been in charge to name a big part of this area ‘Im Rosengärtchen’.

Our local historian, Manfred Kopp, had the answer:

In the 16th century, the ‘register of arable land’ had named this area ‘In the Rose Garden’.

In 1972 (at the time of construction), the diminutive form was added, hence ‘In the Little Rose Garden’.

The Woman on the German 50 Pfennig Coin is from Oberursel

In 2002, Germany, along with some other countries, changed over to the euro currency. Before that we had our Deutsche Mark (DM) and Pfennig for cents.

The woman, depicted on the 50 Pfennig coin, is from Oberursel. Her name is Gerda Jo Werner, and this is her story.

Gerda was a painter and a long-time art teacher at the local Volkshochschule (VHS)*. She was married to the sculptor Richard Martin Werner, who soon passed away in 1949, right at the time when the first German money for the Federal Republic was coined.

The ‘Bank Deutscher Länder’ association invited artists to submit designs for the new coins. The new designs should include images of Germany’s reconstruction after WWII.

In 1948, the local painter and sculptor Richard Martin Werner submitted a design showing a young woman planting an oak tree. This was to symbolize a new beginning; the change from the ruins of war to a new life full of hopes in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The young woman depicted in his design was his wife, Gerda. Werner’s design was chosen over seven other entries from well-known artists.

On 14 Feb 1949, the first 50 Pfennig coins came into circulation. The coin was viewed as the most beautiful German coin at the time, and being unusual for the only one showing a woman.

The artist was also famous for some other works, one of them the ‘Die Läuferin am Start’ (The runner at the Start Line), a plastic sculpture for the Olympic Games in 1936, for which he received a bronze medal in the arts.

When he died in 1949, he missed out on the triumph of his coin design. By the end of the DM/Pfennig era in 2001, more than 2 billion coins had been in circulation.

The 50 Pfennig woman on the coin, a local resident, died at the age of almost 90 years in Oberursel in August 2004.

I did not know about her – until she died.

50 Pfennig coin (Deutsch Mark)

* adult education center

Tüünlüüd or Street Names in Germany

In Maasholm at the Baltic See, we found this rather unusual street name, Tüünlüüd.

Tüün derives from the plural of Zaun/Zäune (fence) and lüüd are Leute (people), which means people looking over the fence.

Tüünlüüd

Seeing four Umlauts in one word made me think of the book Take me to your Umlauts by David Bergmann.

The Moron Hotel on Mallorca

If you are highly intelligent, work for a think tank in the Washington, D.C. area, and you are looking for a different type of holiday, there is just the hotel for you.

Hotel Moron, Cap Ratjada

Hotel Moron, a three-star hotel in Cap Ratjada, Mallorca.

It might be safe to assume this hotel is mostly frequented by Germans, because… the word moron has no meaning in German.

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