Bread for the Bell

by Franz Uri Boas, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The two letters arrived at the Kreis culture office in Minden in the same week of March, and both asked for the same thing: help in applying to have the Glockenbrot entered in the national inventory of intangible cultural heritage. The deadline for submissions to the Land was the last day of October. The letter from Rodenwiese, on the west bank of the Weser, was typed and signed by Heinrich Kollmeier, chairman of the Heimatverein, retired surveyor. The letter from Hollenbeck, on the east bank, was handwritten on the back of a bakery order form by Gisela Rahe, who had stamped it with the shop stamp because she had no other. Each letter called the custom the oldest thing its village possessed. Neither letter mentioned the other village.

The head of the office put both letters on Annika Tiemann's desk with a sticky note that said one dossier, not two, please. Annika had a doctorate in European ethnology from Göttingen and a contract that ran until the following June. She read the letters twice, then took a packet of index cards, white, unlined, ten by fifteen centimetres, from the supply cupboard, and signed for them.

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The custom was simple to describe, and everyone described it the same way at first. On the evening of the first high water of the winter, when the river came up over the lower meadows, a child threw a small round loaf into the Weser from the ferry landing, for the bell. The bell lay on the river bottom between the two villages. It had been a chapel bell. If it was not given bread it would ring under the water, and whoever heard it ringing would follow it in.

That was the version in both letters. Annika wrote it on a card and headed the card Summary — do not use. Then she drove out to Rodenwiese.

Heinrich Kollmeier received her in the front room of a red brick house a hundred metres from the dyke. On the table he had laid out a folder of photocopies, a hand-drawn map of the river at a scale of one to five thousand, and a plate of butter cake. He was seventy-nine and wore a cardigan buttoned to the top. Before she had taken her coat off he told her that the Hollenbeck people had no claim, because the chapel had stood on the west bank, and he could show her where.

"I would like to record you telling it," Annika said, "from the beginning, the way you heard it first. Then the chapel."

He told it for eleven minutes. She did not interrupt. The recorder sat between them on a folded handkerchief to stop it picking up the table.

In his version the chapel stood on a low rise called the Klusenkamp, which the river had taken in a flood. The Swedes had come in the great war, three hundred and some years ago, and the people of Rodenwiese had taken the bell down and sunk it in the river so that the soldiers could not melt it for cannon. They meant to raise it again when the soldiers had gone. But the man who knew the place died, of the plague or of the Swedes, and nobody could find it. On flood nights it rang to be found. The bread was so that it would be content to wait.

"Who threw the bread when you were a boy?"

"Children. Whoever was youngest in the house nearest the landing. One year my sister."

"Do you remember who told you the story?"

"My grandfather. On the dyke. He pointed at the place."

"And the bread? Was that your grandfather too?"

He considered. "The bread was always there," he said.

She wrote that down exactly.

Then he opened the folder. On top was a photocopy of four pages from a book called Sagen und Gebräuche aus dem Mindener Lande, collected by a pastor, Ludolf Wehking, and printed in 1889. Kollmeier had marked the passage in yellow. Von der versunkenen Glocke bei Rodenwiese. The bell, the Swedes, the sinking, the dead man who knew the place, the ringing in flood. Wehking had heard it, he wrote, from an old woman of the village, Witwe Brüning, then aged about eighty.

There was no bread in it.

Annika read it twice. Kollmeier watched her read.

"He left it out," he said. "A pastor. He would have thought it was superstition."

"Possibly," she said. "He put in the ringing."

"The ringing is a story. The bread is a practice. He was writing down stories."

It was not a stupid argument. She made a card for it.

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Over the following six weeks she filled forty-one cards. Each card held one element of the tale or the custom, and on each card she wrote, under the element, every person who had given it to her, with their age, their village, the date of recording, and the person from whom they said they had learned it. Where they could not say, she wrote cannot say. She did not write always.

The elements were: the bell; the chapel; the location of the chapel; the Swedes; the reason for sinking the bell; the man who knew the place; the ringing; the season of the ringing; the danger of hearing it; the loaf; the shape of the loaf; who threw it; from where it was thrown; when; and what was said, if anything, as it was thrown. Some of these divided further. The danger, for example, came in three forms: whoever heard the bell would drown within the year; whoever heard it would walk into the river that night; whoever heard it must not answer, and nothing would happen to them if they kept silent.

The third form she had only from Hollenbeck.

Gisela Rahe told it standing up, in the back of the bakery at four in the afternoon, between the proving cabinet and the flour sacks, with the radio on. She was sixty-two. She had learned the story from her mother, who had learned it from her mother, and so on, said Gisela, back to God. In Hollenbeck the bell had not been sunk to save it. It had been taken. The chapel had belonged to the ferry, which was older than either village; the priest of the chapel had once refused to bless the ferryman's drowned son because the son had been drinking on a Sunday, and that same night the river rose and took the chapel and the bell, and laid them on the bottom in the middle of the stream, where they belonged to neither bank. On flood nights the bell called. You did not answer. And you gave it bread, because the ferryman's son had been hungry.

"From which bank do you throw it?"

"From the ferry. Now that the ferry is laid up in winter, from our landing."

"And in Rodenwiese they throw it from theirs."

"They copy," said Gisela Rahe.

Annika recorded the oven timer going off and the radio announcing the traffic on the A2, because she did not like to stop the machine while someone was talking. Later, transcribing, she found that Gisela had said a word she had not caught at the time. The loaf, in Gisela's telling, at one point was not the Glockenbrot but dat Schtritzel. Gisela had corrected herself straight away.

Annika looked the word up. It was not Low German. She made a card for it with nothing on it but the word and a question mark.

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In the second half of May she went back to Rodenwiese to check two dates. Kollmeier offered to tell the story again for the recording, since the first time he had forgotten a detail. She let him. In the new telling, the loaf was thrown by a girl, the youngest in the house by the landing, and the girl said nothing as she threw it, because if you spoke the bell would answer.

Kollmeier had not said this in March. Gisela Rahe had said it in April, in answer to a question from Annika. Annika had then, in May, in Rodenwiese, before the recorder was on, asked Kollmeier whether anything was said when the bread was thrown.

She made a card. On it she wrote silence at the throwing — Rodenwiese, May — source: probably my question of 14 May. She put the card in the box with the others, not in a separate pile.

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The ferry no longer ran in winter, and had not run at all between 1971 and 1998, when the new bridge downstream had made it unprofitable and a volunteer society had brought it back for cyclists. It was a reaction ferry: a pontoon slung on a steel cable from a high wire across the river, angled into the current so that the water itself pushed it over. The ferry family, before the bridge, had been the Plögers. Both villages mentioned the Plögers, and both villages, when Annika asked whether any Plöger was still alive, said: the old woman, Hedwig, in the care home in Petershagen, but she is not from here.

Hedwig Plöger was ninety-two. She sat by the window of a room on the second floor with a blanket over her knees and a view of the car park. Her grandson, who drove a delivery van and had arranged the visit, stayed for the first ten minutes and then went to move his van.

Annika did not ask about the bell. She asked where Hedwig had been born.

In a village near Glatz, in Silesia, in 1934. Her father had been a miller. In the summer of 1946 the family had been put on a goods train with what they could carry, and in the autumn of that year they had been billeted on a farm in Hollenbeck, two rooms over the cow-house, mother, grandmother, Hedwig and her two little brothers. Her father did not come back from the war. The farmer's wife gave them potatoes and did not speak to them for a year. Hedwig was twelve.

"Was it a cold winter?"

Hedwig laughed. It was the first time. "You are too young," she said. "That winter the river froze. Before it froze it came up. Over everything."

"Do you remember the first time the water came up?"

She remembered. Her grandmother had baked that day, on the farmer's stove, with the farmer's flour, which she had been given in exchange for mending. A small loaf, plaited, the kind they had made at home at the mill for the water. At home, said Hedwig, you gave the mill-race a piece of bread when the water was high, so that the water would not take anyone. Her grandmother would not let the river at Hollenbeck go without. She sent Hedwig down to the ferry with it in the dark, because the grandmother's legs were bad.

"Why the ferry?"

"Because that was where the water was. And the ferryman had a lantern."

"Did you say anything when you threw it?"

"My grandmother said I must not speak. You do not speak to the water."

"And the ferryman?"

"Willi's father. He asked what I was doing. I could not answer him, could I? I had just been told." Hedwig looked out at the car park. "He thought I was simple. Then the next year he asked me again. Then the children wanted to do it. The children from that side and this side, on the ferry, all of them. Everybody's grandmother had something to say about it. One said it was for a bell. They have a bell over there, in the river, you know. The ones from over there said it was theirs, the ones from here said it was theirs." She shrugged under the blanket. "I married Willi in 1954. After that it was the ferry's."

"What did your grandmother call the loaf?"

"Striezel," said Hedwig. "A Striezel. They say Glockenbrot now." She said it exactly as Gisela Rahe had let it slip in the back of the bakery, with the same short vowel.

Annika asked if she might record Hedwig saying it again. Hedwig said it again, then said, "Is that what you came for? A word?"

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The dossier ran to nineteen pages. The form had a field headed Geographical origin and spread of the element, with room for a thousand characters. Annika used nine hundred and sixty.

She wrote that the legend of the sunk bell was attested at Rodenwiese in 1889 and was older than that, and that a variant in which the river took the bell was current at Hollenbeck and was not attested before living memory. She wrote that the practice of throwing bread was not attested in the 1889 collection, and that the earliest datable instance known to her was the first high water of the winter of 1946–47, at the Hollenbeck–Rodenwiese ferry, by a girl of twelve newly arrived from the county of Glatz, at the instruction of her grandmother, after a custom of the mills of that region. She wrote that the custom had been taken up within a few years by children of both banks, had attached itself to the existing legend of the bell, and had since been carried on in both villages as their own. She named both Heimatvereine as bearers. She named the Plöger family. She attached the recordings, the transcripts, the 1889 text, and a list of all forty-one cards with their sources, including the card that said source: probably my question of 14 May.

She sent drafts to Rodenwiese and to Hollenbeck on the same day by the same post.

Heinrich Kollmeier telephoned the next morning. He said that a twelve-year-old refugee girl could not have started a custom in two villages in a few years; that his grandfather had told him the story on the dyke; that the bread was always there. Annika asked him in what year his grandfather had died. He said 1958. She asked how old Heinrich had been on the dyke. He worked it out on the telephone. Ten, perhaps eleven. 1957, then. He was silent for a while. Then he said that the pastor had still left it out, and that he would like that put in the dossier too. She put it in.

Gisela Rahe did not telephone. In the second week of September she sent, on the back of a bakery order form, a list of corrections to the spelling of Hollenbeck names, and at the foot, in the same hand: Hedwig Plöger is from here.

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The first high water of the winter came in the last week of November. The ferry had been laid up on the Hollenbeck side since the end of October, and the pontoon lay against its moorings with the cable slack on the high wire above it. The water was over the lower meadows by four in the afternoon and over the road to the landing by six. The two Heimatvereine had agreed by letter, through the Kreis office, to hold it on the Hollenbeck landing this year and the Rodenwiese landing the next. Neither letter had been friendly.

About forty people came. Annika stood at the back with the recorder in her coat pocket, switched off. The grandson had brought Hedwig Plöger in a wheelchair, wrapped in two blankets, and parked her at the edge of the floodlight. Kollmeier stood with the Rodenwiese people on the dyke side, Gisela Rahe with the Hollenbeck people by the ferry hut. The loaf was a plaited one this year. Gisela had baked it.

The child was a girl of seven from Rodenwiese, whose grandmother lived in Hollenbeck. Nobody had to tell her to keep quiet. She walked down to the edge of the water in her boots with the loaf held in both hands, and stopped, and looked back at the wheelchair.

Hedwig Plöger lifted one hand from the blanket an inch and put it down again.

The girl threw. The loaf went out further than anyone expected, into the dark beyond the floodlight, and came up again on the brown water, and the current took it and turned it twice, and carried it away downstream between the two banks, towards the bridge.

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Franz Uri Boas, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem undecimum Kalendās Novembrēs (22 October 2026), ā Francīscō Boasiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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