Get Your Gander Up in Backnang

 

Last month I mentioned Backnang’s Goose Market, a festive Sunday of shopping in October. Unlike in the UK, German retailers are normally closed on Sundays with the result that downtown districts are quite sleepy. The Sunday Goose Market, by contrast, provides a revenue boost for local stores while creating an effective advertising venue for associations and injecting life into the city center. In preparation, hand-painted, wooden geese take roost along main thoroughfares, and the market itself features live geese at the base of Backnang’s iconic Goose War fountain.

An image of a smugly smirking peasant girl with geese around her billowing skirt, the fountain honors peasant women who staged a revolt in the 17^th century. Historically, goose keeping was a beloved means of topping off domestic coffers for those who could not afford a cow or a goat. And who could blame them? Geese were, after all, generous animals who provided meat for the kitchen, quills for pens, feathers for fletches, down for bedding and wings for brooms.  

There was a catch, however, as the birds roamed free, and, in their search for tasty morsels, they ravished gardens and fields along the river. Farmers with damaged crops complained bitterly to town authorities who, in an effort to keep the peace, told the women of Backnang in 1606 that their goosing days were over.

Their dander up, the women rebelled by penning an emotional petition to the Duke of Wuertemberg in Stuttgart. Sympathizing with their plight, he insisted on compromise but expressed himself so ambivalently that the conflict escalated with the mayor slandering the “recalcitrant and stubborn womenfolk” and even clapping their ringleader in jail.

Alerted by desperate husbands, the duke put an end to the flying feathers in 1612 by issuing the Backnang Goose Decree. The edict secured the rights of goose holders, in Backnang and in all the realm. The goose fountain, erected in 1981, stands outside town hall as a reminder to municipal authorities in the present age that no one should interfere with additional revenue sources -- especially not on a Sunday in October.