The following article is from our December 2007 issue.

Christmas Town In a Time Machine Our intrepid chronicler of German life in America visits Frankenmuth, Michigan - By Uwe Siemon-Netto

On Feb. 21, Rev. Wilhelm Löhe, a Lutheran village pastor, was born in Fürth in Franconia two centuries ago. Although he never visited America, Löhe sent missionaries to set up colonies in the Michigan wilderness. The largest of these is Frankenmuth (Frankish courage), one of the safest and cleanest towns in America. It has also evolved into the nation's Christmas capital.

If you attend a service on any given Sunday at 9:30 a.m. in Frankenmuth's huge St. Lorenz Church, you might wonder whether a time machine had propelled you back to the Sankt-Lorenz-Kirche in Nuremberg, circa 1908. Accompanied by a roaring 50 rank pipe organ, about 1,000 men, women and children belt out their hymns lustily, rolling their R's the way Franconians do. And this would already be the third service that weekend, with yet another to follow.

They bear the unmistakable features of the Franks - a Western Germanic tribe whose main contribution to European history was Emperor Charlemagne (742-814 A.D.), founding father of both Germany and France. Like Charlemagne, these Michigan Franks are men with strong, square faces, while many of their comely womenfolk are of the strapping variety prevalent in the northern Bavarian countryside. In Nuremberg, rarely more than 150 faithful sit in the Sankt-Lorenz-Kirche on ordinary Sunday mornings. By contrast, in Frankenmuth, congregants fill every pew in the nave and most seats on the balconies as well.

And they pay attention to the preacher in a white pulpit high above the chancel. They listen closely - as long as nothing disturbs their routine. "I am sorry, pastor, I could not concentrate on your sermon this morning," one woman apologized recently as she shook the minister's hands at the door. "You see, somebody else had taken my seat."

With 4,700 baptized members, five pastors and three organists, St. Lorenz is clearly the 600-pound gorilla among all institutions, religious or otherwise, in Frankenmuth, a town of 4,800. Some of its congregants live in outlying communities, of course. Still, the congregation's membership roll reads like a Midwestern equivalent of the genealogical register of the Mayflower families, except of course that the German colonizers of Michigan's wilderness arrived 225 years after the pilgrims from Plymouth, England, had landed at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts.

But there were parallels. Like the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, the German colonists endured a grueling journey on their sailing ship, the "Caroline," as it navigated in thick fog past iceberg upon iceberg in the North Atlantic, where at one point, seven successive storms forced Captain Volkmann to remain on his bridge for 48 hours without sleep.

And like the Pilgrims, these southern Germans came for reasons of faith. Following a "Notruf" (appeal) from Rev. Friedrich Wyneken, a Lutheran minister in America, Neuendettelsau's pastor Wilhelm Löhe sent them out in 1845 to establish model communities whose perfect Christian lifestyle would so impress the Chippewa, a Native American tribe, that they would readily convert to Christianity.

In a sense, Löhe's settlers succeeded at first. One year after their arrival, 30 Indian children inhabited the home of their exacting first pastor, Rev. August Friedrich Crämer, known to all as "the iron man." But being nomads, the Chippewa eventually moved on - and certainly not into a life of destitution. Today, though led by a stalwart Methodist chief, they are immensely wealthy thanks to their gambling casinos that are only allowed on autonomous Indian reservations in Michigan such as the ones in Mount Pleasant and Sault Sainte Marie.

So there are no Native Americans at prayer anymore at Frankenmuth's St. Lorenz Church, a redbrick sanctuary wedged in between streets named after Löhe and Neuendettelsau. But the Franks are plentiful - and wealthy, too. Four generations of the Zehnders are there, for example, always filling the same pew. The Zehnders, whose ancestors' tombstone is among the most visible on the graveyard next to the St. Lorenz church, own two of America's largest restaurants. These are good, old-fashioned German-style eateries where all the family members young and old work six days a week, including Dorothy Zehnder, the sprightly 80-year-old matriarch of the giant "Bavarian Inn," whose kitchens she supervises.

Then there are the Bronners - whimsical old Wally Bronner, another octogenarian, and his wife Irene, and their offspring Wayne, Carla and Maria with their spouses and children. The Bronners make their living by celebrating Christmas 361 days a year. They own and run "Bronner's CHRISTmas Wonderland," the largest yuletide specialty store on earth. The salesroom alone is the size of almost two football fields and that's only a fraction of the Bronner buildings' 320,000 square feet of floor space located on 45 acres of elegantly landscaped grounds.

Filled with unparalleled glitter, the giant supermarket runs up a daily electric bill of $900. Two million people drop by every year in hundreds of thousands of cars and buses. They come to be stunned by artificial snowstorms twice every hour, even at the height of summer, at the store's south entrance. They gawk at 500 different nativity scenes and 150 styles of nutcrackers. And they buy and buy - anything from the most expensive wares here, such as 17-foot Santa Claus for $7,000 to trinkets costing less than two bucks. Altogether, the Bronners have 50,000 Christmas items for sale.

With eyes twinkling as brightly as his Christmas candles, Wally Bronner is a marvelous old guy. Dressed in a bright red blazer, like the rest of his staff, he bustles about armies of animated figures and forests of brightly blinking Christmas trees. You can tell he feels like a kid in a candy store as he lovingly takes in all those toys, and those yuletide ornaments imported from around the globe - the cheap stuff from China, the more valuable wares from the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) in eastern Germany. "He really does celebrate Christmas every day," insisted his oldest son, Wayne. "And he's done so ever since starting this business back in 1945, gradually building it up from his miniature commercial sign painting enterprise he began in his father's basement to earn pocket money as a high school boy."

Up the road at the local Historical Museum, director Mary Nuechterlein and Dave Maves, an amateur local historian, smile benignly at the way the Zehnders and the Bronners have transformed their part of town into a wannabe alpine wonderland cum German spa. While Franconia is politically part of Bavaria, it has little in common with the yodeling, thigh-slapping, lederhosen-wearing natives of the southernmost corners of the German-speaking world that many Americans associate with everyone who says "ja" instead of "yes."

If Wilhelm Löhe rose from his grave in Neuendettelsau and floated into Frankenmuth, he would be baffled to find at Bronner's the exact replica of the St. Nikolaus Church of Oberndorf in Austria - yes, Austria, where 10 years after Löhe's birth, Father Joseph Mohr, a Catholic priest, and his organist Franz Gruber, wrote the lyrics and music of what today is the world's most beloved Christmas carol, "Silent Night."

It was Wally Bronner who had a copy of this edifice erected on his grounds to give thanks to God for "CHRISTmas Wonderland's" huge success; he also had wooden plaques bearing the lyrics of Silent Night in 300 languages planted along the walkway leading up to the chapel where loudspeakers play the hymn over and over again, and where on Christmas Eve, Wally personally leads hundreds of visitors in singing it.

With all this you might be forgiven for thinking that Löhe's Frankenmuth has "gone Roman." But no! Remember Garrison Keillor's famous quip? "The whole Midwest is Lutheran. Even the atheists in the Midwest are Lutherans. The God they don't believe in is Luther's God." Keillor coined this adage for Minnesota but he might as well have had Frankenmuth in mind.

Though the Bronners and the Zehnders and David Maves can't think of a single Lutheran atheist in their community, even the second church in town, St. John's, is Lutheran. It belongs to a more conservative branch than St. Lorenz, to which the Bronners and the Zehnders belong, and which is a founding congregation of the strictly confessional Lutheran Church Missouri Synod that counts Löhe and Crämer among its fathers.

In fact, so Lutheran is Frankenmuth that when the Roman Catholics finally set up a parish in 1963, they asked the elders of St. Lorenz for advice on how to name their new sanctuary, and received a very Lutheran answer: "Blessed Trinity, of course!" Now, there is nothing un-Catholic about these two words but lumped together as one name, they sound quintessentially Lutheran, at least in America. Anyway, in Frankenmuth, a reversal in the historical trajectory occurred. The Catholics took their cue from a much younger branch of Christianity and everybody seems happy.

Now, if you talk to Rev. Mark Brandt, senior pastor at St. Lorenz, he will sound a cautionary note. Yes, he readily admits, while there are no longer any Chippewa to convert, Frankenmuth by and large has clung to the values handed down from its Frankish founding fathers (perhaps, one might add, even more so than their cousins in the old country). Yes, this is a wonderfully safe place, which is why so many people from nearby Saginaw, Flint and Detroit went to retire here. Yes, there is practically no crime in Frankenmuth, although "there is sin here, too," pastor Brandt insists, "drunkenness, for example," but then one must allow that this is a place filled with German Lutherans, and German Lutherans drink.

True, true, the Lutheran parochial school, with 500 students the largest in the Missouri Synod, is as excellent as ever, as is the local public school, which was founded much later. In fact, the educational system is so good that 98 percent of Frankenmuth's high school graduates go on to college, an extremely rare phenomenon in America. And yes, local census figures show that the town's divorce rate is well below the national average and is share of two-parent families well above.

But Rev. Brandt warns, "Church attendance is in decline, even though our membership remains stable. When I came here 17 years ago, 2,000 came to our services at least once a week, and now only 1,700 show up." That is a complaint that every pastor in Germany would respond to wistfully: "I wish I had your problems."

But one thing is definitely in decline in Frankenmuth and in the neighboring settlements called Frankenhilf (Frankish help), Frankenlust (Frankish pleasure) and Frankentrost (Frankish comfort): More than one and a half centuries after the first settlers' arrival, the gnarling Frankish dialect is finally fading. The older generation still speaks it with such purity that it brings tears to the eyes of tourists from Franconia, Germany. And German is still a compulsory subject at the parochial school.

But only 30 to 50 worshipers show up for the German-language service on every second Sunday of the month, a service inscribed in the congregation's constitutions. And, as local historian Maves grumbles, while 300 people still come to the annual meeting of Frankish-speakers at the Bavarian Inn, fewer and fewer still master the dialect. Imagine the dire consequence, according to Maves: Most participants, all Americans, now communicate in High German.

- Uwe Siemon-Netto, a veteran foreign correspondent from Germany and Lutheran lay theologian, is scholar-in-residence at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.