A Haven in the Heartland

In the aftermath of World War II, the Soviet regime dealt a crippling blow to lutherie in Bohemia and eastern Germany. Richard Ward describes how Bubenreuth in northern Bavaria became a refuge for violin makers – and a hotbed of production.

- Richard Ward

Almost everyone in the violin world is familiar with the history of German violin making. That history began only about 50 years after the very first violins were created in Italy in around 1550; indeed, according to tradition there were violin makers in the small town of Füssen, on the border of Germany and Austria, at the same time that Andrea Amati was working in Cremona. The makers there even formed a guild in 1562. The recorded tradition of German violin making properly began in the early 1600s, in the towns of Graslitz, in Bohemia, and Schönbach, right on the border with Saxony. Shortly thereafter the craft gained a hold in the village of Mittenwald in the Alps, and in Markneukirchen near the Saxony–Bohemia border.

Over the centuries more violins were produced in the Markneukirchen region than anywhere else in the world; at the peak of production in the 1890s, almost 250,000 stringed instruments per year were being produced in the small area called the Vogtland. An even more important lutherie centre was located just a few miles across the border, in western Bohemia (which after 1919 became known as Czechoslovakia) – in fact, there were more people involved in violin making there than in the area around Markneukirchen itself, which was primarily the business and export centre of the violin making industry. Most of the instruments and bows that were shipped from the Markneukirchen area, where there were more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in Germany, were actually made in the Schönbach area. Almost all of the makers in western Bohemia were ethnic Germans whose families had been there for generations. They were not only violin and bow makers but also wood brokers, makers of cases and accessories, and anything else involved with the violin trade. Practically all of their production passed over the nearby border, where their products were shipped out of the Markneukirchen area to distant ports around the world.