Donald Trump's Ancestral Village in Germany Is Now A Political Tourism Mecca

It’s fitting that Donald Trump doesn’t actually know, or know well, the little village of Kallstadt in the Rhineland-Palatinate – in southwestern Germany – in which his grandfather, Friedrich Trump, was born and grew up before emigrating to the States in 1885. It’s not that Kallstadt is particularly out of the way – it’s hard by the U.S. Air Force base and Army installations in Kaiserslautern, and closer to the French border and the Alsatian wine country than it is to Frankfurt, in fact. The problem has been, rather, that the leading Republican presidential candidate has led a rather full schedule being himself for the last 69 years and hasn’t really gotten around to the whole roots thing.

Perhaps he will someday. Candidate Trump did take a childhood trip back to Kallstadt with his dad, Fred, the hardnosed Queens, New York, construction man, and son Donald did years later utter the, for him, uncharacteristically palliative sentence: ‘I have a warm spot in my heart for Germany.’ Which can only come as a relief, and somewhat of a terrifying prospect, to Chancellor Angela Merkel and many other transatlantic alliance mavens, should the former reality-TV host take the White House later this year. Who knows what he meant.

But that one portentous sentence aside, the doughty residents of ancestral Kallstadt, founded some 1100-plus years ago, are looking at the mounting hysteria of the American elections, as well as the obstreperousness of the notable grandson of the town, with a very wary eye. The Berghold family now owns the little house once owned by the Trump family, a modest one-story dwelling that has become a sort of knockdown German-wine-village version of a Hollywood-Home-of-the-Stars, photographed and tweeted millions of times.

But what, in The Donald that we have bigfooting around on the American political stage at the moment, might have come from this little corner of the world? Well, his proven, granular attraction to Central European wives, for one thing, the former Czechoslovakia and Slovenia, being just a stone’s throw from southernmost Germany. The man has a type. The beauty-pageant owner likes ‘em kinda blonde, very Alpine, and top fit.

In a deeper sense, however, there is this little clue: No German village – or one could argue, no European village anywhere on the Continent, but in this case no German village – that has been around for the better part of a millennium has endured by being anything other than itself. There are no false gods in this part of the world. It’s a simple resolute, hard life. A wine hill is a wine hill. A hoe is a hoe. Nobody’s pretending to be, or do, anything other than what they have been or done.