Kallstadt is an unassuming little place. Located in southwestern Germany’s wine country, this hamlet of twelve hundred souls counts among its biggest draws a pair of annual wine festivals and the fact that—as the local butcher proclaims—it is a “paradise” for pig stomach, a local delicacy. But growing up, the filmmaker Simone Wendel always knew that her home town was special. As she explains in the opening lines of “Kings of Kallstadt,” her documentary film, “Here the sun always shines, and the wine never runs out. But Kallstadt is not like other villages, because Donald Trump’s grandfather was born right here. In this house! Yes, exactly. The Donald Trump!”
Released in Germany in 2014, “Kings of Kallstadt”—which includes an interview conducted by the sensibly shod Wendel, Linzer torte in hand, with Donald Trump at his gleaming Trump Tower offices—was made before Trump’s Presidential bid. Unsurprisingly, both the film and Kallstadt itself are now getting a second look in a country where, a few weeks ago, the cover of Der Spiegel featured the Republican front-runner against a backdrop of an American flag and a raging fire. “Insanity,” the headline read.
Donald Trump’s public acknowledgement of what he refers to in the film as his “German blood”—“Good stuff,” he says, crediting it with his reliability, strength, and ability to arrive on time—is actually fairly recent. Until 1990, including in his 1987 best-seller, “The Art of the Deal,” Trump claimed to be Swedish, not German. This relatively transparent family fiction—Trump’s German grandmother lived across the street from the family until her death, in the sixties—was first propagated by Trump’s father, Fred, due to anti-German sentiment in the U.S.
But Donald Trump’s dilatory enthusiasm for his German heritage—in 1999, he was the grand marshal of the German-American Steuben Parade in New York—is something of a one-way street. “There’s not anyone in Germany talking about Trump being ‘one of ours,’ ” Sebastian Jobs, a history professor at the Free University in Berlin, said. “Here people were really excited about Obama. They look down on Trump.” Nonetheless, as Wendel’s film shows, tiny Kallstadt is teeming with Trump family members, from second- or third-degree cousins of the Presidential hopeful to relatives by marriage. “I’m from a village,” Wendel explained recently on a popular German television talk show. “Everyone is related to everyone else by marriage.” There have been Trumps in Kallstadt for three hundred years, Gwenda Blair, the author of “The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate,” noted. According to her research, Hanns Drumpf, an itinerant lawyer, moved to Kallstadt in 1608, and the spelling of his last name changed by the end of that century.
Wendel, who said that she, too, is probably somehow related to Trump, initially set out to discover whether there was a secret to the success of Kallstadt’s famous emigrant sons—in addition to the Trumps, Kallstadt was also home to Johann Heinrich Heinz, whose American-born son, Henry John Heinz, founded the Heinz ketchup company. (According to locals, there is a long history of intermarriage between the Trumps and the Heinzes.) “If it was just Heinz, O.K., then it’s just an accident,” Wendel said, by telephone. “But Heinz and Trump? The reason I made this film was to see, was it a coincidence or not?”
Instead of heading to the archives, Wendel visited tchotchke-rich living rooms, hair salons, garden barbecues, and the village’s neat cinderblock community center. She interviewed some of Kallstadt’s most important villagers: Benny the postman, Bam Bam the junior beadle, the pageant-winning “wine princesses” Melanie and Sarah, Claus the aerobics instructor, Uli, who is second in command of the gymnastics club, and Gerda, a well-informed retiree, among others. When asked why Kallstadt begat not one but two American business dynasties, most people shrugged. (“We’re pretty friendly here, so I can imagine that Trump and Heinz fit in well in America” was the most compelling reason offered.) Still, Wendel does come across plenty of other interesting tidbits, including a good deal of Trump family history.
While perched in a tumble-down lookout in the forest with Trump’s second cousin, Fritz, the village hunter, Wendel learns that Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump, announced his departure for the New World as a teen-ager, in a note left on the table. “And that night, or maybe it was the next day, Fritz”—Friedrich Trump— “wasn’t there anymore,” Fritz, who keeps in touch with some members of the New York family via telegram, says. “My grandmother always told me about it.”
On a cobblestone terrace, another Trump relative continued the legend: first Friedrich Trump travelled to New York, where his sisters were already living, then made his way west, toward the Alaskan Gold Rush. “But of course he didn’t want to break his fingernails, and he didn’t have a very strong constitution,” the relative says. “So he opened a restaurant and took gold nuggets in payment.” (According to Gwenda Blair, these accounts are more or less accurate—though they all leave out the fact that, in addition to steaks, oysters, and liquor, miners could use their gold to buy “female companionship” at Trump’s successful frontier establishments.).
On one of his trips home to Kallstadt, Friedrich married the girl next door, Elizabeth, and took her to New York. Elizabeth, however, was homesick, and in 1904 the family returned to Kallstadt. Friedrich “worked, for a year, to get his citizenship back” from the German authorities, according to John Walter, Donald’s first cousin, who works for the Trump Organization and serves as the family historian. To no avail: Friedrich had failed to fulfill his compulsory military duty, and as a result he was expelled. “So they left,” Walter says. “And they went back to America, and that’s why Donald and I are here.”
“Hm,” Donald Trump replies, with a smile. “That’s an interesting story. I didn’t even know it.”
German journalists, commentators, and Kallstadters themselves have been quick to point out the irony of the situation. “One woman, Angela, said, ‘If his grandpa had been treated the way Trump wants to treat people, he wouldn’t have gotten very far,’ ” Wendel said. During a recent television interview with Wendel, the talk-show host Markus Lanz called Trump’s attitude toward immigrants absurd. “If someone is a good example of how productive and integrated immigrants can be, then it’s Donald Trump,” he said, before pointing out that it was Trump’s grandmother, Elizabeth, who supported the family after Friedrich’s unexpected death left her to raise their three children alone in New York.
While Wendel agreed with Lanz that the Trump women get far too little attention, her film tacks philosophical rather than ideological. As the documentary progresses, Wendel joins a tour-bus-sized group of Kallstadters who, thanks to their Trump connection, are invited to New York to march in the Steuben Parade. (Wary of American habitudes, they bring their own three-ply toilet paper.) Things wrap up back in Kallstadt, a place where, as she puts it, “everything is better when you do it together.” (Statistically, every villager is a member of 1.35 of the town’s twenty-seven official clubs.)
Preparations for the grape harvest and attendant wine festival are in full swing. As the junior and senior village beadles test the lights of a tractor before hooking it up to a papier-mâché pig’s-stomach float, the filmmaker asks villagers some big “what if” questions: Had they lived, like Friedrich Trump, in the peak years of German immigration to the U.S., would they have emigrated? A white-haired Heinz relative says yes, probably; Uli, of the gymnastics club, says he can imagine that he might have done so; the retiree, Gerda, says she cannot answer the question without knowing what her familial and financial circumstances would have been at the time. O.K., Wendel says, in her last round of queries, so what if the Trumps had stayed in Kallstadt, as planned? What would Donald be now? “Maybe . . . a vintner,” the wine princess Sarah says, after some reflection. “And probably a not-too-shabby one, at that.”
