By Ines Keane
I like a story with a clean origin. Triberg doesn’t give you one, and after a few days there, I’ve come around to thinking that’s actually the more interesting version of the story.
Here’s what’s genuinely known. By the middle of the 18th century, small clockmaking workshops scattered across the villages between Neustadt and Sankt Georgen, in the hills above Triberg, were producing cuckoo clocks out of local wood. That much is documented. What’s not documented, at least not reliably, is who made the first one. Two competing accounts survive from early chroniclers. One credits a Bohemian merchant passing through around 1742, whose designs apparently caught local attention. The other names a specific maker, Franz Anton Ketterer, working in the 1730s — a tidier story, with a named hero and everything, except for the inconvenient detail that Ketterer wasn’t born until 1734. He couldn’t have made a clock in a decade he didn’t live through. Historians worked this out some time ago, and as far as I can establish, nobody has since produced a confirmed replacement name.
I spent an afternoon in a small workshop trying to get a straight answer out of a third-generation maker there, and got the same shrug I’d gotten from a museum guide the day before. Nobody knows. The clock arrived, roughly, in roughly that window, made by roughly those kinds of people, and the specific individual who built the first one has simply been lost to a couple of centuries of oral history and competing local pride.
What struck me, sitting in that workshop watching someone carve the leaf-and-vine casework that distinguishes a hand-made piece from an imported one, is how little the uncertainty seems to bother anyone actually doing the work. The tradition itself — three centuries of small Black Forest workshops making these things by hand — is the part people here actually care about preserving. The founding myth is treated almost as a footnote, something tourists ask about more than locals discuss among themselves.
There’s a practical lesson in this for anyone buying a cuckoo clock rather than just admiring one, and it’s the same lesson that applies to most craft purchases: the story on the box matters less than the joinery underneath it. Triberg’s main street has both genuinely hand-carved pieces and mass-produced imports sitting on adjacent shelves, sometimes at similar prices, and the tourist trade doesn’t make the distinction obvious unless you know what to look for — hand-cut versus moulded leaves, individual variation between pieces versus identical units, a mechanism you can hear ticking with some irregularity rather than something silently uniform.
I came away without a clean founding story, which is not the article I set out to write. But I also came away with a fair amount of respect for a place that’s kept a genuinely difficult hand craft alive for close to three hundred years without needing a tidy legend to justify it. The clocks became a real export industry after the 1850s, and they’ve stayed one through changes in fashion, mass production elsewhere, and — evidently — a permanently unresolved question about who started the whole thing.
Sephari doesn’t yet have sourced, checked profiles of individual Triberg workshops to send you toward by name. Given how much of this trade’s own history turns out to be unverifiable, that caution feels, if anything, appropriate rather than overly careful.
If you make clocks or other craft here, the process for getting listed is at /sell-with-sephari/