“A VISIT TO THE HOME TOWN OF LEVI STRAUSS” 

The founder of Levi Strauss & Co. was born “Loeb” Strauss in 1829 in  Buttenheim, in the Bavarian province of Germany.  (Actually, he was born in the Franconian region of Bavaria, but we’ll get to that.) In 1847 or 1848 Loeb, his mother and two of his sisters left Germany for New York, to live with two older brothers. His father had died and the tiny village of Buttenheim offered few opportunities for young men and women.  After spending time in New York, young Levi – he changed his name around 1850 - moved for good in 1853, to gold rush San Francisco. In 1873 he and tailor Jacob Davis created the first blue jeans when they received U.S. Patent #139,121 for making riveted men’s trousers.

Buttenheim changed with the times, and many original homes and buildings dating to the 17th century or earlier crumbled or were demolished. But one structure survived into the 20th century: the house where Levi was born.

The city bought the ramshackle two story dwelling in 1987 and proceeded to renovate and turn it into a museum, to celebrate the town’s most famous citizen. In 2000 the Levi Strauss Museum was opened and today the facility greets more than 15,000 visitors a year. Its director is Dr. Tanja Roppelt, and the Museum is affiliated with a number of local institutions, including the University of Erlangen, about fifteen miles taway.

A few months ago I received an invitation from Dr. Heike Paul, director of the university’s American Studies Program, to come to the school and give a lecture about the history of LS&CO. and Levi’s® jeans. Dr. Roppelt chimed in and invited me to tour the Levi Strauss Museum, visit local historical sites and the Bavarian state archives in Bamberg. That was all too good to pass up, so I flew to Germany at the end of April, 2009.

I started my visit in Buttenheim, which was a real thrill. The village has 3,000 people (and two breweries) and its mayor, Johann Kalb, has been involved with the museum project since the beginning. Some press interviews were scheduled for my visit to the museum, but Tanja Roppelt took me there before they arrived so I could have the place to myself for awhile.

The house has the same configuration that it did 180 years ago, though remodeled to accommodate exhibits and visitors. There are two floors, each with just three rooms. Levi, his parents and at least three older siblings lived on the bottom floor and another family lived above. The house is tall and narrow with the original low ceilings and doorways. I was suspicious of the blue paint on the exterior shutters (the color of denim??), but the museum’s architect, Christoph Gatz, assured me that those colors were original to the house.  

Talks with Tanja Roppelt and other people in Buttenheim provided me with a very important piece of information: Levi was not a Bavarian. He was a Franconian. Buttenheim is in Franconia, the northern portion of the state of Bavaria, and people from this region will be the first to tell you that they are not Bavarians, and neither was Levi Strauss.

My first day also included a visit to the Jewish cemetery in Buttenheim, where I saw the grave of Levi’s father, Hirsch Strauss. I asked Tanja if the synagogue that Levi would have attended was still around. “Yes it is,” she said. “But it’s now a warehouse for the Lowenbrau brewery.” We walked a couple of blocks from the museum to see it; it’s a beautiful old building, and you can still catch a few faint traces of its original design and function. Even more fascinating, the museum’s shop is located a few doors away from the main building, on the former location of the home where Levi’s mother Rebecca was born in July of 1800.

 Interviews completed, Tanja then took me to the town of Reckendorf, about ninety miles away, which is where the Haas and Hellman families came from. There I met with city archivist Adelheid Waschka for a tour of the archives, the town and the Jewish cemetery.

I brought a souvenir from the cemetery back to my hotel in Bamberg with me, which I didn’t notice until very late at night: a big, fat tick, which had been lunching on my knee for about five hours. A panicked ride in a cab to the emergency room of a local hospital at 11pm was not on the agenda for this trip, but I couldn’t remove the tick myself, and I also needed a tetanus booster. That taken care of, Tanja drove me back to the hotel, after coming down to the hospital to give me moral support.

The next morning made up for the night’s horrors. Tanja and I went to the state archives in Bamberg, where we saw the documents that the Strauss family had to file to get permission to emigrate to the United States. We also saw tax documents relating to the house that is now the museum. Another thrill.

Wednesday evening saw us in Erlangen. Before the lecture, there was a short ceremony in the office of the president of the university. I signed the guest book of the city of Buttenheim (as well as a pair of jeans for mayor Kalb, who has a rather wacky collection of signed Levi’s® jeans), and received a beautiful beer stein from the Bavarian Interior Minister, plus other Buttenheim-related gifts from Mr. Kalb. There was a crowd of about 200 for the lecture a little while later. It was very well received, and so was the “XX”, the oldest pair of jeans in the Levi Strauss & Co. Archives – and the oldest pair of jeans in the world, which I displayed on a table and showed to the very rapt audience.  

This visit was a great mixture of business and pure historical research. Tanja Roppelt and her staff have done the serious work in German archives that I could never do. The long chats with Tanja about Levi’s early life gave me incredible insight into his formative years in his native country. There are still a few questions to be answered, but I now have resources in Franconia to help me track them down, and that makes a historian very happy.

© 2009 Lynn Downey