Story Book Clocks

Aesop was not German. Heidi, from the eponymous novel, was Swiss, and “Hansel and Gretel,” was not imagined by the Brothers Grimm but gleaned from medieval fairy tales told across the European continent. And yet elements of each all appear on German made cuckoo clocks. I wondered why.

The origins of many stories and the explanation of why they long capture a cultures attention, is a mystery that can never be confidently unraveled. But people clearly like their lessons to be learned through evocative stories that bring animals, and forests, and even houses, to life.

Cuckoo clocks have always been designed with a nod to the pastoral ways of the people of the Black Forest and the habits, homes, and animals that reside there. So we have the hares, the birds, the bears, and deer nestled amongst the toadstools and evergreen trees. Figures wait under the thatched roofs and by water wells and chimneys. 

So why shouldn’t the Brothers Grimm tale of two resourceful children and their adventure in the forest be carved upon a chalet cuckoo clock? Though the witches original house was described as having bread walls, a cake roof, and sugar windows, it still sounds remarkably like the delightfully gingerbread-like chalet cuckoo clocks. They often have windows, and woodland creatures peaking from behind trees. And even if we aren’t sure of the particulars of the fairy tale any more, Hansel and Gretel are still walking our collective unconscious, trailing breadcrumbs along the way.

So of course are the many fables of Aesop. But it is the story of the “fox and the grapes” that merits its own cuckoo clock. Carved into traditional bird and leaf cuckoo clocks, the vines and grapes—-and indeed, the Fox—-make for a more ornate, scrolled clock. Once again, in a nod to the rose and not the thorns, we see only a beautiful, natural clock and perhaps forget the lesson of the critical fox, who scorned the grapes as sour, when he could not reach them.

Most straightforward in its use on cuckoo clocks is the popular 1880 Swiss novel for children, Heidi. Though the author, Johanna Spyri, wrote of the Swiss mountains, she wrote her novel in the language of her German neighbors and certainly appreciated the same bucolic landscapes of Germany as similar to the peaceful and healing Alpine regions of her story. Everyone who came to the mountainside in Heidi was healed, a fact to be understandably commemorated on a chalet clock.