Shelf Life – A Fellow Traveler In Sighisoara (Rendezvous With An Obscure Destiny #72)

A bestselling author working on his next book visits hundreds of museums across Central and Eastern Europe. He is looking for any artifact or exhibit that might increase his understanding of the sprawling Habsburg Empire which once stretched from northern Italy to western Ukraine. The author is interested in anything eccentric or unusual that he finds intriguing. This will inform his book which will be part history/part travelogue on a vast scale. With one of his trusty notebooks in hand and pen at the ready while visiting Sighisoara, Romania. The small Transylvanian city has much to recommend it. Most prominently, an Old Town – a UNESCO World Heritage Site – which rises above the rest of Sighisoara. The spires of several structures can be seen soaring skyward from a great distance. The most famous of these reaches crowns the Clock Tower.

The author sets out to climb the 64-meter-high Clock Tower to get a bird’s-eye view of the surrounding Old Town in all its glory. Along the way he comes across an exhibit on the Transylvanian Saxon rocket scientist and spaceflight pioneer Herman Oberth. The author stops to have a look. He is fascinated by this odd exhibit improbably placed in a seven-hundred-year-old structure. He takes copious notes. This is not out of the ordinary for him. He has reams of such details lining the pages of his notebooks. The information from many of these notes will never make it into the book. Only those which are the most unique and make a larger point about the Habsburg Empire will find their way into print. That includes the exhibit on Herman Oberth in the Clock Tower.

Looking forward – Hermann Oberth bust in Sighisoara

Source of Fascination – A New Chapter
I am not a bestselling author, nor do I carry notebooks with me while visiting museums or historic sites in eastern Europe. I do carry a smartphone which I will sometimes use to take notes on intriguing people, places, incidents, and exhibits that I come across while traveling. When I visited the Clock Tower in Sighisoara, I took some photos. Unfortunately, all but one of them were lost several laptops ago. I must rely on photographic memories of what I saw during my visit. I found the exhibit on Hermann Oberth a source of fascination. Years later when I recalled seeing it, I wondered if my memory had been playing tricks on me. An icon in rocketry celebrated in a building constructed during the Middle Ages.  Yeah whatever. Who would believe such a thing? Perhaps a person who has visited one too many underfunded museums. Lack of money has given many museums license to go in odd directions.

I have been in enough provincial museums to know that items of dubious historical value often end up in the exhibits.  The Clock Tower in Sighisoara felt different. The tower was the museum for me. The artifacts on display were of minor interest at best. Climbing the tower was the only experience that would do. Nothing else could compare. At least, that was what I thought. There would certainly be no need to include an exhibit about someone not associated with the tower such as Hermann Oberth. The exhibit on him would have been better off in the Sighisoara History Museum, but the tower doubled as that museum. This left me bemused. I was not the only one.

A decade after my visit to Sighisoara, Oberth came back to me. Between 2014 and 2024, he lingered in my subconscious until one day curiosity got the best of me. While doing research on Oberth, I glanced across my living room at a bookshelf stacked with volumes I keep outside of my library and close at hand. Most of these are used as ready references. The books also act as eye candy. I love looking at the colorful spines of the (mostly) soft cover books. One of these will often catch my eye, tempting me to pull it from the shelf. On this occasion, it was the white spined Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe by Simon Winder. Danubia is a book I have read from cover to cover and often return to as a source of inspiration. Winder traveled all over what was once the Habsburg Empire. He spent most of his time there visiting hundreds of museums and historic sites in countless places. These visits are woven into the narrative fabric of Danubia. Winder’s observations are funny, illuminating, and provocative.

Great Read – Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe by Simon Winder

Historical Justice – Sins of Omission
I pulled Danubia from the shelf and instinctively searched the index looking for references to Sibiu and Sighisoara. Both cities are associated with Oberth. I was looking for information and inspiration about Transylvania. The handful of pages on Sighisoara immediately caught my attention because the Clock Tower exhibit on Hermann Oberth featured in them. Winder had seen the same exhibit I did. He too viewed it as a sublime piece of history found in an improbable place. The subtitle in the chapter dealing with the exhibit is “Transylvanian rocketry.” That is bound to get the reader’s attention. Unfortunately, many other subjects explored in museums do not. Winder talks about the bizarre exhibits that can be found in the museums of Eastern Europe. He creates a fictitious scene where the dullest exhibition case award is given at the annual Christmas dinner for museum directors in western Romania. Winder’s choice goes to an exhibit of two books in the Sighisoara Museum with “illustrations of a man demonstrating a back strengthening device.” For good reason I do not recall this exhibit.

Mania for museums – Simon Winder

I have experienced the same befuddlement as Winder at provincial museums in Eastern Europe. Artifacts that should never see the light of day are on display. It is anybody’s guess why. Perhaps because the museum does not have better artifacts, or the museum director has made a deliberate choice to avoid controversial historical topics. This is particularly true of recent history. The past in Eastern Europe is never far away. Memories and wounds are still raw. Better to stick with absurd therapeutic devices then delve into the 20^th century. Even Hermann Oberth was a controversial subject. His work on V-2 rockets helped lead to the deaths of almost 3,000 British civilians. There was nothing about that in the exhibit. For all anyone knew, a local boy had succeeded beyond the wildest expectations. As Winder says, “Oberth was a terrible figure in many ways but from his mind stepped most of the basic principles of the space programme.” The exhibit did not do Oberth’s life historical justice, but it was still unforgettable. 

Click here for: Reputation Management – Transylvania: The Land Beyond The Myth (Rendezvous With An Obscure Destiny #73)

Destiny & Danubia Calling – Taking Flight In Transylvania (Rendezvous With An Obscure Destiny #71c)

The same question arises when I try to put together the patterns of my life. Is life a series of random events and bizarre coincidences, or does life follow a discernible pattern called destiny? In other words, do things just happen or are they meant to be? I would like to think the latter, but I realize that our minds discern patterns to make sense of an insanely complex and chaotic world. Whether it is true or not, I prefer to keep on believing that most things in life are meant to be. Coincidences are connections, and life’s puzzles will reveal patterns if pursued long enough. This was the case when I began to research Transylvania’s rocket man, Herman Oberth. A chance discovery a decade earlier had settled somewhere deep in my subconscious. Little did I know that Oberth was not only lurking in my memory, but also on a nearby bookshelf.

Looking up – Sighisoara Clock Tower rises to the occasion

Clocking In – Scientific Methods
I heard curiosity rather than destiny calling when I began to research and write about Herman Oberth, a Transylvanian Saxon who through imagination, intelligence, and self-belief became the father of German rocketry. Oberth was very different from the other Transylvanians that have interested me. He was not a prince or peasant, aristocrat or artist. Oberth was a brilliant scientist. This was foreign territory for me. I am not scientifically inclined and have very little interest in space travel, which was one of Oberth’s specialties. He wrote several books which I could never read because the concepts are (literally) over my head. And yet, Oberth was one of those people I could not get out of my mind. Our only meeting did not last more than a few minutes and was so memorable that I am unlikely to ever forget it.

Oberth died twenty-five years before we met, but I doubt he could have made as much of an impression in the flesh as he did that spring day in Sighisoara.  The rocket man’s life and work were the subject of a small exhibit in the 13^th century Clock Tower. History went from the medieval to the moon for anyone who huffed and puffed their way up very steep stairs. If I remember correctly, the exhibit was located between flights of stairs. The Oberth exhibit was there to greet anyone out of breath. I imagine that many people have the same incredulous reaction as me. Surely this could not be a serious attempt at engaging visitors. The Clock Tower does a fine job of that on its own. As does Sighisoara’s immaculately preserved Old Town. I went there to see it and search for Vlad Tepes (Vlad The Impaler’s) birthplace. I achieved both of those goals. The unexpected byproduct was a lasting acquaintance with Oberth, one that would infrequently keep coming back to me until a decade later I finally acted on my curiosity to find out more about him.

Space age – Romania stamp for Hermann Oberth (Credit: Post of Romania)

Unsolved Mystery – An Historical Anomaly
A cursory search of the internet revealed that Oberth is a legend in the history of rocketry. He lived a long life with most of it spent in Germany. He also lived in the United States where he worked on rocket programs for the military. The most obscure parts of Oberth’s life are his first thirty years, most of which were spent in Transylvania. His Transylvanian Saxon roots in the region do not seem to fit a man who imagined such things as moon cars. The Saxons were good at trade, constructing fortified churches, and keeping to themselves. Nothing could be further from the space age than such an insular community. Perhaps Oberth’s imagination was stimulated as a reaction against century old traditions. He wanted to visit new frontiers, though he grew up in a very old one.

I can think of a lot of things Transylvania stimulates such as a love of nature, folk culture, and the simple pleasures of life. Rockets shooting across the sky and manned space flight would be the furthest thing from my mind. Obviously, Hermann Obert had other ideas. The kind that could change the world though he lived in one that had changed very little since the Middle Ages. Obert’s imagination was stimulated by a couple of novels by Jules Verne. There might have been something about Transylvania that spurred his scientific creativity as well. Whatever that was we will probably never know. The Oberth exhibition in the Clock Tower was not going to solve that mystery. Nevertheless, if not for the time Oberth spent in Sighisoara, mostly during World War I, he might never have achieved many of his dreams, which not coincidentally turned into nightmares for British civilians who were on the receiving ends of V-2 rockets he helped develop during World War II. All that was in the future. In Sighisoara, Oberth was already looking towards it.

Personal history – Danubia by Simon Winder

Taking Notice – Strokes of Genius
Getting transferred from the death and destruction of the Eastern Front to relatively quiet Sighisoara led Oberth to scientific strokes of genius with liquid fueled rocketry and weightlessness. His career began to take flight in the small and sleepy Transylvanian city. I doubt the Sighisoara History Museum, which administers the Clock Tower, would have put together an exhibit on Transylvania’s rocket man if several of his intellectual breakthroughs had not occurred while Oberth was stationed in the city. Thank goodness they did. Otherwise, I would never have known Oberth ever existed.

When I first saw the exhibit, I questioned why it was there. Once I learned of Oberth’s time in Sighisoara, I then questioned why the exhibit was in the Clock Tower. The most probable answer was that the hordes of German tourists who come to Sighisoara love to learn about how one of their ethnic kin has a connection there. I assumed that I was one of the few English speakers who showed the slightest bit of interest in the Oberth exhibit. Foreigners who visited the Clock Tower probably glanced at the exhibit and never gave it a second thought. My interest in Oberth was only because I led tours of a former nuclear missile site at the time. Who else could possibly have been intrigued by the exhibit? Simon Winder, the author of Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe, was who.

Click here for: Shelf Life – A Fellow Traveler In Sighisoara (Rendezvous With An Obscure Destiny #72)