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)

Outer Limits – Hermann Oberth’s Strange Destiny (Rendezvous With An Obscure Destiny #71b)

Sixth grade was an eagerly awaited event in my adolescent school years. One of the teachers happened to be a model rocket enthusiast who styled himself a sort of middle-aged astronaut. He applied to be the teacher taken on the space shuttle Columbia which would tragically explode after taking flight. The closest he got to liftoff was by living vicariously through model rocket launches with his sixth-grade science classes. His love of space flight was infectious to the point that he had the entire class getting their parents to pay for model rocket kits. Then he would help all his students assemble them for launch on the school football field. This was great fun even for a non-scientifically minded student like me.

We would watch the model rocket launches and then chase down the ones with working parachutes. This was a one-of-a-kind experience that helped me understand the fascination with rocketry and outer space. For enthusiasts of space travel, the sky really is the limit. I imagine that was how Hermann Oberth felt as a child. The Transylvanian Saxon grew up in a scientific netherworld where the idea of space travel was as foreign as science fiction. All Oberth had to guide him were Jules Verne novels, his imagination, and whatever he could cobble together for experiments in rocketry. That did not stop Oberth from pursuing his dreams of rocketry and flights to outer space. During his long, complex, and deeply conflicted life, several of Oberth’s ideas changed the world of rocketry and space flight forever.

Looking up – Hermann Oberth at seven years old

Taking Flight – A Single Minded Pursuit
Hermann Oberth was born in Sibiu (Hermannstadt), Austria-Hungary. As a child he became obsessed with rocketry after reading From The Earth To The Moon and its sequel Around The Moon by Jules Verne which dealt with space travel. This led Oberth to build a model rocket and formulate the idea of multistage rockets while still a teenager. As an ethnic German Saxon, he was able to gain entry at a medical school in Munich, Germany where he was to follow in the footsteps of his father who was a physician. Oberth’s studies were cut short by World War I when he was drafted into the German Army and posted to the Eastern Front as a medic. He survived the battlefield long enough to get transferred back to Transylvania. Oberth was assigned to a medical unit in Sighisoara, but he had by this time decided not to become a doctor. Oberth had enough extra time to renew his interest in rocketry and space flight. His time in Sighisoara explains the small exhibit on Oberth that I discovered at the Clock Tower. Romania would prove kinder to Oberth’s early career than Germany.

Oberth moved back to Germany after the war to study physics, but his doctoral dissertation on rocket science was rejected. Fortunately, Augustin Maier, a Romanian professor at the University of Cluj gave Oberth a second chance to defend his dissertation, which he did successfully. He would go on to author a book on space flight. Oberth’s single minded pursuit to see his ideas put into practice eventually paid off. He started a group dedicated to the study of spaceflight which attracted many prominent scientists, including Werner Von Braun. Oberth proved to be a fine mentor for Von Braun. His ideas were ahead of their time. Von Braun, rather than Oberth, would put many of these into practice. During World War II, Oberth worked on different rocketry projects for Nazi Germany, including the V-2 which was used as a weapon of terror against Britain.

Aiming high – Hermann Oberth in his element

Tragedy & Triumph – Delayed Gratifications
Oberth was awarded the War Merit Cross for his service in furthering the German war effort though he was not in lockstep with the V-2 program. Oberth criticized it as militarily unfeasible. True to form, he had his own ideas about what would work better. In this case, a solid fueled V-2 rocket. That idea never came to fruition for V-2’s, but it would for missiles during the Cold War with remarkable results. Oberth made it through World War II unscathed. The same could not be said for two of his children. A son died fighting on the Eastern Front and a daughter was killed in an explosion while working as a technician at a rocket test base. Despite these losses and Germany’s defeat in the war, Oberth never lost his adherence to right wing politics. Many years after the war, he became a member of a far-right political party in West Germany.

When the war ended, Oberth wisely surrendered to the Americans. His Nazi past was overlooked because he did not directly commit any war crimes. After the war he worked on various rocketry projects, the most notable of which were in the United States. Among these, Oberth was a consultant for development of the Atlas Missile, the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) deployed by the United States. Oberth’s ideas about human spaceflight, once dismissed as ridiculous, went mainstream. He is known as the German father of rocketry.  Among his innovations was work on the mathematical equations used as the basis for rocketry. He also correctly theorized that liquid fueled rockets would be vastly more powerful than ones that were propelled by gunpowder.

A familiar scene – Sighisoara as it would have looked to Herman Oberth between the wars (Credit: Kurt Hielscher)

Improbable Journey – A Long Way From Home
Despite his dubious wartime record and penchant for right wing politics, Oberth was celebrated in his lifetime and still is today. Ironically, there is a moon crater named after him. Quite appropriate, considering that his life’s work advanced rocket science to the point where craters were created by the V-2’s fired by Nazi Germany at Great Britain. Discovering Oberth in the Sighisoara Clock Tower exhibit was just as strange as his life and work. It is difficult to imagine how a boy obsessed with a couple of Jules Verne novels ends up changing the trajectory of rocketry and science for mankind. Oberth’s life journey was just as dramatic and improbable as the spaceflights he dreamed up. That he came from a provincial city in southern Transylvania is as hard to believe as any Jules Verne novel. Yet Oberth was a true believer in the potential of Verne’s visions and of his own. Imagination and intelligence took Oberth a long way from his Transylvania home. The rest of humanity has gone along for the ride.

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

Rocket Man – A Surprise in Sighisoara (Rendezvous With An Obscure Destiny #71a)

The man who came closest to being a father to me was a font of wisdom. As an Englishman, Brian Walton loved to provide incisive anecdotes and witty jokes. As a professional historian he had an inexhaustible supply of stories to draw from. The best of these combined historic events with his own personal history. Brian grew up in Stockport, an industrial town in Greater Manchester, during the aftermath of World War II. The mentality in Britain was very different from that of today. The war was still fresh in everyone’s mind. Germans were not to be trusted. They had dropped bombs all over Britain, including three on Brian’s street when he was a toddler. He had an understandable anger towards them which would sometimes still be displayed in gallows humor. Like all good humor, it had subversive intentions.

Coming to America – Hermann Oberth (forefront) with several German scientists including Wernher von Braun at the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency

Taking Flight – Pushing The Limits
One evening, Brian and I were discussing the American development of solid fueled missiles. This was a game changing technology that allowed nuclear missiles to be launched at a moment’s notice. At the time, I was working as a guide at a former nuclear missile site on the Great Plains. Brian filled me in on some missile history which I was only vaguely aware of. He mentioned that America’s missile program excelled partly due to the work of Werner von Braun, a German rocket scientist who conveniently emigrated to the United States after the war and proceeded to help America develop rocketry. Von Braun did not do this out of altruism, but to save himself from the crimes he had committed during the war by developing V-2 rockets which killed almost 3,000 British civilians, wounded thousands of others, and terrorized the populace.

Brian, who was a great lover of movies said, “they made a film about Von Braun’s life while he was still alive. It was called, “I Aim At The Stars. And we used to say in Stockport that it should have been called, “I Aim At The Stars and my rockets fall on Britain.” That story came to mind many years later when I was visiting Transylvania. While climbing to the top of the 13th century Clock Tower in Sighisoara, I came across a small exhibition about a Transylvanian who also aimed at the stars. Hermann Oberth, was a mentor of Von Braun and the man most responsible for rockets falling on Britain. Transylvania has a reputation for the supernatural, but a rocket scientist at one of the most iconic sites in Sighisoara was really pushing the limits. Then again, so did Oberth throughout his long and complex life.

Above all – Clocktower (center) in Sighisoara (Credit: Bogdan Muraru)

Conflict & Complexity – The Saxon’s Story
The last thing I expected to find as I made my way up the medieval Clock Tower in Sighisoara was an image of Hermann Oberth and information on his life. That was because I had never heard of the man. I doubt many others have either and that includes Romanians. Oberth was a Transylvanian Saxon, that community has been dwindling in Romania ever since World War II. An estimated 100,000 Saxons fled westward when the Red Army was about to overrun Transylvania in 1944. Another 70,000 were arrested and sent to the Soviet Union to work as slave laborers. Ironically, Romania, unlike other nations in Eastern Europe did not expel the Saxons following the war. When the Romanian Revolution in 1989 led to the overthrow of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and communism, there were still 95,000 Saxons living in Transylvania. Due to the dire state of Romania’s economy during the transition from communism to capitalism, most of Transylvania’s Saxons migrated to Germany. They found the peace and prosperity in Germany that had eluded them during their last fifty years in Transylvania.

By the time of my visit to Transylvania in 2014 there were approximately 25,000 Saxons left in Transylvania. That means three out of every four Saxons had left the region since 1990. They had set out for greener pastures. There are plenty of these in Transylvania, but not the kind covered in money like Germany. The Saxon’s greatest legacy are the fortified churches and remarkable villages with spectacularly quaint architecture. Several of these have been designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites. As for the Saxon’s human legacy, that has mostly vanished. This made discovering an exhibit on a Transylvanian Saxon, who had also emigrated from the region long ago, that much more unique. Judging by the number of Germans who I observed visiting Transylvania during my time there, I should not have been so surprised. Perhaps the wounds of war had finally healed enough to promote the accomplishments of Oberth, even if some of his accomplishments helped propagate the war that led to the Saxon exodus from Transylvania. Oberth’s life and legacy is just as conflicted as the Saxon’s recent history in the region.

Making a name for himself – Street sign in Sighisoara (Credit: Renardo la vulpo)

Egregious Exhibition – A Matter Of Importance
I did not spend much time studying the small exhibit on Oberth in Sighisoara’s Clock Tower mainly because it was located on one of the upper levels close to the stairs. I was too busy catching my breath and wiping sweat from my brow due to the long bursting climb up the 64-meter-high tower. My first thought upon seeing the exhibit was perplexity. I could not imagine what would possess someone to put an exhibit about a man who represented one of the modern world’s most ambitious undertakings inside a medieval tower. I have seen enough exhibits in Eastern Europe’s provincial cities to realize that the people running them feel that they must exhibit anything of even the mildest interest to compensate for a lack of funds to create modern exhibits.

I found the Oberth exhibit so egregious as to be memorable. I committed Oberth’s name to memory, promising myself that I would find out more about him later. In the next several years any time I thought of my time in Sighisoara, Oberth would come to mind for a few seconds and then like Transylvania’s Saxons vanish into the past. Finally, a decade after my visit, I decided that it was time to find out why he was so important to Sighisoara and the world. What I discovered was just as fascinating and unexpected as the exhibit I came across in the Clock Tower.

Click here for: Outer Limits – Hermann Oberth’s Strange Destiny (Rendezvous With An Obscure Destiny #71b)