Donald Trump’s ancestral roots have been tracked to a village in Germany.
Kallstadt, a village of some 1,200 souls, is tucked among vineyard-clad hills and its claim to fame has been the stuffed pork belly speciality it produces. It lies in the southwestern state of Rhineland-Palatinate and is west of Mannheim.
Trump’s grandparents grew up in Kallstadt. The surname had already morphed from Drumpf into Trump long before Friedrick suddenly left poverty to find fortune in the US around 1885 when he was 16.
Maybe Trump’s stinging anti-economic migrant rhetoric is the product then of experience.
Friedrick is said to have left a farewell note on the kitchen table, reunited with some of his sisters already in New York, worked first as a barber and then a hotel manager on the west coast.
His money spinner was opening several bars for gold prospectors in the Yukon during the Gold Rush.
He advertised his Arctic Hotel thus: "For single men the Arctic has excellent accommodations as well as the best restaurant in Bennett, but I would not advise respectable women to go there to sleep as they are liable to hear that which would be repugnant to their feelings -- and uttered, too, by the depraved of their own sex."
Flush from the experience, he bought property in Manhattan when prices were still dirt cheap.
Frederick returned to Kallstadt where he scooped up a wife, Elisabeth Christ. The couple went to live in New York but Elisabeth’s homesickness brought them back to Kallstadt where the authorities caught up with Frederick who had failed to enroll for the mandatory military service. The couple departed again for the US in 1905.
To avoid the string of anti-German sentiment in the US, Trumps adopted a false cloak of Swedish heritage. But a 2014 documentary about Kallstadt focussed on the billionaire Heinz ketchup family which also hails from the village as well as Donald Trump.
"The people in Kallstadt are very reliable, strong people and I feel that about myself - I'm strong and I'm very reliable. I'm on time, I get things done," he says in the film.
"I'm proud to have that German blood, there's no question about it. Great stuff."
