The strongest men

When Anton Geierstanger finished school in the mid-1950s, there were virtually no training opportunities in Ruhpolding. The young lads started to work either for a farmer or at a sawmill. The 14-year-old Anton was one of the few to find a job as a worker with the forestry office. Because he behaved well and was reliable, he was offered an apprenticeship contract after two years - which was something of an accolade in those days. Only strong, powerful, tough men are suited to becoming woodcutters. “Woodcutter was a respected profession in Ruhpolding, the most respected of all,” says Anton Geierstanger.

In times past, the woodcutters were occupied with logging from spring to autumn. Because timber was easier to debark in summer, it dried out better and could therefore also be transported away with less difficulty. In these months, the men lived with their party in a wooden cabin in the forest during the week. A party usually consisted of four woodcutters. Their working day began at seven o’clock in the morning. “But we often had to set off an hour earlier, depending on where we had a chop,“ recalls Anton. A “chop” is the deforestation and clearing of a wooded area. For the lunch break, the men brought a meal, often leftovers from the evening meal. They had to prepare this themselves every day in their parlour, such as “muas”, a simple flour dish made of flour, water and fatty lard. “I didn’t like it,” recalls Anton Geierstanger. He preferred dumplings, sauerkraut and a piece of bacon, which was also good to eat cold the next day. The men also took noodles, tinned meat and cheese spread with them. “The problem was that nothing kept long, after all there was no way to keep food cool”. In late autumn, the woodcutters had to gather the tree trunks cut down in summer in a so-called “ganter" (wood pile) to then bring them down into the valley in winter, fastened to the sledge. This dangerous transportation did not come to an end until 1965, when the first forest roads were built in Ruhpolding.

Anton bought a chainsaw at the end of the 50s, when he started to work in a party of woodcutters. This made him one of the first. It was normal for the men to purchase their tools themselves. The chainsaw cost 1,200 mark, Anton still remembers this very precisely, and that it was a lot of money back then, despite the state subsidy. “But it made you much faster, so you could earn more”. This is because the men were paid at piece rates. Much earlier, there used to be timber masters who employed their own hands. From the start of the 20th century, the forestry offices themselves employed the woodcutters. The respective party foreman negotiated their pay in advance.

Although life as a woodcutter was hard, full of privation and dangerous, it was still also free and self-determined, away from the constraints of village life. “The nicest thing was the peaceful atmosphere in the morning. Or when we climbed quickly onto the Hörndl at midday, or slept for half an hour longer on the meadow. Nobody said anything about it, after all we still did our work,” says Anton Geierstanger.

He worked as a woodcutter for some years, he was even in the lumberjack world championship in Wisconsin in America, and was later a master at the woodsman school in the Laubau. Anton still loves to roam through the forest today. He says: “I had the best job in the world.”