Trump’s ancestral village not talking about him
Herbert Trump did not want to talk about it. Neither did Ilse Trump. Ursula Trump, who runs the Trump bakery in the next village, eventually relented, and sighed: “You can’t choose your relatives, can you?”
The relative in question is Donald Trump, president of the US, multimillionaire, the most powerful man on the planet and a seventh cousin of Ursula Trump’s husband — though in Kallstadt, a village nestled in the rolling hills of Germany’s southwestern wine country, he is simply “Donald.”
That is not least to avoid confusion with the other Trumps (or “Droomps,” as the name is pronounced in Palatinate dialect) listed in a phone book for the area: Beate Trump, a podiatrist in another nearby village, for example, or Justin Trump, a teenager whose friends say he sometimes gets teased for his quaff of orangeblond hair.
But the Weisenborns and the Geissels and the Benders and the Freunds in Kallstadt are related to Trump, too. “Practically half the village is,” chuckled mayor Thomas Jaworek, before quickly adding: “I’m not.”
Both of Trump’s paternal grandparents, Friedrich and Elisabeth Trump, were born in Kallstadt, home now to 1,200 inhabitants. Growing up directly opposite
each other, they were baptized in the village church and married a few miles down the road before emigrating to the US.
In Kallstadt, Friedrich Trump was a popular guy. Contemporaries described him as “polite,” a man who “lived quietly and withdrawn” and had an “unblemished way of life.”
Kallstadt’s relationship with Donald Trump is more troubled, which may explain why there are no signposts pointing to the ancestral Trump home.
And little aside from the names on a few graves on the village cemetery hints at Kallstadt’s most famous grandson.