They are mostly industrious, friendly and indispensable, and yet the innkeeper’s daughters only play a shadowy existence on the big world stage. That’s strange enough, because this species isn’t usually a deadbeat.
In a tavern in the Rottal, a beer dumpling really wailed, finally letting the innkeeper’s daughter know in a plaintive voice: “I think I’m going to die now!” The girl was not impressed and only whispered to him: “But ned in there!”
If you take a closer look at the topic of innkeepers, you soon end up in the Bavarian State Ministry for Food, Agriculture and Forestry, which is currently – unsurprisingly – run by an innkeeper’s daughter. Michaela Kaniber (CSU) likes to say with pride that she is an innkeeper dirndl. Luckily it’s not like it used to be, when boys from the country put forward the thesis that you might have to do silly dirndl (deandln) hair more often.
Minister Kaniber, who would certainly be able to defend herself in this regard, said years ago when she visited a folk festival in Eichstätt: “I’m an innkeeper’s dirndl, I like to have a beer.” And at the Namberger inn in Hörpolding, she said that as a host dirndl she insisted on stopping by the kitchen.
Kaniber undoubtedly belongs to the pithy division of the innkeeper’s daughters. But there is also a softer genre, as it appears in Polanski’s film “Dance of the Vampires”. There, a bloodsucker bites the neck of the beautiful innkeeper’s daughter Sarah. With Kaniber, vampires shouldn’t risk it. Federal Agriculture Minister Cem Özdemir (Greens) will be able to confirm at any time that the minister extends her claws faster than western hero Lucky Luke draws his Colt.
The landlord’s daughter Emerenz Meier, who was a writer, was less robust. She finally tried her luck in America, where she really perished. In general, far too many innkeepers’ daughters have experienced sheer misery: the writer Lena Christ, who was harassed to the death by her mother, or all those poor creatures who were exposed to the violence of the men heated by the beer.
No wonder that in 1886 Paul Gauguin painted an innkeeper’s dirndl whose face does not reveal a smile. Some host daughters stand in the light, many others in the shadow. On the radio station Bayern 2, an innkeeper recently told that her mother had warned her: “Deandl, learn something Gscheids!”