It’s the result that everyone wanted, at least afterwards. And yet it is a difficult day for Anneliese Laute. Not because she has to bring out snacks in trays, as has so often been the case in recent years. But because it will probably be the very last time. She and her brother Hans Strohmayer have just signed the contract, right under the many red and pink geraniums that they planted again this year, although the pub on the Streichen has been closed since autumn. Now it is part of the “Bavarian Cultural Heritage”. It is the third property owned by the foundation, which describes itself as a “Bavarian National Trust”.
In November Anneliese Lautes’ other brother Franz died, who had been the landlord up here for almost his entire life, painting. Anneliese Laute is approaching 80, and Hans Strohmayer is no longer the youngest either. They would have loved to sell the tavern, which is located next to the famous Streichenkirche high above the Achental, to the Schleching community so that everything can stay the way their brother left them. And then the argument began down in the valley. Most local councils were in favor, but others were all the more bitter against it. You and Mayor Josef Loferer would have loved to have seen a local building contractor and two external donors. But what if in a few years or even a generation or two it had occurred to someone that the widely famous Wirtshaus am Streichen, a landmark of the whole of Chiemgau, should become a private house or a wellness hotel or a chalet village, how they have become more and more over the past few years over in Tyrol? Soon there was talk of the threatened “home sale”, and the rifts in the 1,800-inhabitant community of Schleching became deeper and deeper.
There would have been no shortage of buyers for such a sale, and many would have offered Anneliese Laute and her brother even more than the Bavarian Cultural Heritage Foundation has now paid for the inn, including the land and the forest down to the valley. But the heirs of the Streichwirt did not want to sell off their inheritance, they wanted to have it preserved. And that is exactly what the Bavarian Cultural Heritage Foundation, founded in 2018, has set itself the task of. She became aware of the inn through reports in the SZ and has teamed up with the family foundation of Yvonne and Thomas Wilde, who live in Schleching, have sold their company and have since supported projects in the region with their non-profit foundation.
The Wildes had previously promised the “strike friends” group a financial contribution to keep the inn. But without any money from the community, it has only been enough since the Cultural Heritage Foundation got involved in June. That also made a pending referendum superfluous, which only heated the minds in Schleching further. The argument that buying the community’s identity-creating inn would take away any financial leeway for many years to come was also off the table. Many roads lead to the strike, says Mayor Loferer in the meantime, and it is good that this is now being followed.
The former president of the state parliament, Alois Glück, looks over at the Geigelstein. As a member of parliament for Chiemgau, he has already experienced the bitter battles over the ultimately prevented ski swing over there and the nature reserve that was introduced 30 years ago instead. Glück worked behind the scenes for the preservation of the Streichenwirt, and when the Cultural Heritage Foundation emerged as a savior, the Traunstein District Administrator Siegfried Walch also began to persuade them on the phone. Glück did not sign a purchase contract that day, but was the first member to sign the formal founding document of the strike friends as the local group of “Kulturerbe Bayern”.
In everything that will happen in the future about painting, an advisory board will have a say in which, for the time being, a prank friend, two representatives of Bavarian cultural heritage, the Wilde couple as well as Mayor Loferer and his deputy Elfie Bachmann will sit. Exactly as it is, everything cannot stay on the painting. The kitchen needs to be modernized, as well as the few small guest rooms, and maybe even a few more will be built in the threshing floor and in the stable. In two weeks, the inventory will begin by laser measurement, announced the architect Paul Mößmer, who was in the service of the Archdiocese of Munich-Freising for a long time and has been working for the Foundation for Cultural Heritage for a year.
The foundation’s chairman of the board is another former state parliament president, Glück’s predecessor Johann Böhm. The ensemble consisting of the church and the 600-year-old former sacristan’s house and today’s Wirtshaus am Streichen is “pure Bavaria, you can’t imagine it being more beautiful,” says the Lower Franconian Böhm, who, in his own words, liked to drive the 400 kilometers to Schleching for the contract is. Others speak of the “jewel” or the “gem” and appreciate the civic commitment that has led to this result. Mayor Loferer has to listen to some things with his arms crossed, but he also applauds the district administrator. “Let’s make it a place to come together,” says Walch about the inn and announces “a peace beer”. Then Anneliese Laute brings the snack, for the last time.