The summer of 2003 will officially end in another week, at least according to the calendar. Before it does, I want to write a few lines about it, since it has been a very eventful period for me in terms of establishing personal contacts with other Hobohms.

In April I learnt that I would have to go to Berlin on a business trip on Tuesday, 6 May. Since I hadn’t been to Berlin for a long time, and still had a considerable amount of unutilized annual leave, I decided to add a few private days to this trip and fly to Berlin on 3 May. On the one hand, this enabled me to do extensive sightseeing in Berlin, the center of which in particular (around the Potsdamer Platz, Pariser Platz, Brandenburger Tor, Reichstag, etc.) has changed considerably since my last visit in the mid-1990s. On the other, it gave me an opportunity to convert some of my hitherto “virtual” contacts with some of the Hobohms I had come to know through my work on Treffpunkt Hobohm into genuine personal contacts.

In this context it was particularly important for me to get to know Rainer Hobohm personally, since we had only recently confirmed a direct family relationship between us. Despite being very busy with a move from one apartment to another at the time, Rainer agreed to take the time for a meeting, and came to my Hotel in Dahlem on the afternoon of 3 May. From there he took me to the Trautenaustraße in the suburb of Wilmersdorf, where I had been born almost fifty years ago in the Trautenau-Klinik and which was, coincidentally, just around the corner from the apartment he was moving out of. Although the clinic has since shut down and the building is now used as an adult education centre, it was nevertheless a strange feeling to see it for the first time.

After spending some time looking for an open restaurant, which proved to be quite a challenge on a Saturday afternoon in Berlin, Rainer took me to one of his regular pubs, which had fortunately nor shut down for the weekend. This allowed us to chat, and exchange information and views, in the very pleasant atmosphere of a typical Berlin pub. I received a particularly nice surprise when Rainer handed me a CD-ROM with scans of the original of his ancestry book, from which he had taken the data provided on his family page. These scans of the ancestry book, with its extremely beautiful cover page and very informative contents, have now been uploaded into the Treffpunkt. This very pleasant afternoon with Rainer drew to a close at around 7.00 p.m., when I had to make my way to my next appointment with an old classmate.

I spent the next day, Sunday 4 May, in Berlin with old school friends, but on Monday I took a trip to Magdeburg, where I had made an appointment with the musicologist and Telemann-Specialist Wolf Hobohm . Wolf, who is still extremely active despite his recent retirement, had taken a few hours off from the III International August-Gottfried-Ritter Organ Competition, which was being held in Magdeburg under his auspices at the time, to show me Magdeburg and tell me of the local Hobohms. I thus received a very comprehensive guided tour through the old and new sights of the city, of which the visits to the cathedral and the monastry of “our dear ladies” (where the organ competition was being held) were the absolute highlights.

It was a particularly interesting experience for me to be in the company of a namesake who is very well known in the city, and was constantly being greeted by passers-by with such salutations as “Guten Tag Herr Hobohm” or “Hallo Herr Hobohm”. To hear these greetings, and realize that they were not addressed to me, was something completely new for me, since I am usually the only Hobohm far and wide and thus the only recipient of such greetings. Well, after all Magdeburg and its environs are the home ground of the Hobohms, and there just are more Hobohms there than I am used to. After a very nice lunch in a newly opened restaurant in the old city center I made my way back to the station and Berlin, und Wolf returned to his organ competition.

The official part of my business trip, which began the next day, also took me to Cologne, where the family of Peter-Uwe Hobohm lives. Although I unfortunately didn’t have the time to meet them, I was nevertheless able to call Peter-Uwe and his daughter Anke from the hotel, and so refresh our old acquaintance dating back to the early years of the Treffpunkt.

Around Whitsun I had another opportunity to travel to Germany, and in particular to Rothenburg ob der Tauber, where I had been invited by my old school, the Reichsstadt-Gymnasium, to give a lecture to the graduating class on the work of my employer UNIDO. I used this trip to Central Franconia to call on our family chronicler Richard Hohbaum in Gerabronn. Although Richard is sadly not in the best of health, as he had also indicated in his letter on the postponement of the Hobohm family reunion, which had originally been scheduled for precisely that Whitsun weekend, he was full of joie de vivre and it was really nice to meet him and so have a small family reunion after all. He introduced me to his father, took me through his beautiful old house, the former administrative centre (“Oberamtei”) of Gerabronn that he and his wife had personally renovated, and showed me some of the exhaustive genealogical records on the Hobohm clan that he maintains on specially designed index cards. The stay in Gerabronn was enriched by a wonderful lunch in a very elegant restaurant next door to the Oberamtei before I had to drive off again to Nürnberg to catch my flight to Vienna.

In early August I was able to undertake a further trip to Germany, this time directly into the Hobohm heartland, the Magdeburger Börde. My son Omar had signed up for a holiday job in Hötensleben (the birthplace of my father and his grandfather), and I had traveled there to pick him up and bring him back home to Vienna. Being in the neighbourhood, I naturally wanted to use the opportunity to spend some time searching for my roots. Owing to the shortage of time, however, I decided to limit myself to a drive to Wormsdorf, where my oldest known ancestors lived. A search through the electronic telephone directory in the Intenet had revealed that there were still three Hobohm families in the village - a family Hans-Georg and Gertrud Hobohm, a family Heinrich and Regine Hobohm, and a Ms. Wally Hobohm. Holding a copy of my family tree in my hand, I rang all three doorbells and was very well received everywhere.

The visit to the family Heinrich/Regine Hobohm proved to be particularly poignant - an inscription over their front door revealed that their house had been built in 1845 by a certain H.-C. Hobohm. As the present son-in-law of the family, whom I met there, pointed out, this H.-C. Hobohm would almost certainly have known my oldest known ancestor Johann Christian Hobohm, who had spent his whole life from 1777 to 1849 in Wormsdorf. Perhaps they might even have been related. These are the interesting puzzles that emerge from such look back into our genealogy. Of course, we will continue to look for the answers to these puzzles.

Sarwar Hobohm

September 2003