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The story of the gingerbread houses began many years ago, during my apprenticeship as a confectioner, when my master allowed me for the first time to put my own gingerbread house creation next to his into our Christmas decoration shop window.
Many, many years went by, until I tried again to build a fancy gingerbread house. That was at the Auhof Restaurant opposite the university entrance in Linz-Urfahr. We needed a new Christmas decoration. I asked our main baker: Would he sell me a couple of kilos of his gingerbread dough? I designed a house, double the size of my master’s house a few years ago. To make all the parts stay in shape we glued them on carton. It ended up as the most beautiful gingerbread house I had ever made.
In the following years we continued. But we prepared the dough according to our own recipe, which we had received as a present from a good friend. We did not mount the gingerbread pieces on carton any more. Our new design was well tested to ensure stability without any non-genuine assistance, so that the whole house became edible. With Christmas approaching we found out that more and more guests came mainly because they were curious to see our new gingerbread house creation. What kind of artful little house does Peter Forstner come up with this year?
When the era of our Auhof Restaurant came to its end, we moved down the river Danube to Lower Austria, to the Castle of Luberegg, the summer castle of Kaiser Franz (Emperor Francis of Austria), opposite the monastery of Melk on the entrance to the Wachau Valley. The castle’s restaurant was really only a summer term place to visit. This is the reason why we looked for a possibility to extend business at least until Christmas. We had to find something to stay attractive and interesting to customers in the “dead season”.
Our experience with different models of houses at the Auhof Restaurant permitted us to confidently plan and finally undertake something larger: This is how the first Gingerbread Houses Arts Exhibition came into being in Advent of 1994.
Once upon a time ... – this is how all fairy tales begin. So did the story of Kaiser Franz Gingerbread Houses.
It’s always difficult at the beginning: For our first exhibition in Luberegg Castle we built seven gingerbread houses, following old traditional designs and our own conceptions. We dedicated and arranged a separate restaurant room into an exhibition site with a miniature landscape around the seven houses. In front of the restaurant entrance door we put a black slate: “Gingerbread Houses”. We waited. Within the first two hours we sold three houses. This encouraged us to produce some more houses on stock. But it took almost a week until we sold a fourth one. In three weeks it was 16 houses, but we still had the seven pieces of the exhibition. What now?
We offered the houses to the regional TV studios for auction. In vain. At the point where we were ready to bring the houses to a nearby children’s village on December 23, 1994, at 7 o’clock in the morning the following things happened:
The telephone rang. Someone, whom we thought to be a fairy out of her tale, asked us in a very gentle but a little excited voice: Did we still have those gingerbread houses? If so, could we bring them into Vienna, to the central Vienna TV station? As fast as possible? Because they were already on air there. In the Holy Night TV broadcast “Light into the Dark” our houses were presented. Every year since then our houses are part of their regular Christmas TV program.
It was not always sunshine though. In fact, we had some breakdowns until we mastered the medium gingerbread. One of these “accidents” was really a catastrophe: The formal exhibition opening was planned for the evening, with the press, television and VIPs. When we entered the exhibition room in the morning of that day everything seemed destroyed ‑ gingerbread decorations on the ground, gingerbread walls and roofs broken, gingerbread trees and chimneys dented and hanging down. We were looking on 500 wasted hours of work. We had simply underestimated the humidity in the old summer castle of the Austrian Emperor.
Since it was far beyond reality to try to rebuild the whole exhibition a second time, we replaced the humid houses by houses we had on stock to be sold, we dried the bigger exhibition models with hairdryers and applied new icing. Ten minutes before the official opening the exhibition was ready. But I would prefer not to go through this another time.
In the following years the degree of perception by the public was multiplied by television and print media as well. The fairy tale continued.
The biggest disaster happened in 2002, when the waters of the high Danube destroyed the Castle of Luberegg. We thought there would not be any gingerbread houses exhibition that year. But we expected 6 000 registered guests who had already booked their trip to the Danube. We successfully negotiated with the owners of MS Austria lying in the harbour below the Melk monastery. “Art on Board”, an exhibition on a Danube ship, became a story that had never happened before. The result was a new record that broke all precedent numbers of visitors.
It became possible to continue this exhibition, when we took over Faberhof Manor in Freinberg on the river Danube between Passau and Engelhartszell in 2004.
The Gingerbread Houses Arts Exhibition became known outside of Austria for the first time in 2005 when we succeeded in attracting visitors from Switzerland, Germany, Japan and Taiwan. More and more curious and art loving travellers explicitly came to see the gingerbread houses. Because we were so close to Passau, the Bavarian Television Company dedicated several broadcastings to our exhibition.
The period of Faberhof Manor ended with the 14th exhibition 2008. It was one of the most lavish ones, including a couple of unconventional houses (to look into the future) and a gingerbread replica of a partition of the “Silberzeile” (part of the rich houses on the market place of Schärding, the district capital).
The year 2009 brought about a new challenge at a new site: The 15th Kaiser Franz Gingerbread Houses Arts Exhibition took place in the Monastery of Zwettl in Lower Austria.
This year’s exhibition, already the 17th of its kind, will for the first time include ethnographic topics as many of the gingerbread house models are inspired by old models of folk tradition.
With this annual Advent exhibition we want to enable our visitors to take a small part of the fragrance and joy of Christmas into their homes, as a journalist once created the motto of our exhibition:
“If you are looking for Christmas, you’ll find it here”.
Peter Forstner and the Gingerbread Team
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