Walks in the vicinity of Hof

“Ringsum”: a circular walk round the town of Hof

Why not walk all the way round Hof ? It can be done if you divide the walk into stages. If you want, you can of course do the whole stretch in one go as a marathon. This new trail “Ringsum” is above all intended for those who simply want a pleasant walk. The individual stretches each make pleasant walking. They can all be combined, so that in the end you have actually made it all round Hof on foot.

The description of the whole walk and of the individual stages can be downloaded in PDF-format.

“With my knapsack on my back…”

As a boy, the writer Jean Paul walked the 10.5 kilometres from Joditz to Hof once a week. Jean Paul moved to the little village of Joditz in 1765, where he grew up as the son of the local minister. There he spent the important years of his childhood, from the age of 2 to the age of 11, which is why he called Joditz his “spiritual birthplace”. In his biography he calls this time the happiest phase of his life, although he grew up in cramped, poor circumstances. In nearly all his novels the village appears under the name of Auenthal or Hukelum or Elterlein. His schoolteacher Knieling has gone into world literature in the form of the literary monument he created for him with his “Life of the Cheerful Schoolmaster Maria Wutz in Auenthal”.  One of the idylls of summer for Jean Paul was the weekly trip to Hof. Carrying a suitable rucksack on his back, he walked to the house of his well-to-do grandparents where he was able to fetch meat, coffee and all the other things which were not available in the village or which could not be bought so cheaply there as in town. His mother gave him a few coins to avoid the impression that everything was being given to them, so that his grandmother, who was generous towards her daughter and grandson but miserly towards the rest of the world, would fill the rucksack with everything on her shopping list.

That is the story which gave birth to the idea of making a footpath through the idyllic valley of the River Saale from Joditz to Hof. This walk was planned and realised by the Joditz Rambling Club together with the town of Hof, the villages of Köditz, Feilitzsch and Töpen, the Hof district council, the private Jean Paul Museum and the Schmidt family from Joditz.

At 10 points between the village square in Joditz and the end of the walk at Hof’s Schlossplatz, information boards with literary texts and explanations provide the necessary background to Jean Paul’s life and works. As a contemporary of Goethe, he was a best-selling author of the time who was read more than any other writer. This waymarked trail goes past Hof’s oldest grammar school, named Jean-Paul-Gymnasium in his honour, and past the site in Unterkotzau where his brother lies buried.

With this mixture of walk and literary information, the initiators hope to create a tourist attraction and also to arouse interest in this author, who was born in Wunsiedel and died in Bayreuth, and who spent most of his life –and often went on long walks – in this region. The decisive experiences which influenced his work as a writer were certainly the ones he made as a child and a youth in Joditz in Hof. Even those who are not so interested in literature at least know that Jean Paul occasionally made fun of the town of Hof, giving it names like “Kuhschnappel”. Nevertheless he did say: “Take a look at Hof: I suffered most here, but I also produced my best works here.”

The route of the walk can be downloaded here.

A more detailed leaflet describing the walk for locals and tourists alike, showing the route of this 10.5 kilometre trail, which can be extended to 12 kilometres, and giving short quotations by Jean Paul which make you want to read more about him at the 10 stops along the path is available free of charge at the district council offices, the tourist-information office in Hof and in the villages of Köditz, Feilitzsch and Töpen. This leaflet also gives brief information about Jean Paul’s life and work and presents some of the places between Hof and Joditz which are connected to him.