Drumb, Tromb, Tromp, Trum, Trumpff, Dromb … the Trump family name has had various permutations over the past five hundred years, according to the local church register.
Yet nowadays there are few traces of a clan that once had a stronghold in the village of Kallstadt in south-west Germany. There is no plaque outside the house where Friedrich Trump, the grandfather of US presidential hopeful Donald, was born in 1869.
The only hint is in the few gravestones, overgrown with shrubs bearing the name in the local cemetery, and the faint outline where once “Trump” was set in wrought iron above a bunch of silver grapes at a winery that went bankrupt several years ago. “I don’t see what all the fuss is about,” said Hans-Joachim Bender, a retired vintner, sitting at his dining room table looking out onto the vineyards he used to farm. “If you’re here to talk about Donald Trump, I don’t have an opinion about him one way or another except sometimes he’d be wiser to hold his tongue.” Like everyone here, Bender pronounces the name in the local Palatinate dialect as “Droomp”.
However long one looks at 73-year-old Bender, it is hard to see any likeness with the New York property tycoon. There is none of the blonde double combover hair, and unlike Trump – a teetotaller – Bender enjoys a drop or two of his own homemade Riesling wine. And yet, like several people in this village of 1,200 inhabitants, he is related to the business magnate.
“My great great grandma was Friedrich’s mother,” he says. “But I don’t know what that makes me to Donald.” His grandmother was one of the last Trumps. And, he casually remarks, his grandfather was a Heinz – as in ketchup.
“Both the Trumps and the Heinzes came from the village,” explains Simone Wendel, a Kallstadter filmmaker, who pulls out a family tree to explain her own Trump connection. “My mother’s cousin was married to the grandson of Donald Trump’s great uncle. Or something like that.”
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