Trossingen: how a Swabian farming village taught the world to play the blues
A weaver's copy, a clockmaker thrown out of a rival's workshop, 20 million harmonicas a year and a tune played in orbit. The story of Hohner and the harmonica town of Trossingen.
Trossingen sits on a high plateau between the Black Forest and the Swabian Jura, about 100 kilometres south-west of Stuttgart. It has around 17,500 inhabitants, a state university of music, a federal academy for youth music and a museum holding some 25,000 harmonicas. For a town of its size that is an unusual amount of music. The reason is one small instrument and one family firm, Hohner, which for a time turned this farming village into the harmonica capital of the world.
A weaver copies a souvenir
The story begins before Hohner. Around 1830, a local cloth maker and weaver called Christian Messner got hold of a mouth organ from Vienna, where the free-reed instrument had recently become fashionable. Accounts differ on the details. The European Route of Industrial Heritage says Messner bought one while travelling with a watchmaker neighbour; the town's own history credits a clockmaker neighbour who brought it home. Either way, Messner took it apart, copied it and began making them. Smithsonian Magazine notes that he kept his construction methods strictly within the family.
Secrets in small towns rarely stay secret. From 1840 his nephew Christian Weiss worked independently, and by 1855 Trossingen had two registered harmonica businesses. Then a young local clockmaker entered the picture.
The clockmaker who was shown the door
Matthias Hohner, born in Trossingen in 1833, had worked in the Black Forest clock trade. According to Smithsonian Magazine, he visited Weiss's workshop in 1856 to learn the craft, and Weiss, growing suspicious, threw him out. Hohner set up on his own the following year anyway. In 1857, with his wife and a single helper, he produced his first batch of harmonicas: 650 according to the business reference FundingUniverse, around 700 according to ERIH. Both figures describe a cottage industry.
What happened next is one of the great export stories of German industry. Hohner looked across the Atlantic early. Exports to the United States began in 1862, the year the American Civil War was in full swing, and German emigrants carried the instrument west. ERIH notes that settlers on the American plains were among the most important buyers: a harmonica was cheap, fitted in a pocket and could play the songs people remembered from home.
From cottage to factory
Growth came quickly. By 1877 Hohner employed 86 people producing more than 85,000 instruments a year, still largely by hand. The first machines arrived around 1880. In 1887 output passed one million harmonicas a year, with roughly 80 per cent exported. By around 1900 the figure was in the millions, and FundingUniverse states that about 96 per cent of production then went to the United States.
In 1896 Hohner introduced the model that would outlast them all: the Marine Band, a ten-hole diatonic harmonica on a pearwood comb. The name borrowed glamour from John Philip Sousa and his famous Marine Band, whose image still decorates the box. A patent was filed in 1897, and Hohner says the model may be the longest-running series-production instrument in history.
Matthias Hohner handed the company to his five sons in 1900, two years before his death. One of them, Hans, partly educated in America, ran the firm's first foreign branch, opened in New York in 1901. In 1903 Hohner began making accordions and won a gold medal at the St Louis World's Fair in 1904 for its first model.
Twenty million a year
The numbers from the following decades are hard to picture for a town this size. In 1913 about 3,000 workers made some ten million harmonicas a year. By 1920 it was around 4,000 workers and 20 million harmonicas. A Hohner anniversary history puts output at about 25 million a year around 1925, across Trossingen and a second site in Klingenthal in Saxony. Employment peaked at around 5,000 on the eve of the Second World War. Hohner also absorbed its old rivals: the Weiss company and another local maker, Koch, were taken over in 1921.
Most people do not know how literally the company shaped the town. Historian Martin Haeffner told Smithsonian Magazine that Trossingen built its railway and its town hall with harmonica money, and that for a long time it was simply a Hohner city. Locals referred to the company as die Firma, the firm. The village was granted town rights in 1927, during the celebrations marking a hundred years of the local harmonica industry. The little electric Trossinger Eisenbahn, opened at the end of the 1890s to connect the town to the state railway, survives today as a historic line.
A music town by design
Hohner did not just sell instruments; it created players. In 1931 the company founded a school for the hand harmonica, today the Hohner Konservatorium, together with a music publisher and the German Harmonica Association. The aim was clear: people who learned to play would buy instruments.
The Second World War added an unexpected chapter. In 1943, with Stuttgart under air attack, parts of its music academy were evacuated to Trossingen. A state institute for music education followed in 1944 and 1946. When its future was in doubt, a new music institute was set up in 1951, funded jointly by the Hohner Foundation, the state of Baden-Württemberg, the town and the Hohner company. In 1975 it became the State University of Music Trossingen, one of five state music universities in Baden-Württemberg and today known for its early music department. The federal academy for youth music education followed in the early 1970s. A university of music in a town of 17,000 is, in large part, a harmonica dividend.
The man who steered much of this was Ernst Hohner, the founder's grandson, who had studied in France, Britain and the United States. He led the company from 1920 until 1965, and Trossingen's concert hall is named after him.
Blues, keyboards and outer space
In the American South, something Hohner never planned was happening. Black musicians, playing cheap German harmonicas, developed techniques such as cross harp, playing in a different key from the one the harmonica was built for and bending the draw notes. The result became one of the defining sounds of the blues. Hohner itself names Little Walter and Sonny Terry among the players whose music the Marine Band shaped.
The firm also moved with the times. In the 1960s it built electromechanical keyboards such as the Pianet and the Clavinet. And on 16 December 1965, during the Gemini 6 mission, astronauts Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford surprised mission control by playing Jingle Bells on a tiny harmonica and a set of bells. Hohner and Smithsonian Magazine identify the harmonica as a Hohner Little Lady, a four-hole miniature about 3.5 centimetres long. Few people know that the instruments are still at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, donated by the astronauts in 1967.
Crisis and a Taiwanese rescue
The good times did not last. Cheaper Asian instruments, the decline of the accordion and electronic keyboards squeezed the business. By 1987 the workforce had fallen below 1,000, and Hohner's historical collection was sold to the state of Baden-Württemberg. The family's involvement in running the company ended in 1986. In 1989 the investment firm Kunz Holding took a controlling stake.
In 1997 a majority passed to the Taiwanese instrument group KHS Musical Instruments, through its investment arm. Company histories record painful cuts that year, with the Trossingen workforce reduced from 493 to 200. In 2001 Hohner reported its first profit in more than two decades. In 2015 Hohner's US distribution company was sold to KHS America, tying the brand's largest market more closely to its owner.
Most people do not realise that the harmonica icon of German craftsmanship has been majority-owned from Asia for nearly thirty years, and that the arrangement is what kept the Trossingen workshops alive. Smithsonian Magazine notes that many simpler models are now made in China, while higher-end harmonicas are still produced in Trossingen.
Trossingen today
The scale is modest compared with the 1920s but the craft remains. In 2022 the Schwäbische Zeitung visited the factory and described about 125 employees producing roughly 750,000 harmonicas a year. Reeds are punched from strip metal in about 150 different types, mounted on plates, checked against backlight and tuned individually in sound booths, 192 steps before tuning is complete. The company says its own brass alloy is key to the sound. Hohner also sells around a million plastic recorders a year, most of them in Spain, a reminder that music education is still the business underneath.
The German Harmonica Museum reopened in 2016 in Building V of the old Hohner works, with around 25,000 harmonicas from around the world. Smithsonian Magazine reports that Hohner has made more than a billion harmonicas since 1857.
Not the only harmonica town
One more fact tends to surprise even enthusiasts. Trossingen is the most famous harmonica town, but not home to the oldest maker. That distinction, according to Wikipedia, belongs to C. A. Seydel Söhne in Klingenthal, Saxony, founded in 1847. Germany, it turns out, had two harmonica regions, one in the Swabian highlands and one in the Saxon Vogtland, and between them they supplied much of the world.
What Trossingen teaches
The Trossingen story is often told as a German success, and it is. But it is also an American story, written by emigrants and blues musicians, and an Asian one, written by the owners who kept the workshops running. The constant is the place: a high, windy town where skills passed from weavers to clockmakers to factory workers, and where a music university now trains people who may never touch a harmonica. If you want to understand how a single niche product can build a town, buy a Marine Band and then take the train to Trossingen.
Sources
- Smithsonian Magazine: Industrial espionage and cutthroat competition fuelled the rise of the humble harmonica
- Smithsonian Magazine: Sixty years ago, instruments were played in space
- FundingUniverse: Matth. Hohner AG history
- ERIH: German Harmonica Museum
- Hohner 150th anniversary history (accordions.com)
- Hohner: The Marine Band 125th anniversary
- Hohner: Little Lady
- Immigrant Entrepreneurship: Hans Hohner
- Schwäbische Zeitung: So entsteht bei Hohner eine Mundharmonika
- Trossingen University of Music: History
- Wikipedia (German): Trossingen
- Wikipedia: Hohner
- MMR: KHS America acquires Hohner Inc. USA