Calw, Chapel

Calw is an attractive spot with interesting half timbered buildings and a cobblestoned pedestrian shopping street. In the 1400s the tiny Gothic St. Nikolaus Chapel, about the size of a small dining room, was built on one of the bridge piles and teeters over the Nagold River.

Hermann Hesse, the 1946 Nobel Prize winner (novelist, poet, essayist), was born in Calw in 1877. One year, while we were sailing on the TSS Stefan Batory, from Rotterdam to Montreal, we met a man who thought he might be a descendant of Mr. Hesse.

The gentleman had just visited Calw looking for information about his genealogy, and was surprised to meet someone who had visited this little old village.