An March 10th the folk festival on Lake Constance was over. The closed sheet of ice had disappeared. The Swiss had to sell their chestnuts and sausages on the bank again. “On March 9, you could see the shipping lanes of the ships on the lake again, on March 16 the ice was so brittle that nobody dared to step on it anymore,” says Julius Pietruske, who was 17 years old at the time.
According to a rather unreliable count, Lake Constance froze over exactly 36 times between the years 875 and 1963. In Alemannic the phenomenon is called Seegfrörne. Whether the lake was actually always frozen in all places is not reliably reported – who had an overview of whether the ice cover had closed over the Obersee, Überlinger See, Untersee and Gnadensee? In 1963, several aerial photographers documented the extraordinary natural event. In front of Nonnenhorn near Lindau, they marked provisional runways on the ice, and the sea resort’s diving tower was converted into a tower.
One of the photographers who documented the sea frosts with his Rolleiflex was the wedding photographer Franz Thorbecke. He also made good money from sightseeing flights and postcards. His son Reinhard Thorbecke has now digitized the best photos. “It was a completely extraordinary time, special trains came, school was cancelled. Butchers and booksellers sold on the ice,” says Thorbecke. Everyone wanted to run the 14 kilometers from Nonnenhorn to Rorschach on the Swiss side. Whether there will be a complete sea freeze again is considered unlikely due to climate change. The prerequisite for this is permafrost in the winter months, but the researchers have been counting fewer and fewer cold winters since 1990.
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