The Wildermuth Clan of Rielingshausen — the Famous Cousins, and Robert Earl's Return

Rielingshausen — a small farming village about seven miles northeast of Marbach am Neckar, in Baden-Württemberg — is, in the words of the local historian Heinz Erich Walter, “the cradle of the Wildermuth-Clan.” Two documents in the family papers open up what that means: Walter’s essay on the clan’s famous members, and Robert Earl Wildermuth’s own account of walking the village’s church and cemetery in the early 1990s.

Part I — The famous Wildermuths (after Heinz Erich Walter)

Ottilie Wildermuth (1817–1877) is the best-known bearer of the name — a writer, raised in Marbach, whose main street the town later named Wildermuthstraße. Per Walter, her own link to Rielingshausen was distant: she came into the clan by marriage. In 1843 she married the university professor Johann David Wildermuth (1807–1885) of Pleidelsheim, who had climbed from a poor family to a teaching post and the university at Tübingen, where the couple settled and Ottilie’s writing flourished. The Pleidelsheim Wildermuths traced back to Johann Peter Wildermuth, born 1682 in Rielingshausen, who married in Pleidelsheim and died of smallpox in 1721 — Ottilie’s husband was his great-grandson.

Their son was the psychiatrist Dr. Hermann Wildermuth (1852–1907), director of the Stetten asylum in the Rems valley and, at the last, head of the Board of Health in Stuttgart. Hermann’s sons carried the name further still: one, Hans, was himself a noted psychiatrist; the other, Eberhard Wildermuth (1890–1952), became the most publicly prominent of all. A lawyer and a decorated major in the First World War, Eberhard was in the Second World War the commander of Le Havre, remembered (per Walter) for conducting the city’s defense “with an acknowledged level of decency.” After the Reich’s collapse he entered democratic politics, served as economics secretary for Württemberg-Hohenzollern, and in 1949 joined Chancellor Adenauer’s first cabinet as the Federal Republic’s first minister for housing. He died in Tübingen in 1952. Walter records a telling anecdote: asked under the Third Reich to furnish an “Aryan” family tree, Eberhard pointed to the illustrious names on his mother’s side — unaware of his own Wildermuth descent. His biographer Kohlhaas noted drily that the name Wildermuth — literally “wild spirit/courage” — “had originally certainly not been given to a pussyfooter.”

Walter even traces the name into Swiss literature: the novelist Max Frisch (1911–1991), author of Homo Faber and The Fire Raisers, recorded in his diary that his maternal grandfather was a Wildermuth whose father “came from Württemberg” — a craftsman who had left Rielingshausen or Pleidelsheim for Switzerland around 1850, the same mid-century emigration decade in which Johann Michael left for Ohio.

The Wildermuth mayors — and a murder on the road

The clan ran the village for over a century. Walter lists the Wildermuth mayors (Schultheißen) of Rielingshausen: Zacharias (1640–1672), Jakob (1721–1740), and Adam (1740–1762). Adam left office alive but met a grim end. On the night of 23 May 1768, the retired ex-mayor was found dead on the road between Oppenweiler and Strümpfelbach — robbed and murdered by one of the criminal bands then roaming the Mainhardter Forest, after he had carelessly shown off a purse of 100 Taler at a guest house. The band of some forty was not broken up until 1772, when nineteen were beheaded and the rest sentenced to hard labor.

How close do the two lines come? Rielingshausen, 1682

Chuck’s own Wildermuth line and the famous one nearly touch — in the same village, in the same year. Both run back to Rielingshausen Wildermuths born in 1682:

• Johannes Wildermuth Jr. — Chuck’s seven-times-great-grandfather — was baptized in Rielingshausen on 28 December 1682, married Margaretha Grayers there in 1708, and raised nine children in the village through 1722. He is the Wildermuth who stayed; his line ran on locally and then through Großaspach until Johann Michael emigrated in 1847.
• Johann Peter Wildermuth — the famous line’s founder — was, per Walter, also born in Rielingshausen in 1682, but left for Pleidelsheim, where he died of smallpox in 1721. He was the great-grandfather of Ottilie’s husband Johann David, and so the ancestor of Hermann and Eberhard.

Are they the same man? No. Johannes was demonstrably alive in Rielingshausen — baptizing children — in 1720 and 1722, after Johann Peter’s 1721 death in Pleidelsheim; and Johannes and Johann Peter are distinct Lutheran baptismal names. Two different men.

Brothers, then? Possibly. Johannes’s father, Johannes Wildermuth Sr. (b. 1650, d. 1694), is recorded with “at least one son” and room for more. If Johann Peter was also a son of Johannes Sr., the two would be brothers — and Johannes Sr. would be the common ancestor joining Chuck to Ottilie, Hermann, Eberhard, and even Max Frisch’s Württemberg grandfather. But two sons both born in 1682 would have to be twins, so first cousins is the likelier reading, with “1682” for Johann Peter an approximation.

The one missing document is Johann Peter’s parentage. Chuck’s side is traced (Johannes Jr. ← Johannes Sr. ← …); Johann Peter’s parents appear nowhere in this archive. Find them in the Rielingshausen parish register and the question resolves either way.

The honest verdict: the two lines come within a single generation and a single village of meeting. Chuck descends from the Wildermuths who stayed in Rielingshausen (Johannes Jr.); the famous ones from the branch that left for Pleidelsheim (Johann Peter). They are near-certainly kin — plausibly first cousins, conceivably brothers — but as of the record, no documented link joins them.

Part II — Robert Earl’s return to Rielingshausen

Two centuries and an ocean away, Robert Earl Wildermuth — Chuck’s grandfather — went looking for the village himself. His travelogue records the search. He found Marbach first (Schiller’s town, and Ottilie’s, with its Wildermuthstraße and its thick-walled hilltop old town), then, “after three trips,” the village itself: Rielingshausen, “the town where the surname Wildermuth is said to have originated,” with nineteen Wildermuths in the local telephone directory and Großaspach — his own great-grandfather’s emigration village — twenty miles east.

At the village he found the old Evangelical church, built in 1752, its interior “immaculately clean… the old wooden pews shone as if they were newly lacquered,” with a high, narrow pulpit “raised up about eight feet.” He wanted photographs but was so watched by a suspicious cleaning woman that, in his own words, “I was intimidated… I took no pictures inside the church.”

Then the cemetery. Carved into the sandstone wall by the gate were the names of the village’s war dead — “among those names… were listed twenty-three Wildermuths.” Inside, tombstone after tombstone carried the name. Two elderly women tending a grave stopped to talk, and Robert Earl tried out his broken German:

“Meine Name Wildermuth ist. Ich bin ein Amerikaner. My Grossvater nach Amerika aus Grossaspach im 1847.”

(My name is Wildermuth. I am an American. My grandfather [went] to America from Großaspach in 1847.)

The women “started speaking rapidly in German and directed me to… the Wildermuth section of the grave-yard. It was very eerie,” he wrote, “to see so many tombstones with the name Wildermuth on them” — the graves kept in the German manner, each plot “carefully covered with freshly cut evergreen boughs.” The war-memorial wall he described survives in the archive in Chuck’s own 2018 photographs — the same “twenty-three Wildermuths” Robert Earl counted, the family that stayed.

Sources: Heinz Erich Walter, “Members of the Wildermuth-Clan” (Rielingshausen local-history essay, English translation, family papers) — clan facts paraphrased; Robert Earl Wildermuth’s typewritten Württemberg travelogue (family papers), quoted from his own text. Both transmitted by Chuck Eesley, 2026. See also the Rielingshausen war-memorial artifact, the Rielingshausen church, cemetery, and town square, and the emigrant Johann Michael Wildermuth.