Every time there are reports of crashes in the Kiental, Anneliese Wieland (82) remembers her childhood and the guardian angel who must have accompanied her.
Because as an eight-year-old she herself painfully experienced how dangerous the deep slopes are.
Erling -
It must have been spring when the accident happened. Anneliese Wieland, née Sörger, was eight years old when she and three friends sneaked into the Kiental to pick liverworts. The blue flowers bloom between March and April. The Kiental was a forbidden zone for the Erlingen children, the paths were not yet well developed, and railings were only partially available.
The 82-year-old Erlinger grew up in Seefelder Hof, where the parish office is today, right next to the Benedikter grocery store. From the parking lot there, a path leads along the forest directly to the monastery and down a steep staircase into the Kiental. “We were allowed to go this far and no further,” says the sprightly pensioner and points to a small area of grass at the beginning of the stairs. The houses on the right of the path did not exist back then. “That was all meadow.” Many of the trees lining the path to the left weren't there shortly after the war.
Anneliese Wieland, who ran the Cafe Klosterblick on the monastery parking lot until 1986, has not been to the place from which she slid about 30 meters down the steep slope as a child for a long time. And yet she can still steer single-mindedly towards it, recognizes the tree to which, as a schoolgirl, she clung to to pick flowers. “There were the most beautiful liverworts”, right on the slope. It was too dangerous for the friends, so that Anneliese Wieland still knows that she called them disparagingly “cowards” and then dared to go out alone.
“Then my hand slipped off,” says the Erlingerin. She can no longer remember the fall. When she opened her eyes, she was lying down by the Kienbach. She had slipped about 30 meters, "backwards", slashed her left leg and broken her ankle. “I can prove it. I still have a scar on my thigh. "
Her friends had hurried down the back of the hill to check on the eight-year-old. And the first thing Anneliese Wieland then said to them was: “You mustn't tell anyone that I fell above. I won't tell my guiding principle until I can never beat it. ”The friends had to promise her. Because the fear of her father's anger was far greater than any pain at that moment. "That's why we told the parents that I slipped at the top of the stairs." In fact, no one found out about the accident. At some point she even forgot it herself - until someone crashed again in the Kiental.
On the trail of this memory to the Brückerl, where Anneliese Wieland was injured as a child, she met Alfons Echter by chance.
The 69-year-old Erlinger is much younger, but as a child he was also forbidden to go to the Kiental, "otherwise the Kuttamirl comes", the specter of the Erlingen children at the time.
As a child, Echter also had an accident in the Kiental and had kept it from his parents for fear of being punished - he had broken into the ice at the waterfall.
The fairy tale of the white woman (Kuttamirl), who is said to have lived in a cave by the first bridge in the direction of Herrsching, had inspired the Erlingen children as much fear and respect as it made them curious.
“We were always around the cave and looked into the entrances,” says Anneliese Wieland and laughs.
Even today she can't laugh about the fact that she ended up injured in the stream just a few meters away.
Rather, she is grateful to the Guardian Angel who must have accompanied her.
She firmly believes that he will take care of her to this day.
There is no question that she later forbade her own children to go to the Kiental alone.
She knows that these two didn't stick to it either, “but I don't want to know”.
When Anneliese Wieland fell, there were still no cell phones or smartphones.
Very few people in Erling had a telephone.
She and her friends were lucky that shortly after the fall, a woman came by on a bike.
"So they put me on my bike and took me to the village doctor."
Anneliese Wieland couldn't walk for a long time. She was wearing a cast, but the cut was simply bandaged, not sewn. That was the case back then. “You were just sick, that'll be fine. But I didn't miss anything at school, ”she says. Her best friend Ella to this day brought her schoolwork home. An early form of homeschooling, so to speak.
At that time, the old school in Erling taught in two classrooms - one for the fifth to eighth grade and one for the little ones. There was a time when Erling had more business than Herrsching. “There was everything you need here.” For the 82-year-old, who was elected to the local council in 1972, this is still the case today. Many of her school friends still live in Erling - Georg Scheitz senior, for example, or Karl Scherbaum. School friends who, like Anneliese Wieland and Alfons Echter, may have had their experiences in the Kiental - and never talked about it.
