Nick Zortea is probably not even aware of how much he stands in the tradition of the forest day in every respect. It’s not just his swing boat from 1949 that he spent a year renovating with his father Reiner and mother Inge and the association Dietesheimer Schiffschaukel eV, which was founded specifically for this purpose movement stops. With a jokingly spoken sentence, he revives another, long-cultivated culture. “Maybe I’ll find a woman here to marry into a showman’s family,” he says with a wink. “Then I would bring my swing boat into the marriage.”
At 28, the sporty young man is in the prime of marriage, as people used to say, when Frankfurt’s most beautiful fair still had “Wäldcheszettel” (“Wäldcheszettel”): Visitors who were still unbound were probably already sticking themselves together in the 19th century, as has been handed down, Label on hat or cap with very clear words like “I’m still available” or “Looking for a woman”. Nowadays, since there is also a “rainbow area”, “I’m here without a man” would no longer be reduced to one gender as it was in the past.
Childhood memory acquired and restored
Zortea doesn’t have a note, and he doesn’t even wear a hat for good reason: it would fly off his head if he performed his trick again: the rollover. This is on the middle of the five swings at the Dietesheimer Schiffschaukel – or do you say ships? – possible. Many of these specimens are no longer available in Germany. Zortea bought “his” swing boat in 2016 after the showman family Hollenbach had suddenly arrived at the local notch the year before without this challenge, which he and many Dietesheim residents loved. “At that time, a DIN standard for temporary constructions was changed in such a way that the Hollenbachs would have had to bear enormous costs for a technical overhaul, which they no longer wanted to invest,” says Zortea.
He was extremely sad because this swing boat was the highlight of the curb in his hometown a few kilometers down the Main from Hanau. On Wednesdays before the curb, as a little boy, he had always been waiting on the fairground for the Hollenbachs to finally start setting up. “We don’t have that much in the village, there was the carousel and the swing boat,” he says. “We all really missed it then, almost everyone in our village can roll over.” So he decided with his parents to found a club and buy the swing and renovate it himself. In 2019 there was the 70th Year anniversary the Renaissance with its own festival in Dietesheim. Some of his fellow citizens have traveled to the Forest Day in the past few days to demonstrate their skills at Zortea. “But there were also people who read this on the Internet, who even came from behind Gelnhausen or even further just for us,” says Zortea. There were 17 rollovers on the first day alone.