Over the years, Konrad Fischer, skipper of the German fishing vessel Maria, has found some strange and alarming things in his fishing nets, including WWII water mines and, once, a corpse, according to The Local DE.
But the veteran fisherman had never found anything like the bottle he pulled from his nets in March 2014: a 101-year-old message in a bottle, signed by a man named Richard Platz.
This message in a bottle was, and still remains, among the oldest bottled messages ever found.
“I had it in my hand, but then a colleague told me there was something in it,” Fischer told the Kieler Nachrichten newspaper. Apparently, he nearly threw it back in the water! “When I saw the date,” he added, “I got really excited.”
“If the message is really this old,” Fischer went on, “maybe a museum would be interested.”
Well, a museum was interested–my friends at the Internationales Maritimes Museum in Hamburg! As a matter of fact, I visited the museum in 2015 and got to see the message in a bottle in person.
Notice the word “Kiel” embossed on the bottle? Kiel is a northern German port town on the Baltic sea. Incredibly, Konrad Fischer caught this message in a Kiel bottle not far from the city. When you look at the size of the Baltic sea and consider that this bottled message drifted around the sea floor for a 101 years, it’s just incredible that it surfaced so close to “home”.
According to The Local DE, the Internationales Maritimes Museum in Hamburg determined that Richard Platz’s granddaughter, Angela Erdmann, was alive and well in Berlin. Naturally, the discovery of her grandfather’s 101-year-old bottled letter blew her mind!
“It was almost unbelievable,” she told the German news agency DPA. “[It] was a pretty moving moment,” Erdmann said of getting to hold the message and bottle. “Tears rolled down my cheeks.”
Angela Erdmann’s grandfather, Richard Platz, had sent the message in a bottle in 1913 while on a nature appreciation hike. He was just 20 years old. Unfortunately, Richard Platz died in 1946 at age 54, before he got a chance to meet his granddaughter Angela.
But the most intriguing thing about this 101-year-old message in a bottle is that some of it is illegible. Like many of the messages I have found, the ink is faded, and researchers hope to eventually piece together the rest of the message. What else hides in those invisible lines? There must be more to the story. I have been very lucky to reveal hidden writing through careful work, like with this message, and this one, and this one. Platz’s message may require slightly higher technology, though.
Who was Richard Platz?
Angela never met her grandfather, but his 101 year old message in a bottle gave him a final chance to speak, and gave her a chance to get to know him.
In an interview with Verfuhrer Berlin, she shared what she had learned about him since his bottled message had been found. I’m translating here, so this may not be perfect…:
“He was the father of my mother Sieglinde and her sister Gudrun, who was born in 1920. My mother was born in 1921. He loved his family above all and tried to educate them in terms of mutual love, understanding and tolerance.
He was in World War I, was wounded, but recovered. But he developed heart disease. In 1946 he died of appendicitis during the reconstruction.
Only now [with help from family] did I find out who my grandfather really was: a great man. He organized walks for young people (hikers) all over Germany by bike or on foot, was a member of the Social Democratic Party, worked in the Chamber of Culture, and was responsible for the school library, loved literature, was a writer himself and an outspoken family man who adored his family. And, from the very beginning onward, he moved with his small family through Germany, first on foot and then mainly with a canoe, where all had to paddle diligently. Later they even had a small outboard motor, which somewhat simplified the travel. Thousands of kilometers they traveled from Berlin to the Baltic Sea, to East Prussia to the home of my grandmother Ella, his wife, or to the Thuringian Forest. Mostly they spend the night in a small tent.
[The message in a bottle] came at just the right time, because after my crash in 2010 I had lost everything I had laboriously built up over many years. I was sick for a long time and only since mid-2013 are things going slowly back uphill. With the help of dear friends I am starting again now and his message in a bottle tells me that I’m on the right track.”
So there you have it–the 101-year-old message in a bottle. Like so many very old bottled notes, it demonstrates that same old incredible power of messages in bottles to “reunite” families and bring to life family history that would otherwise have been lost. Magic.
