In The Third Man, Orson Welles leans out of a Ferris wheel car above Vienna and says the most famous thing anybody has ever said about the cuckoo clock. Italy under the Borgias got warfare and bloodshed, he argues, and produced the Renaissance. Switzerland got centuries of brotherly love and peace, and produced the cuckoo clock.
Terrific line, and not Graham Greene’s. Welles put it in during shooting, and Greene admitted later it was the best thing in the picture.
It’s also wrong in every direction it points. The Swiss got in touch afterward to mention—very politely—that they have never made cuckoo clocks. Welles repeated that correction for the rest of his life and got it wrong himself, placing the Black Forest in Bavaria. It sits in Baden-Württemberg, one state west, and that is where all of this happened.
Nobody Knows Who Invented It
Start with the disappointing part. We don’t know, and the Black Forest wasn’t first.
A clock that called like a cuckoo sat in a Saxon prince-elector’s collection in the early 1600s, generations before anyone here cut a wooden gear. Athanasius Kircher wrote the mechanism down in 1650, and by 1669 Domenico Martinelli was recommending the cuckoo call as a sensible way to announce the hour.
The Black Forest origin story then arrives in two versions that contradict each other. Franz Steyrer wrote in 1796 that clock peddlers bought cuckoo clocks from a Bohemian trader in 1742 and that Michael Dilger and Matthäus Hummel copied what they brought home. Markus Fidelis Jäck wrote in 1810 that a man named Franz Ketterer in Schönwald had been building them since the early 1730s. Neither offered a shred of evidence, and two centuries of digging have settled nothing.
Schönwald put up a monument to Franz Anton Ketterer as the inventor regardless.
Here’s the catch: the Franz Ketterer that Jäck actually named was the son, and the son was roughly kindergarten age when the invention supposedly happened. So the village may well be honoring the wrong man. ;-)
From the middle of the 18th century the trail becomes solid, with small workshops between Neustadt and Sankt Georgen building wooden cuckoo clocks. They stayed rare, though. Until about 1850 the cuckoo cost a serious surcharge and went into only a small single-digit share of Black Forest clocks.
What the region sold in vast numbers was the plain wooden wall clock, simplified so thoroughly between 1750 and 1780 that ours were the cheapest wall clocks in the world for the next hundred years. The cuckoo got the credit anyway. The French still call a cheap German clock a coucou, whether it has ever contained a bird or not.
The Little House Is a Railroad Hut
Look at a cuckoo clock and you see a Black Forest farmhouse. Steep roof, carved trim, a bird under the gable. Ancient peasant craft, obviously.
It’s a railroad signalman’s hut, drawn by an architect for a design competition in 1850.
The clockmaking trade around Furtwangen was in trouble. So, Robert Gerwig, who ran the watchmaking school newly founded there, called on artists across the Grand Duchy of Baden to design a new clock case. One entry came from Friedrich Eisenlohr, a Karlsruhe professor who had spent years building for the Badische Staatsbahn (the Baden state railroad), including more than 300 trackside signalman’s huts. He took one of his own huts and hung a clock face on the front, wrapped in painted ivy.
Understand what that meant in 1850. The railroad was the future, the loudest symbol of speed anyone had. The silhouette people now read as timeless rustic charm was, at the moment somebody thought of it, about as traditional as bolting a jet engine to your mantelpiece.
And here’s the part I enjoy most: the one surviving clock built to Eisenlohr’s original drawing has no cuckoo in it. It’s 51 cm (20 in) tall, it belongs to the Deutsches Uhrenmuseum (German Clock Museum), and whoever assembled it simply left the little door off. Bird and house were not yet a package deal.
That changed fast. By the mid-1850s the Bahnhäusle (little railway house) was selling hard, and in 1862 Johann Baptist Beha in Eisenbach added the deep carving, the bone hands, and the pinecone weights everybody now pictures. Everything since has been decoration. The house itself has barely moved in over 170 years.
What Is Actually Inside a German Cuckoo Clock
The call comes from two small organ pipes, one tuned higher than the other, each with its own bellows. Cuck-oo. That’s the entire magic trick, and it has worked the same way for close to three centuries.
The movement is where your money goes. Most mechanical Black Forest cuckoo clocks run on a Regula movement from SBS-Feintechnik in Schonach, which started making clock parts in 1856 and today builds drive systems for car doors and medical equipment alongside the largest output of mechanical cuckoo movements anywhere. The wooden cases for nearly every manufacturer come out of one single joinery, too. Rival brands, same carpenter.
Your real choice is the movement, and it matters far more than the carving. A one-day movement wants winding daily, which takes ten seconds of pulling the pinecone weights back up. An eight-day movement runs a week on one wind, but it’s bigger and heavier, so it won’t fit a small clock. A quartz clock runs on a battery, and its weights and pendulum are there for looks.
Then there’s the thing nobody brings up in the shop. Night shutoff.
A cuckoo clock without it will call twelve times at midnight, once at one in the morning, twice at two, and you will be awake for all of it. Most mechanical clocks have a manual lever you flip before bed, expensive ones shut themselves off, and quartz models use a light sensor. Ask which one you’re getting before you pay, not after. ;-)
One practical note while you’re at it. An eight-day clock with its weights hanging can run well past 10 kg (22 lb). That goes into a stud, not a drywall hook.
Why Your Clock Plays a Broadway Song
Order a music box with your clock and it will usually play two tunes in rotation. On a great many of them, one of the two is “Edelweiss.”
“Edelweiss” is not a German folk song. It isn’t an Austrian folk song either, and it is emphatically not the Austrian national anthem, which is Land der Berge, Land am Strome. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote it in 1959 for The Sound of Music during the Boston tryout, and it was the last lyric Hammerstein ever finished.
So why is it inside a clock from the Black Forest? Because American buyers expect it there. The case is carved here, the movement is built here, and the melody was written in a hotel room in Massachusetts. More charming than embarrassing, I think, but you should know what you’re buying.
How to Tell a Real One
Most objects sold as cuckoo clocks have nothing to do with the Black Forest. The shape isn’t protected, and a molded case can be produced anywhere for very little.
What is protected is the phrase “Black Forest Cuckoo Clock,” registered as a collective trademark, along with the certificate that goes with it. The Verein die Schwarzwalduhr (Black Forest Clock Association) in Schonach has issued it since 1987, and the conditions are strict enough to be worth something:
- The clock is made in the Black Forest.
- The movement is purely mechanical.
- Case, carving, dial, hands, weights, pipes, and gong come from the region wherever that is still technically and economically possible.
Look hard at that second condition. A quartz cuckoo clock can never carry the certificate, even if every last piece of it was assembled by hand in Schonach. Some very good clocks are therefore uncertified on purpose. Certified doesn’t mean better for you; it means mechanical and local.
The manufacturers still in the association make a short list: Anton Schneider, August Schwer, HEKAS, Robert Herr, Rombach & Haas, and Hönes.
It got short the hard way. Hubert Herr in Triberg, one of the last firms doing everything under a single roof, went into insolvency in 2020 when the tourist trade it lived on stopped. Its most famous product, the smallest mechanical cuckoo clock in the world at 13.5 cm (5.3 in), sits in a museum case now instead of a catalog.
If you already own a Black Forest clock and it has started misbehaving, the association keeps service partners in the US, Australia, and Japan, plus repair videos in English. Worth bookmarking before you need it rather than after.
Where to Go and See Them
Clock country is compact. Triberg, Schonach, Schönwald, and Furtwangen sit within a few minutes of one another, and you can cover all four in a day if you’re efficient, two if you’d rather enjoy yourself.
Triberg is the loud one, with Germany’s most famous waterfalls, a great many clock shops, and the world’s largest cuckoo clock. The Eble family built that one out at Schonachbach on the B 33 north of town, a working clock at 60:1 scale, with a pendulum 8 m (26 ft) long and a bird weighing 150 kg (330 lb). Five years to build. You climb a staircase inside to watch the gears turn.
Up the hill in Schonach, the Dold family has an enormous cuckoo clock as well. Theirs came first.
You can imagine roughly how that conversation went. The arrangement they arrived at is beautifully German: the Dold clock is the First World’s Largest Cuckoo Clock, the Eble clock is the World’s Largest Cuckoo Clock, both signs are accurate, and nobody had to take anything down. ;-)
For the serious collection you want Furtwangen, where the Deutsches Uhrenmuseum holds more than 8,000 objects gathered since Robert Gerwig started rescuing old clocks in 1852, including that cuckoo-less Eisenlohr original. Check before you drive out, though: the museum closed in August 2024 for a full renovation and is expected to reopen in 2027. Until it does, the Schwarzwaldmuseum in Triberg is the substitute I’d send you to, with Black Forest clocks across four centuries, a clockmaker’s workshop—and that smallest cuckoo clock in its glass case.
If you’d rather take the whole thing as a drive, the German Clock Route links these towns with Schramberg, Sankt Georgen, Waldkirch, Lenzkirch, and a dozen more. Give it three days at the very least.
One closing thought, because people ask me. The cuckoo clock is not German clockmaking at its most serious; for that you want Glashütte in Saxony, where the work is precision rather than folk art and nobody has ever carved a squirrel into anything. The Black Forest did something else. It built the clock ordinary households could afford, then made it charming enough that people carried it across oceans.
More on the region is on my page about the Black Forest, more on what else we’ve sent out into the world under German inventions, and the rest of the section starts at German culture.