Bronze by Renate Jung
Created in 1989
Here you stand,
with naked fiess,
shirt I uff the Elsenz-Wies!
He would have needed norre bicke
to dip his stoi into the water –
But the clever Kraichgau farmer
life was already sour enough!
He stands and haunts and smiles knitz
about his own joke!
–
The "Sinsheimer Wetzstoispucker" stands in bodily size, gnarled, down to earth as a water-spitting fountain figure on Karlsplatz. The artist did not choose a powerful, upright Hercules as the symbolic figure of the “whetstone spitter”, but a figure that corresponds to the economic and social conditions and bears a resemblance to a former Sinsheim farmer.
According to old oral tradition, the people of Sinsheim once stood up to their ankles in water at the Stadtgraben, at the Untertorwiese or at today's Karlsplatz, which before 1820 was still a swampy meadow in front of the city wall, and mowed the reeds. In this business, the scythes often became blunt and had to be sharpened with a whetstone. Although the mowers were deep in the water, they would have spat on the whetstone instead of dipping it in water or in the water-filled "kumpf" hanging from the waist belt. This is said to have been observed by some outsiders, and since then the people of Sinsheim have had their nickname "Wetzstoispucker".
(sinsheimer-erlebnisregion.de)