Small, fat men make it big here
On our tour, we repeatedly encounter men who seem uninvolved. Well-fed, arms folded, they gaze up into the cloudy sky with small eyes. They look strikingly similar: all have large, bulbous noses, round, protruding ears, a respectable belly bulges in the middle of their bodies, and a hairless head. "Small, fat men often appeared as main characters in my illustrations," explains Jonas, "and I've always liked working with wood." There was plenty of wood on Krautsand, and so it was that shortly afterwards the first wooden figures stood on the windowsills of the house and in the garden. A passerby liked the expressive men so much that he wanted to sell them in his shop in Hamburg. "I carved 20 figures for him. A short time later, he came back and wanted 20 more." The figures sold like hotcakes. "So I thought, you can sell them yourself." Today, 18 years later, demand for the wooden men is greater than ever. Jonas sells a third of his work through the renowned Hamburg gallery Commeter, and private and public commissions each account for a third of his sales. Many private buyers come from Switzerland. "I often hear from the Swiss that the figures look so beautifully North German. Do they?" Jonas asks us. Yes, they do.
From the trunk to the lovable wooden figure
The distant gaze, the stoic and solid. Somehow Nordic. The large Kötz wooden figures are carved from disused dolphins. These heavy, up to eight-meter-long wooden posts, usually made from the indestructible trunks of the bongossi tree, were once used to moor ships. Jonas works on one end with a chainsaw, chisels, and sandpaper until the round trunk has become a round wooden man. To be able to work on them more easily, he places the trunks in the twelve-meter-deep well in the garden. He holds them at working height with an ingenious rope system. Wooden planks placed on the edge of the well form a platform. "This puts me at eye level with the figure."
A family to cuddle
When Jonas Kötz and his wife Anne-Marie, nicknamed Ami, moved from the urban Blankenese to Krautsand in the municipality of Drochtersen, they were still just the two of them, Ami pregnant with Leonie. Today, the Kötz family has five members. Leonie is now 18, Paul 15, and Jacob 11. "Originally, we had planned to possibly move back to Hamburg once the children started secondary school," explains Jonas. But at some point, that was no longer an option. Jonas: "We feel at home here."
The living space the family has created truly feels like paradise: the garden is a sea of blossom, apple trees that will soon bear fruit, a dog, cat, horses, sheep, a pond where you can swim, the Elbe River at the door, meadows and fields all around. The way the family members interact with one another is so loving that you just want to cuddle them all. So it's fitting that we're invited to lunch. We were able to leave our sandwiches packed. Ami helped cook for us. We sit with the children in the kitchen, the center of the 240 square meter house. The interior of the house appears strikingly lively. Old, new, and homemade furniture alternate. The interior design is in a constant process of change, Ami explains to us.
