As of: March 28, 2024, 9:00 a.m
By: Birgit Lang
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The Good Friday ratchet from Toni Aicher is a self-made brand. © Birgit Lang
Upcycling was already a topic for Toni Aicher long before it was on everyone's lips. He reuses old materials and builds new things out of them: including a traditional Good Friday ratchet, which he has used to call believers in his village to church services on Easter weekend for a few years now.
Taufkirchen - A Good Friday ratchet is a noise instrument that makes a clattering or rattling sound. The noisy wooden boxes are used to call believers to prayer when the bells are silent from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. Because Good Friday is also known as “Silent Friday”. In memory of Christ's suffering, the church bells fall silent until Easter Sunday.
“This is basically the ringing of the kirch” instead of the bells, says Toni Aicher about his ratchet. “Depending on the wind, you can hear it for a kilometer, easily.” Most people know the 74-year-old from Jettenstetten as the man from “Hau den Lukas” at the Taufkirchen and other folk festivals. Tradition is important to him.
He built his ratchet from old material that was in his workshop. For example, the slats from an old bedstead were used again. “They are ideal because they are so thin and curved,” he explains. “If they had been straight, I would have had to design everything differently. But it hung better that way.”
To drive the slats, he used a round piece of wood and attached small corrugated dowels to it at staggered intervals. “So that the slats are pulled up” and make a lot of noise when they click down again. It has to be loud because believers from far away should be able to hear it.
The log is driven by hand with a “Sahstgrigge” (a former scythe handle) and a “Woin” (shaft). He spent one day building his ratchet, which stands on a decorated frame; it could also have been placed on a wooden trestle. Either way, it's comfortable for him to crank.
“In the old days, when Jettenstetten was still its own parish, there was also a Good Friday ratchet here. Until everything was taken away from us,” says the former carpenter. Jettenstetten also no longer has its own pastor. In the neighboring community of Gibensbach there is still a Good Friday ratchet. “A beautiful thing, it works the same way. “It’s just old, but it’s still used by the altar boys,” he says. He copied his own from her model.
In other places too, altar boys and other children, often called ratchet children, paraded through the town and used their clatter to draw attention to church attendance until Easter Sunday. Aicher wants to take over that in Jettenstetten this year. He has now demoted himself to an altar boy, he says with a grin.
On the east side of the branch church of St. Margaret, it is used to ratchet, i.e. to make noise. The believers in and around Jettenstetten think this is “great”, even if some initially wondered if he was crazy because they no longer knew this custom. The children especially want to try it out, and then the Good Friday ratchet goes all around. “But don’t stop, we have to keep going,” he tells them. Because if he turns it himself, the noise lasts three to five minutes.
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Aicher always operates the ratchet at the ninth hour, i.e. at 3 p.m. Then the people come together again, but no longer for church services, but to chat - in this case, to chat. When asked whether he wears hearing protection when he does what he does, he just laughs. “It doesn’t matter to anyone. She doesn’t act that loud.”
Every Easter he takes the Good Friday ratchet out of the barn, dusts it off and is happy that so many other believers can enjoy it with him. “Now they are fully behind it.”