After the United Kingdom, Germany is the second biggest golf market in Europe, for both players and courses.
Golf first came to Germany in the early years of the twentieth century. From the mid-1920s, the game grew considerably, and a number of courses sprung up around the country, mostly designed by British architects. The firm of Colt, Alison and Morrison was particularly pre-eminent, and Germany was, in fact, where John Morrison was to do some of his most enduring work, most prominently Hamburger-Falkenstein, still generally regarded as the country’s best course, and Frankfurt-Niederrad. Multiple national champion Bernhard von Limburger emerged as the first golf designer of significance to spring from mainland Europe; by 1939, he had designed around a dozen courses.
The events of the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s, though, meant golf was far from the mind of most Germans. In the Soviet zone, later the German Democratic Republic (DDR, or East Germany), golf simply ceased to exist; in the West, the struggle for survival put golf a long way down the priority list. In the years after the war, though, as the German economic miracle manifested itself, golf clung on in a small way.
The Eikhof course at Ostsee Golf Resort Wittenbeck is one of many Städler designs in Germany (Photo: Ostsee Golf Resort Wittenbeck)
Born in 1951 in Osnabrück in the province of Lower Saxony, the story of Christoph Städler in many ways mirrors the story of German golf as a whole. The Osnabrücker Golf Club was founded in 1955, and some friends of Städler’s parents were early members. “They took me, my brother and my father to the course when I was six years old,” he says. “My father quickly came to love the game, and I started playing when I was seven. I got quite good, quite quickly – I was a two handicap at 14, and scratch when I was 16. There were only 51 golf courses in Germany when I started playing in 1957, at the age of six.”
Städler was good enough to become a regular in German teams in international events – as well as the national champion! – and it was at one of these that the seeds of his eventual final career were sowed. “The Eisenhower Trophy event in 1974 was played at the Teeth of the Dog course in the Dominican Republic, which was quite new at the time,” he says (the course had opened in 1971). “I played in it for West Germany, and the creativity of the course blew me away – the use of railway sleepers, a tee in the ocean, which isn’t there now. If big professional tournaments had been held there, I’m sure it would be much higher up the rankings than it is – it is a wonderful course, and to this day, Pete Dye’s work inspires me the most, even though his fondness for creating very difficult courses isn’t something I have followed.”
Seeing Teeth of the Dog in 1974 set Städler’s mind going. “I started to think about golf course design as a career but, at that time, it wasn’t a business in Germany: there was no way you could have made a living at it. Von Limburger was still around, and still working – I met him in about 1980 on a site, he died in 1981 – and architects like Frank Pennink and Don Harradine had done a few courses around the country. But there was nowhere near enough work for anyone to consider it as a sensible career.”
A new layout for Bades Huk – on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast – was completed in 2023 on the site of the abandoned Hohen Wieschendorf course (Photo: Golfkalendar/von Ralph Dörnte)
He therefore studied economics and went to work for Deutsche Bank. But everything connected with golf in Germany changed on 14 April 1985 when Bernhard Langer won the Masters and kickstarted the great German golf boom. “The very instant that Bernhard sank the winning putt, I knew that everything would change,” says Städler. “I thought to myself, ‘Go train yourself until you know enough to get into this business’. I got a bunch of books from American golf architects, and, I set myself to learning everything I could about golf architecture. Städler finally founded his golf design business in 1987 and, already a well-known figure in German golf circles, he hasn’t looked back since.
“I did my first jobs, I think pretty well, and got good references from them,” he says. “Golf was exploding in Germany at the time, and given that the work I did was well-received, it wasn’t hard to get more. The first project that got my business going was Semlin in Brandenburg, in a wonderful sandy area, a beautiful 100-hectare (247 acres) site for 18 holes, and each hole was nicely separated. I loved it very much, and I’m still proud of it. It was a low budget, but came out very well.”
Städler’s business grew rapidly, and he took on additional architects, first his long-time colleague Dirk Decker, and then, in the mid-1990s, Achim Reinmuth and Philipp Fleischhauer who remain part of the team – the company is, in fact, now known as Städler and Reinmuth Golf Design. His office has been for many years one of the very largest in Europe (including the UK) with, at one point, five fee earners.
“I always knew that, given most golfers in Germany were quite new to the game, that what we needed was affordable courses, and that is what I have always tried to build,” he says. “Fairly inexpensive courses, with low membership fees, and low barriers to entry are much more likely than expensive ones to be economically sustainable, so I was convinced that was the way to build my business. For many years, it was the mass of projects that we were working on – typically ten or more at a time – that really helped to establish us as the busiest in Germany. My background as a banker helped me a lot, I think, because I was very happy dealing with numbers, and that helped me keep a lid on project costs. Many of my early courses cost less than two million Deutschmarks, which is less than €1 million. Those courses were fair for weaker players, but challenging for better ones – I think that’s one of my key skills as an architect.”
Städler has worked at Rosendaelsche, one of oldest clubs in the Netherlands (Photo: Rosendaelsche Golf Club)
In total, Städler has built 56 courses. “Most of those were fairly early in my career,” he explains. “There is very little market for new golf in Germany now. Unlike in the UK or the USA, we haven’t really seen a post-Covid boom in German golf – the number of players is increasing, but only by very small percentages. From about 2000, we became very active in course renovations, and we have worked on a number of highly ranked courses like Frankfurter, or Club zur Vahr in Bremen. We completely redesigned Club zur Vahr’s Garlstedter Heide course in 2006, and I was very proud of that project (‘Heide’ is the German word for heather).” He also renovated the Rosendaelsche course in the Netherlands, the second oldest club in the country, which is now seventh in the Top 100 Golf Courses’ rankings.
Städler has had a very different career from most of the architects we have profiled in these pages. His story has not been about building World Top 100 courses on pristine sites in the middle of nowhere, or right next to an ocean, but has rather been about helping to bring golf in quantity to a country where it was previously in very short supply. “There are about 740 golf courses in Germany now; that’s an increase of about 20 times in my lifetime,” he says. “If golf is to move further forward here, we need something big to push us ahead, something with a similar impact to Langer winning the Masters. We need more golf on TV, we need more top German players, and we need a Ryder Cup. There have been German bids for the Cup, but the political support isn’t there. Sometimes I think we are too serious in Germany! We can’t put enough effort behind something that is a leisure activity.”
Germany has extremely stringent environmental restrictions, and Städler says that inevitably has a big impact on golf. When asked if, at the age of 74, he still has ambitions, he laughs. “I have not built a true links course, and I would very much like to,” he says. “But a true links is not now feasible in Germany – it would be impossible to get planning on a genuine links site.” It isn’t a links course, but Städler, along with his partner Reinmuth, has been at work for two years on the La Maviglia project in Puglia, southern Italy, on a classic Mediterranean landscape of maquis and olive groves, less than a kilometre from the Gulf of Taranto. But at the moment, the project is stalled. “We got planning consent for the project very quickly, but right now it has ground to a halt,” he says. “I hope this extraordinary project will be resumed soon and we’ll get to finish the course.” I hope so too.