54 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. 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). Christoph Städler has played a major part in making Germany a significant golfing nation and led one of Europe’s largest golf design firms. Adam Lawrence spoke to him about the boom that began his career and, even in his seventies, aspirations for the future. Building on the boom CHRISTOPH STÄDLER INTERVIEW Photo: Städler and Reinmuth Golf Design
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