Zimmermann

The name is a job description and nothing else. Middle High German zimber meant worked wood, the stuff a building was made of, and it is the same word as English timber; Zimmer only later narrowed to the room the timber enclosed. Add mann, the worker, and the compound gives the man of the wood-work: the framer, the builder of the load-bearing skeleton. Modern German has three words for the trade, Zimmerer, Tischler and Schreiner, and none of them is Zimmermann. The surname preserves a form the workshop itself dropped.

It is not a small name. Zimmermann stands 27th among the commonest surnames in Germany and 16th in Switzerland, and the register files Timmermann, Zimmerman and Zimerman as the same name in other mouths and other hands. Occupational names are the largest class of German surname. There is no kindred behind any of it: every valley that built in wood had a man who did the framing, and the byname stuck to him in Saxony and in the Aargau independently, for the same reason.

Carpentry is one of the oldest crafts there is and one of the worst recorded. Knowledge went down the generations by hand and by eye, not on paper: builders only began publishing pattern books with any regularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so for the whole of the period in which the surname formed, a Zimmermann's training existed in his hands, his master's example and the frame standing in the street. The work was the heavy, structural end of building: carpenters framed post-and-beam until the close of the nineteenth century, and only afterwards did the old method acquire the retrospective name of timber framing. English kept two words for what the German carpenter did, housewright and barnwright, and they fit the German trade too: the house, the barn, the church roof, the mill frame.

It was never a trade a man could simply take up. The apprenticeship ran three to four years and produced a journeyman; above that stood the master, which in Germany meant an examination that was arduous and expensive, demanding legal and economic knowledge as well as craft, because only a master could employ and teach. Between the two ranks came the road: into the nineteenth century the newly qualified journeyman left the town that had trained him and worked in another region, learning how that country built before turning for home. For a carpenter that was technical rather than sentimental, since pitch, span and jointing were regional dialects and the only way to read one was to raise it.

One entry in the German biographical register makes the point better than any argument. Johann Franz August Zimmermann, who died in 1774, is listed there with no office, no title and no estate, described in full as a Zimmerergeselle, a journeyman carpenter. He is in the record as the thing the surname says he was.

Johann Jacob Zimmermann was born at Vaihingen in Württemberg on 25 November 1642 (the German register prefers 1644), studied theology at Tübingen and took his Magister there in 1664, teaching singing while he did it. He became a Lutheran minister at Bietigheim in 1671, and in the early 1680s wrote treatises on the two comets that had frightened the population, charting their courses astronomically and reading their meanings astrologically. In 1692 he produced one of the first equidistant conic projection star charts of the northern sky, and Isaac Newton names him, as Mr Zimmerman, in the third book of the Principia in 1687, as an observer of the great comet of 1680.

The astronomy and the theology would not stay apart. Zimmermann concluded that the upheavals bringing in the kingdom of Christ on earth would fall in or about 1693, and published the calculation under the anagram Ambrosius Sehmann von Caminiez. His superiors held millenarianism a dangerous heresy, and a second charge said he followed Jakob Böhme. He was put out of his ministry in 1685, and in February 1686, still refusing to recant, he and his family were expelled from Württemberg. They went by way of Nuremberg, Amsterdam and Heidelberg to Hamburg, where he lived by writing and teaching and defended Copernicus in his Scriptura Sacra Copernizans, reprinted there in 1706 and again in 1736.

In Hamburg he drew around him others sick of the intolerance of the establishment, and in 1693 about forty of them left to cross the Atlantic. Zimmermann died at Rotterdam as the eleven families were preparing to sail, and his disciple Johannes Kelpius was elected magister in his place. Kelpius took the Hamburg Group, the widow Zimmermann among them, to ground by the Wissahickon Creek in Pennsylvania and founded the community there that local legend still remembers; it dissolved not long after he died in the early eighteenth century. An old German letter records only that Zimmermann died on the way to America, and that its writer had begged him not to go.

Two brothers born at Gaispoint by Wessobrunn in Upper Bavaria, Johann Baptist in 1680 and Dominikus in 1685, came out of a family of artists and craftsmen belonging to the Wessobrunner School, and between them they decorated a large part of Catholic southern Germany. Johann Baptist was a painter and one of the leading stucco plasterers of the Baroque. His first recorded commission is the stucco and fresco of Mariä Empfängnis at Gosseltshausen in 1701; he was still at work in 1757, the year before he died in Munich.

What he touched reads like an itinerary of Bavarian building: stucco for Tegernsee Abbey, for Ottobeuren from 1714 to 1722, for Benediktbeuern, Andechs and Schäftlarn; the grand stairway of Schleissheim Palace between 1720 and 1726, under Joseph Effner; the Munich Residenz from 1726 to 1733 and its Reiche Zimmer from 1730 to 1739; and, at the end, the Steinerner Saal at Nymphenburg between 1755 and 1757.

The brothers also worked together for the better part of forty years: the Marienkapelle and the Kartause library at Buxheim, Mariä Himmelfahrt at Maria Medingen from 1718, St Mary at Bad Wörishofen, St Markus at Siessen, and above all Steinhausen, where Dominikus built and Johann Baptist frescoed. He put the fresco into the pilgrimage church at Wies in 1749 and again in 1753 and 1754, inside a building his younger brother had designed.

Dominikus Zimmermann began as a stuccoist and ended a Baumeister, master builder and architect, and the record files him as an architect and stuccoist of the German Rococo. He settled at Landsberg am Lech, built its old town hall in 1719 and its church of St John in 1752, and served the town as mayor between 1748 and 1753: a craftsman's son from a Wessobrunn hamlet at the head of a Bavarian council. His abbey church at Mödingen went up between 1716 and 1725, the Church of Our Lady at Günzburg between 1735 and 1740.

His two principal works are pilgrimage churches. Steinhausen, near Bad Schussenried, he built between 1728 and 1733 and his brother painted. Wies, near Steingaden, occupied him from 1745 to 1754, and he did not leave it: Dominikus Zimmermann died beside the pilgrims' church at Wies in November 1766, having spent his last two decades within sight of the thing he had made.

The same register carries a Franz Dominikus Zimmermann, born before 1714 and dead in 1786, described as a stuccoist and building craftsman. Whether he was son, nephew or no relation it does not say, and that is the difficulty with a surname meaning carpenter: the Bavarian building yards held a great many Zimmermanns, and most of them were nobody's cousin.

The name reaches the council bench early. Georg Zimmermann, born in 1483 and still living after 1543, was burgomaster of Danzig. Berchtold Zimmermann, recorded before 1480 and after 1504, was a monk and librarian of the abbey of St Gallen. Balthasar Zimmermann (1570 to 1633 or 1634) was land surveyor and cartographer to electoral Saxony, a Zimmermann who measured ground rather than cut it. The Swiss reformer and hymn writer Johannes Zimmermann (1490 to 1526) is listed under his humanist name, Xylotectus, which says the same thing in Greek, and the Austrian printer Michael Zimmermann, dead about 1565, appears in the register as Cymbermannus.

In print the name settled at Wittenberg. Gottfried Zimmermann (1670 to 1723), publisher and bookseller in the town from 1698 at the latest, bought a Berlin branch in 1700 and in 1713 handed it to his son-in-law Christoph Gottlieb Nicolai, who used it to found the Nicolai publishing house. He kept a second branch at Zerbst, sat on the Wittenberg council as Ratsherr from 1710 and was made Gotteskastenvorsteher in 1714. His son Gottfried Samuel ran the business until 1761; his daughter Maria Justine married Nicolai and was the mother of Friedrich Nicolai, one of the central figures of the German Enlightenment.

One branch was ennobled. Christoph Adam von Zimmermann (1662 to 1745), hereditary lord of Seebnitz, Niedermittlau and Pohlwitz, was raised into the Bohemian knightly estate on 27 January 1710. His son Carl Sigismund became Prussian Landrat of the district of Löwenberg-Bunzlau in December 1756, taking over from the dismissed von Tschirnhaus. In the summer of 1757 Austrian troops captured him in the Seven Years' War and held him until January 1758. He went back to the office and kept it until he died at Niedermittlau on 5 January 1764.

In America the name usually landed as Zimmerman, one letter lighter, the carpenter otherwise intact; by the census of 1990 it stood 441st among United States surnames. Others lost the German altogether, because emigrant names were regularly translated rather than respelled, and a Zimmermann put through that mill came out as Carpenter. The skill needed no translating. Timber was the one material the new country had without limit, and German framers and joiners raised the houses, barns and churches of settlement after settlement; the Pennsylvania German bank barn, part stone and part timber, its upper floor overshooting the yard as a forebay, is the trade's signature on the American landscape.

In Germany the name kept building after it stopped meaning a builder. Carl Eugen Zimmermann (1828 to 1902) was a Baumeister and deputy burgomaster of Aachen; Grete Schroeder-Zimmermann (1887 to 1955) was an architect and a university teacher; Johann von Zimmermann (1820 to 1901) began as a locksmith and ended an inventor and industrialist. Music is the other seam: Agnes Zimmermann (1847 to 1925) was a concert pianist and composer, and Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918 to 1970) and Udo Zimmermann (1943 to 2021) composed in Germany in the twentieth century.

Two modern bearers close the circle in opposite directions. The composer and arranger Dieter Zimmermann (1943 to 1978) worked under the pseudonym Cliff Carpenter, translating his own surname into English exactly as the immigration clerks had done. Robert Allen Zimmerman, born in 1941, went the other way and set the name aside altogether to become Bob Dylan. The carpenters carried it for centuries; the singer put it down in one.