What's In A Name
We all got some dirt in our name ...
We all have a last name. It’s interesting how this last name works for us and against us.
I’ve been blessed by the fact my last name is terribly uncommon. Run a google search and I’m at the top along with some Ben guy who does the weather in Chicago. But there are Deubelbeisses out there.
For those interested - here is a little bit of history related to my name - "Deubelbeiss" which literally means "Devil's bite". In my 30s and living in Europe, I began researching its origins. Seems that in the 1700s, one Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Josef decreed that all the Jews in his reign should pay taxes. Jews then didn’t have last names so - they had to come to town and get one so taxes could be assigned annually, properly.
So they went to town. And if you had money at that time, you’d get the name of Mueller or Schmidt or Wenger. If you didn’t have any money, you got what you got, depending on the mood of the official. That’s why we have many with names like “Streisand” (the hairs of a horse’s ass) or Greenspan (the green poison left on a spoon after it was in mayonnaise for many days) or Ostertag - Easter Day. Or Deubelbeiss - Devil’s Bite.
Now my father’s family long ago, like so many, converted. So long ago, nobody remembers. It was common. To get ahead, you adopted the local religion. So I’m not a Jew. But there is more to the name’s story. Much more.
In the 80s and 90s when I traveled to Switzerland and the officials inspected my passport, I would get a big dropped-jaw face of shock and surprise. They'd say, "Do you know the story about your family?"
Here is the rundown of why my name spooked a generation of Swiss.
Deubelbeiss and Co. - How A Gangster Duo Terrified Switzerland.
Deubelbeiss came from an intact working-class family and worked during the Second World War as a mechanic in the armaments industry in Geneva. Here he came into contact with the labor movement and Marxism . He began with small thefts, allegedly for the establishment of a cultural gathering of German-speaking Swiss, and was sentenced to two years in prison. In prison, he met his future accomplice Kurt Schürmann (who allegedly died in 2006). He met him in 1950 in Zurich again.
On the night of 23 to 24 June 1951, the two broke into an arsenal in Zurich-Höngg and stole 15 submachine guns and 9685 rounds of ammunition, which they buried in hiding in forests. On the evening of December 4, 1951, they kidnapped the banker Armin Bannwart in front of his house, because they hoped he had the safe key of Privatbank Winterstein in Zurich that they wanted to rob. The abductee, however, did not have the key with him. Finally, the two gangsters brutally killed the kidnapped banker in a forest in a forest outside the community. Only a few weeks later, on the night of January 24 to 25, 1952, they attempted to rob the post office Reinach in the canton of Aargau. This too failed, they were surprised at the scene. It came to be the largest shooting in Swiss criminal history, 108 casings counted by the police at the scene.
The police called on the population to engage in search with repeated radio reports, causing widespread concern. On February 18, 1953 Deubelbeiss and his accomplice were convicted of murder , robbery and other crimes to life imprisonment. In court, Schürmann claimed that they wanted to build a revolutionary party and committed their actions for political reasons.
Deubelbeiss did not get released until July 1, 1978, and then lived under the name of Ernst Schmid as an unobserved citizen on the outskirts of the city of Zurich, in Oerlikon , and worked in municipal waste incineration. He did not fall back into crime. (funny, my Dad’s middle name is Ernst).
Social-historical significance
The deeds of Deubelbeiss and Schürmann shook the self-image of the Swiss people after the Second World War, according to which the country was a peaceful state. The gangsterism "of the Chicago type" - so the contemporary press said - had arrived. An entire generation of children experienced the threat of parents and educators, "IF YOU ARE NOT GOOD, THE DEUBELBEISS COMES!."
It’s kind of cool to know that your name is actually a common idiom!
What about your last name?
Well I have a rather unusual last name that’s somewhat German sounding. In fact my initial research led me to a simple explanation that is was indeed from the ‘old German’ Schuck, Scouth, or ’Shoemaker’. There were many variations of course, and Schoch was a common Swiss variant. Now all of this was well and good, but it did not square with what my Uncles told me about our name. As best I could remember they said it was Norwegian or Dutch. They said the barrel staves for barrels were called Shook’s and the family name would be a cooper who made barrels. This posed a gaint problem because I had proudly told the story of my name to many who would listen.
While here in Nicaragua, I finally had the time to do some major research, which was made easier by a number of genealogy sites, however I was still a shoemaker from Germany. Finding the truth about my name ( at least that which matched my family oral history) came almost by accident. I had just finished the book “In the Heart of the Sea’, which is the story of the whaling ship Essex. This is the famous ship that Herman Melville used to base his novel “MOBY DICK” on. The ship was attacked, and sunk by a giant Sperm Whale (estimated to have been 26 metres long) in the south east Pacific. Usually crewed by 30-35 sailors only 20 survived the attack, and of those, 10 or so were already out in ‘whale boats’ Of the 20 only 8 survived the three month ordeal drifting to South America (11 were eaten by the others). So, after reading that epic tale, I became interested in whaling, and the ships that made up the fleet out of Nantucket. While looking at a typical whaling ship I found a section showing a cut-away view of the centerline of the ship. It detailed all the segments and what was stored there, or what they were used for. It was while I was going over this diagram carefully that I spotted an area of the forecastle where the “shooks" were pointed out. So now... I had a connection that fit more closely with my Uncles explanation. I first find out that the ’shoots’ were a bundle of barrel staves., I assumed for repairing barrels, and well they were. The more I dug, I discovered that the ’shooks’ were complete barrels, disassembled and strapped into tight bundles. These then would be assembled as they were needed to conserve space. Space was at a premium on a ship barely 150’ long and just over 30’ wide… a three masted ’tall ship’ for sure, and a true ocean sailer. But by this time because of the intensity of the hunting the whales were further and further away from home ports. The ships had to travel half way around the world to fill their hold, taking two or three years in the process, and usually accounting for as many as two thousand of barrels of whale oil before sailing home…
So, My family name did have something to do with barrel staves, and most likely came from the Netherlands (the first true whalers (2000 bc). I, and all my children are blond, and blue-eyed, Dutchmen… PROOST!