Rhönrad 1921

Otto Feick was born on July 4, 1890 in Heil's smithy in the Palatinate village of Reichenbach, near Kaiserslautern. He grew up there with his mother Philippina Heil and his grandparents. His father Ludwig Feick, a blacksmith, lived about 10 km away in Glan-Münchweiler. The little boy enjoyed spending time with his grandfather in the smithy. One day, he takes two wagon tires, joins them together and stands between the two tires. After tying his feet with a string, he holds on to the tires and lets himself roll down the small slope by the smithy, bruising his fingers in the process.

When his mother remarried in 1901, he moved with her to Kaiserslautern, where he attended school and was confirmed in the Protestant collegiate church in 1903. Otto trained as a locksmith and completed his military service in Aschaffenburg in 1912. There he met Pauline Schmalz from Schönau in Franconia and married her in 1914. The young couple moved to Ludwigshafen to the newly developed district of Gartenstadt. Otto Feick worked in Ludwigshafen as a locomotive fitter at the Deutsche Reichsbahn depot, became involved in the railroad workers' association and was soon elected to the board of the German Railway Workers' Union. In June 1919, he founded the "Verein für Volksgesundheit" (Association for Public Health) in Ludwigshafen and became its first chairman, with the aim of using sport to counteract the stress caused by his work in the factory and the cramped living conditions. The club's sports grounds are set up directly on the small Blies lake. This club still exists today under the name "VSK Germania Niederfeld 1919 e.V.".

After the end of the First World War, the Palatinate is occupied by the French. The railroad fitter Otto Feick and many of his colleagues put up passive resistance. They refuse to work for the occupying power and no longer complete freight trains to France. Some trains were even derailed "out of the blue". As a result, he and several colleagues were arrested by the French military police in 1921. Even though many thousands of Ludwigshafen residents demonstrate against this, he is sentenced to prison by a military court, which he has to serve in the military prison in Mainz.

In prison, he remembers the hoops he used to roll down the slope in front of his grandfather's smithy as a child and begins to work on plans for an unusual piece of gymnastics equipment: two circular steel hoops, each about one and a half meters in diameter, are connected parallel to each other by six rungs of equal length. Handles are mounted on two rungs and boards with padded leather straps to hold the feet are mounted on two other rungs. There are also two further handholds on the opposite side.

After his release from prison, he made his first model and tried it out in 1922 on the grounds of his association for public health. He later used the resulting photo for the patent application.

When the German government defaults on the high reparations payments stipulated in the Treaty of Versailles in 1922, the Ruhr region is occupied by French and Belgian troops in January 1923. The Reich government then calls for passive resistance and instructs its civil servants not to obey the occupiers' orders. Reichsbahn workers are also forbidden to transport coal to France or Belgium. The French respond with expulsion. In 1923, 5,000 railroad workers and their families in the Palatinate alone were forced to leave their homes within 24 hours, including Otto Feick. He moves with his family to the small town of Schönau an der Brend, his wife's hometown in the Rhön.

Feick set up a metal workshop there, where he made bedsteads and toys, among other things, and continued to work on improving his gymnastics equipment. In gratitude to his new home, he named it the "Rhönrad" and in November 1925 he was granted a patent for this extraordinary piece of sports equipment.

From 1926, he traveled through Germany with a small group of gymnasts to publicize his invention. He also came to Ludwigshafen, where he presented the Rhönrad at an inventors' fair in the newly opened Ebertpark. He then traveled almost all of Europe with his gymnastics troupe and finally to the United States in 1929. There, the Rhön wheels became known as "German Wheels" and even played an important role in a sports festival in the 1929 film "Dynamite" produced by Metro Goldwyn Mayer.

On the occasion of the premiere of this film in Austria, the Neue Wiener Tageblatt reported in its April 24, 1931 issue that the film featured a rhönrad race contested by women. After a screening in England, Rhön wheels are used by Royal Air Force pilots to train their sense of balance and simulate loops.

In order to finance these costly marketing tours, Otto Feick even had to pledge his patent rights. However, the production of the Rhön wheels, which cost between 80 and 100 Reichsmarks, eventually became so successful that he was able to open a new workshop in Würzburg.

As early as August 1930, the first international Rhön wheel tournament is held in Bad Kissingen. Among other things, the athletes compete in "downhill courage riding", competitions and obstacle races. And finally, in 1936, 120 gymnasts demonstrate Rhön wheels in a supporting program at the Olympic Games in Berlin, even though it is still not an Olympic discipline today. This performance not only made the rhönrad instantly famous, but also meant that even long after the Second World War, the rhönrad was still frowned upon as a "Nazi sport", even though the trade unionist and staunch democrat Otto Feick never allowed himself to be taken in by the National Socialists.