Dr. Wilhelm “Willy” Brüning has covered Bavarian culture in Helen since 1995. He holds a Ph.D. in Alpine Cultural Studies from the Universität Innsbruck (1989), where his dissertation on the semiotics of the cuckoo clock remains, by his own count, the only serious scholarly treatment of the form ever produced in the Tyrolean tradition.
Dr. Brüning is the founder of the Bavarian Architectural Quarterly (now defunct, but archived at the Helen Public Library), a former Sunday cultural columnist for the long-shuttered Helen Sentinel, and the author of the unpublished but frequently cited 1,400-page manuscript Toward a Theory of the Painted Beam: Helen, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and the Question of Authentic Inauthenticity.
His column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. It is generally long. He considers the recent introduction of “Bavarian Ranch Dressing” at three downtown establishments to be a civilizational event of the first order, and he is currently working through what it means.
