Beard Competitors Split on Styling Rules; Mr. Weisser's 'Reindeer' Makes Rival Bristle
PFORZHEIM, Germany—For an hour a day, Gerhard Knapp wraps his whiskers around conical plastic rings, hair-spraying, blow-drying, and keeping the tendrils clipped tight until they are dry.
His nemesis, Elmar Weisser, doesn't worry too much about grooming his three-foot beard on most days. But when it's time to compete, his sister transforms it into something nice, like a reindeer or a bicycle or a Brandenburg Gate. (click below to read more)
In German facial hair competitions, a battle brews over grooming and bragging rights. WSJ's Anton Troianovski reports from Berlin.
Mr. Knapp, 76, is not happy with this hairy state of affairs. At next month's annual meeting of the Association of German Beard Clubs, he plans to urge his fellow whisker enthusiasts to require competitors to style their own beards.
"A beard competition is a beard competition and not a fantasy competition," he says. "It'll be the end of the beard clubs if this isn't stopped."
Germany's roots boast centuries of flamboyant facial hair. Now the sport that grew out of that tradition faces something of an ideological conflict.
In Germany's annual beard championship, there are 17 categories such as Hungarian mustache, freestyle sideburns and imperial partial beard. Competitors present themselves onstage before a panel of judges. They score the hopefuls' whiskers based on how closely the facial hair matches a particular style or, in the freestyle categories, sheer creativity. The prize is a trophy, along with bragging rights.
Germany's Gerhard Knapp prepared his beard for the Full Beard Freestyle event at of the World Beard and Moustache Championships in Trondheim, Norway, on May 15, 2011.
Messrs. Knapp and Weisser—the former with his meticulously groomed, symmetrical array of ringlets and curves running from chin to sideburns; the latter with wacky sculptures fashioned from his facial hair—are giants of the most elite category: freestyle full beard.
Mr. Knapp's postcard-size calling card notes he's a five-time German champion and a two-time world champion. But lately it's been Mr. Weisser who's been getting the glory. The reindeer earned Mr. Weisser, 47, top honors at the world championships in Norway in May. Mr. Knapp says he thought about making a ski-jump slope out of his beard—"I would have won, for sure"—but he didn't do it because he believes that competitive beards should be ones the wearer is comfortable sporting every day.
Mr. Weisser, who like Mr. Knapp is a barber, is legendary for driving his own mobile hair salons to competitions. He offers his trucks, called Friseurmobiles, for rent, and now has four. But he insists he needs help to sculpt his masterpieces.
"The kind of artwork I create, there's no way I can do that myself," Mr. Weisser says. "If you want to make a reindeer or a Brandenburg Gate out of that, then good luck doing it alone."
In German beard circles, tensions are high. Controversially, the president of the beard-club association, Wilhelm Preuss, is taking sides: He's supporting Mr. Weisser. A recent meeting of the Berlin Beard Club—which, like Mr. Knapp, wants to require beard contestants to style their own hair—grew heated as some members raised the possibility of quitting the association because of Mr. Preuss's lack of neutrality.
The more intensely the members argued, the more their Chinese-style mustache tips wiggled, their enormous upturned Kaiser-mutton-chops jiggled, and their three-pointed musketeer beards danced.
For now, the Berlin club is staying in the association, but the club president, Lutz Giese, said he may leave his post as the association's second-in-command.
"Equal rights for all starts with everyone styling their beards themselves," Mr. Giese says.
Mr. Preuss, a 53-year-old bus driver in a small Bavarian town outside of Nuremberg, has a long, bushy beard and a voluminous mustache curled upwards—meaning he competes in the natural-full-beard-with-styled-upper-lip category. Before competitions, his wife Lisa Preuss arms herself with blow-dryer, comb and hairspray to make sure his mustache is well-rounded and symmetrical.
Mr. Knapp, a barber, "has the time every day, because of the nature of his job, to style his beard as needed," Mr. Preuss says. "We should give people the opportunity to get professional help in order to be on an even playing field with people like Mr. Knapp."
In Bavaria, beards were worn by alpine shepherds who had to go without shaving for months. In Imperial Prussia, it was the kaisers—Wilhelm II with his curled mustache, Wilhelm I with his giant sideburns—who helped popularize facial hair.
After World War II, many Germans shaved off their beards. Mr. Knapp says his father, a barber himself, at war's end vowed never to wear facial hair again because of the discomfort of never being able to shave properly on the front and the infamy of Hitler's mustache.
Germany's beard clubs and competitions started popping up a few decades ago amid a facial-hair revival. In recent years the popularity of the German sport spread around the world and helped kindle a competitive facial hair movement in the U.S., which now has its own reality miniseries on cable and, some here fear, threatens to eclipse Germany's.
"I started with a gigolo beard, on vacation in the 1980s" recalls Karl-Heinz Hille, using the German term for a thin mustache, at the meeting of the Berlin beard club. Mr. Hille agreed to grow such a mustache on a bet. Then, he said, he let it keep growing, people started noticing, and he made it bigger and curvier. Today he is a six-time imperial partial beard world champion.
Mr. Preuss, the association president, says that at the annual meeting in October, he intends to keep discussion short about whether competitors should be required to style their own beards. "There are more important things to talk about," he says. On his agenda: introducing a new "trendy beard" category to attract young people.
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