When GTI Fans Celebrate Father’s Day, They Think Wörthersee

Not long before the Treffen at Wörthersee this year, Volkswagen released a set of videos to celebrate the gathering’s 35^th anniversary. The beautifully-shot vignettes feature GTI fans getting ready for the Treffen and Part 1 tracks the progress of a father and son preparing their Golfs. What you may not realize is that there’s a very good reason for that.

Every year the Wörtherseetreffen is celebrated on Father’s Day, which is a little different in Germany. Vatertag or Herrentag is celebrated on the fortieth day after Easter on a federal holiday called Ascension Day. And so, to celebrate the ascension of the lord Jesus into the kingdom of heaven forever opening the gates of eternal paradise to all earth’s people, Germans buy cheap ties for their dads and pull a wagon up a hill. They also use this as an excuse to get drunk, but that goes without saying.

Thanks to math, Ascension Day always lands on a Thursday, so for ease, you can think of it like a German, springtime Thanks Giving with no Turkey and fewer mall-related deaths. What they do instead of heading to a dangerous mall, is head into nature’s warm embrace. Anyone who’s read Grimm’s Fairy Tales knows what I’m talking about.

Way, way back in the 1980’s some government employees in Austria decided that the holiday would be a great time to promote tourism, because why celebrate Vatertag in the Vaterland when you can celebrate it in a place whose hills are alive because of music? Famous-by-Austrian-standards actor and Tourism director for the town of Maria Wörth, Erwin Neuwirth, decided that car lovers were the kinds of people he wanted to have in his town, so he got an ad out into Germany’s biggest car magazine advertising a meet for Golf GTI owners.

The first year went surprisingly well, with about 160 people showing up in 72 cars. Compared to this year’s treffen, it doesn’t sound like much, but for more than 150 people to schlep all the way from Germany to a field in Austria is actually impressive when you think about it. What’s more impressive is that the next year nearly 3,000 people showed up to celebrate Vatertag with the father of all hot hatches.

The video below, from 2012, features footage from the second ever Treffen, in 1983. If you turn on the closed captioning you can read about that second Treffen. Better yet, ignore the text altogether and take a look at how people were modifying GTIs in the early ‘80s.

Nowadays the guests number in the hundreds of thousands and the Treffen has more to do with the GTI than it does with fathers, but the holiday and the Treffen are still inextricably linked. So next year, instead of buying your dad a terrible tie or another power tool, consider taking him to lake Wörhtersee in Austria to celebrate the car that allowed him to be both responsible and fun, some of the best things a dad can be.

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