In October 1909, a young Bavarian waiter named Josef Holzapfel accepted a staggering challenge: to walk around the entire globe within three years to claim a prize of 60,000 gold marks.
The Journey That Defied the Odds
- The Stakes: A Frankfurt sports club offered 60,000 gold marks—roughly equivalent to 400,000 euros today—to anyone who could successfully circumnavigate the earth on foot within three years. Holzapfel was the only participant to actually step off the starting line.
- The Route: His trek began toward England, where a brief jail stint for a street brawl prompted him to turn around, reverse course, and march entirely toward the East.
- The Legacy: Now, more a century later, his great-grandniece Karin Holzapfel has meticulously reconstructed the journey in her new book, Vom Woid in d’Welt, published by SüdOst-Verlag, using surviving photographs, journals, and municipal stamps.
From Jail Cells to the Qing Dynasty
Holzapfel’s expedition was far from a leisurely stroll. Armed with a camera rigged with a self-timer to prove his milestones, he documented a rapidly changing planet. Town archives in Deggendorf still house the traveler’s battered albums, filled with foreign stamps and official municipal signatures. City archivist Florian Schneider noted that Holzapfel managed to witness the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in China, deal with social unrest in Persia, and traverse the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire.
Along the way, danger chased him relentlessly. He was repeatedly robbed, forced to hide in dense cornfields to evade bandits, and frequently arrested by paranoid officials who mistook his heavy camera equipment for foreign espionage gear. Yet, serendipity offered relief in unexpected places. In the United States, Holzapfel found refuge among German-American immigrant communities, particularly brewery owners whose hospitality was so strong it occasionally wiped out three consecutive days of entries in his travel diary.
The Price of Pacifism and the Final Accounting
By the autumn of 1912, the three-year deadline loomed large. Holzapfel secured passage on a steamship bound for Europe, arriving just in time to collect his prize money. According to his great-grandniece, every last coin of the 60,000 gold marks disappeared quickly. He distributed a portion to the impoverished residents of Regen, funded a modest lecture tour, and threw his energy into promoting international peace.
Holzapfel’s commitment to global harmony eventually put him at odds with the rising Nazi regime in Germany, leading to multiple arrests for his outspoken pacifism. After surviving the turbulence of the mid-20th century, the former globetrotting waiter spent his final years running a quiet kiosk in Deggendorf until his death in 1950. Through newly recovered records, his astonishing three-year march has finally emerged from local folklore into the wider historical record.
