The author of Southbound finds the town of Helen, Georgia, attractive and troubling — but she isn’t giving it up.
Words by Anjali Enjeti | Photos by Truett Dietz
October 14, 2021
y first introduction to Alpine Helen was a Facebook rant in 2009. A friend complained about a grotesque commercial tourist trap, a faux-Bavarian town 90 miles northeast of Atlanta, the armpit of Georgia, he bemoaned.
I googled “Helen, Georgia” to see what the fuss was about. My screen filled with images of white chalets with brown beams and pitched red roofs, cobblestone alleys, men outfitted in lederhosen and Tyrolean hats adorned with feathers atop their heads, women in blouses and dirndls with aprons, tall plastic mugs of beer in each hand. I soon learned that this tiny town, population under 600, welcomes 3 million visitors a year, making it the third most visited city in Georgia.
I was intrigued.
I came of age in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the 1980s, long before the city developed its renowned downtown riverfront. Back then, Chattanooga was known for the Choo Choo, Ruby Falls, and Rock City Gardens, a boulder park along the cliffs of Lookout Mountain. Gnomes, the less creepy version of those Christmas elves on shelves, peeked around bends and dangled from the ceilings of caves. On weekends, we’d head to Raccoon Mountain, ride a ski lift to the top, and zoom down a concrete chute on a fiberglass sled, as if sledding down the Swiss Alps.
In other words, I am no stranger to the appeal of artificial attractions in Appalachian cities. I grew up with them.
I also have an emotional and genetic connection to Germanic culture and cuisine. My Oma, now deceased, was originally from Linz, Austria. Almost all of her extended family still lives there. She spoke German to her children and visited her homeland frequently during her life. Somewhere buried in storage, I have my own green Tyrolean hat (though we call it a steirerhut) covered in pins from the first and only trip I made to Austria as a teenager.
Of course, Germany is no Austria; Austria is no Bavaria; Linz is no Helen, but the mere thought of an Alpine village a short drive from my home awakened a fierce nostalgia for family members I haven’t seen in decades.
What’s more, I’d been living in Georgia for two years. My youngest child was now a sturdy toddler. With her newfound life as a biped, we had gained freedom from slings and strollers and were eager to explore the Peach State beyond the blinking tail lights of eight-lane highways. We made our first trip to Helen a few weeks after I came across that Facebook post.
We’ve been going a few times a year ever since.
Northeast Georgia is defined by the rolling hills at the tail end of the Blue Ridge mountain range, the dense white pine and oak trees of the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forests, dozens of waterfalls, and the Chattahoochee River, which winds throughout. Forty-five miles directly west of Helen is the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, where thousands of hikers gather every spring to attempt the 14-state, 2,200 mile thru-hike to Mount Katahdin in Maine.
Georgia’s mountains are a popular destination for those seeking to lose themselves in nature and the vibrant culture of Appalachia. Wineries dot the region, as do apple orchards, antique stores, and roadside stands with freshly picked produce, beef jerky, and boiled peanuts. Artists, too, make their home here, where they sell handmade candles, statues made from tree trunks, beaded jewelry, and quilts.
The Bavarian ruse that is Helen serves as a foil to the natural beauty surrounding it. Visitors can race go-karts, mine gems, play 18 holes at a pirate-themed mini-golf course, ride the Georgia Mountain Coaster, a replica of the Alpine Slide of my childhood, and go tubing in the Chattahoochee, where one can easily (as I have) spill over the jagged rocks into the icy waters. The line for homemade ice cream (at a shop called Homemade Ice Cream) wraps around the building, the fried aroma from Granny’s Famous Funnel Cake Haus wafts through the air, and fried cheese stuffed with ham is hot off the grill at Muller’s Famous Fried Cheese Café. (Muller’s German potato salad, chock-full of peas, pickles, and parsnips, is some of the best I’ve ever tasted.)
In June, tourists catch the Helen to Atlantic Balloon Race and Festival. A weekend in September brings the Alpine Village Arts and Crafts Festival. Helen’s Oktoberfest, which runs from mid-September to early November, is one of the longest-running Oktoberfest celebrations in the U.S. Confetti rains down on Main Street, a kickoff parade of kegs precedes the traditional “tapping of the kegs,” pitchers of beer bookend the long tables in the Festhalle, and crowds in German garb fill every corner of the town.
My favorite destination is Hofer’s of Helen, one of several Konditoreien, or cafés, in the town, and one with an authentic German connection. After success with other bakeries in Atlanta, Horst and Gerda Hofer, originally from Schwabach, Germany, opened a second Hofer’s location in Helen in 1991, which is now run by their son, Ralph. Hofer’s serves classic dishes like schnitzel, bratwurst, and Hungarian goulash. (Since I’m a vegetarian, I usually go for the gemüse spätzle, noodles topped with vegetables.) The café’s covered front deck doubles as a Biergarten for customers who want to people-watch on North Main Street while drinking Paulaner Munich biers.
For dessert, Hofer’s bakery offers everything from apple strudel to blaubeerkuchen (blueberry cream cake), and of course, German chocolate cake. Before we head back home, we fill the trunk of our car with boxes of crème puffs, eclairs, and Bavarian muffins. The pastries are so light and fluffy, they melt in your mouth.
What’s not to love about Helen?
Roughly a dozen cities in the United States integrate a European aesthetic inspired by the early ethnic groups that settled there. Swiss immigrants turned up in New Glarus, Wisconsin, in 1845, and the town later adopted Swiss-style architecture and began hosting Swiss celebrations. Dutch Calvinist separatists fled to Holland, Michigan, in 1847. The town boasts windmills and a tulip festival that mimics the festival in its ancestral country across the pond. German immigrants who, in the early to mid-1800s, settled in towns like Oldenburg, Indiana, and Frankenmuth, Michigan, inspired those cities’ style and architecture.
Helen lacks a Germanic-specific origin story. Incorporated in 1913, Helen was named for the daughter of R.M. McCombs, who presided over the company that built the local sawmill and railroad. The lumber scene flourished in the early part of the 20th century until it ground to a halt in 1931. The sawmill had depleted the land so completely, it was moved to Mexico. Roads for automobiles sprouted up over the land, rendering the railroad useless. It finally shut down in 1934.
With not much left other than an argyle sock company, Helen was in desperate need of an economic boost. In the late 1960s, local entrepreneurs sought a creative solution for the town’s revitalization. One of them, Pete Hodkinson, asked friend and painter John Kollock if he had any ideas. The mountain landscape reminded Kollock of his time stationed in Germany. He painted a series of watercolors that reflected his vision, which became the blueprint for Helen’s design.
The concept lit a fire. Crowds of people, almost all of them white, descended upon Helen, and local businesses thrived. In 1983, Füssen, Germany, officially became Helen’s sister city, cementing the Georgia town’s relationship to Bavaria.
North Georgia has a long history. There’s evidence to suggest that the earliest people arrived during the Etowah Period (1000-1500 CE). They left several burial mounds in their wake, including one near Helen, the Sautee Nacoochee Indian Mound. The Cherokee also lived in north Georgia and later used the mound for ceremonial rites and built structures, known as townhouses, for public gatherings. Treaties in the early 1800s pushed most of the Cherokee out of the area, and this ejection was accelerated by the discovery of gold in 1828, followed by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. In 1915, the Museum of the American Indian, the Heyes Foundation, and the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution excavated the mound, revealing the burials of 75 people.
After its excavation, the Sautee Nacoochee Mound was reconstructed. Today it symbolizes Georgia’s eradication of most of the region’s Indigenous people. It sits just off Unicoi Turnpike a few miles south of Helen on the former estate of Lamartine Griffin Hardman, who served as Georgia’s governor from 1927 to 1931. In 1999, the land and estate were donated to the state of Georgia, and visitors can now tour the mansion, dairy barn, and mound. The white gazebo on top of the mound was built by a settler in the late 1800s, supposedly to protect it. There’s a sign that reads “Private Lands Not Open for Public Use.” When I visit, the enclosed mound and gazebo remind me of a small castle surrounded by a moat.
Little remains of Native American culture in northeast Georgia aside from the non-Native interpretation of it. Turquoise jewelry hangs in display cases in souvenir shops, and cigar-store Indians with full headdresses greet customers. In his essay “After Alpine Idealism: Cultural Amnesia in Helen, Georgia,” Nicolas Canal Tinius writes, “Underneath its saccharine façade, Helen is not the candy land it prides itself to be, nor are its buildings innocent gingerbread houses. Its white stucco ‘icing’ is, in truth, a whitewashed, ahistorical veneer.”
There is plenty of truth to this. Though Helen’s heritage center and museum convey how settlers stole the land and drove the Cherokee out, to date, the city, like the rest of Georgia, has too few authentic representations of its original Indigenous inhabitants. Unlike other states in the South, there are no federally recognized tribes in Georgia. In 1993, the state officially recognized the Georgia Tribe of Eastern Cherokee but has otherwise not given the tribe any land. Not even the former Cherokee capital in northwest Georgia, New Echota, belongs to the Cherokee. The State Parks & Historic Sites division of Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources owns the visitor center and reconstructed buildings.
The irony runs deep. In 1936, after mining and lumbering demolished the trees around Helen, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Chattahoochee National Forest to protect the region and prevent such destruction from ever happening again. Though the U.S. government saw an urgent need to save the land, it has yet to acknowledge the Georgia Cherokee or any other tribes that have made the state their home.
Helen is very white. Roughly 95% of its inhabitants are non-Hispanic white. Some of the Black and Brown people who live in or around Helen are business owners. Indian Americans own and operate some of the area’s hotels, and immigrants run the Thai and Mexican restaurants. On weekends and holidays, Helen’s racial diversity increases exponentially with tourists from nearby Atlanta. On a recent trip, several Black families, Asian families, and a group of women wearing hijabs milled about town. Others were speaking Spanish.
Over the years, I’ve talked to several Black and Brown Georgians about Helen. Some love the city, as I do. Others react the same way as Donald Glover’s character, Earn, in the “Helen” episode of the television series “Atlanta” — with eye rolls and deep suspicion. Some tell me they don’t feel safe in Helen, or in any other part of north Georgia, so they avoid the area completely.
I’m a multiracial (Austrian, Puerto Rican, and Indian) Brown person, and my warm feelings toward Helen were challenged in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. That April a white power rally and cross burnings were held near Cedartown, Georgia, 60 miles northwest of Atlanta. Confederate flags, which had never completely disappeared from the white rural South, sprang up across the nation on bumper stickers and T-shirts. “Make America Great Again,” the slogan Donald Trump stole from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, triumphantly sprawled across the crown of blood-red baseball caps in Appalachia’s foothills. I didn’t usually come across these flags and slogans while hiking on the trails, but they’d turn up in Georgia’s mountain towns that I’d visit afterward, including Helen.
White supremacist ideology can be felt everywhere in the U.S., but it certainly has a stronghold in north Georgia. QAnon conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican representative in the 14th Congressional District, has likened Black Lives Matter to the KKK and said that Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib should “go back to the Middle East.” Republican congressman and armory owner Andrew Clyde represents the 9th Congressional District, Helen’s district, and though he does not receive as much attention as his colleague, he espouses the same dangerous pro-gun, anti-mask-mandate, and anti-Critical Race Theory views.
Members of Congress like Greene and Clyde are likely popular with the right-wing extremists who make their home in Georgia. In 2018, members of the National Socialist Movement, one of the largest neo-Nazi groups in the U.S., held a giant swastika burning in west Georgia. In 2020, three members of The Base, a paramilitary neo-Nazi organization, were arrested in northwest Georgia for plotting to murder anti-fascist activists. In a state that is home to Stone Mountain, the largest Confederate monument in the world, white supremacists have plenty of playgrounds to choose from.
The steely bravado that white supremacists display in north Georgia mirrors the rise of racism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism in Germany. A few months after President Trump’s inauguration, an anti-government assassination plot led to the discovery of a vast network of right-wing extremist organizations in Deutschland. During the fall of 2017, members of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) were elected to Parliament, and in 2018, neo-Nazis filled the streets of the city of Chemitz to protest the country’s admission of immigrants and refugees.
Despite this, both the U.S. and Germany are becoming increasingly diverse. Twenty-six percent of German residents were either born abroad or have at least one parent who was born abroad. According to recent census data, the “White alone, non-Hispanic” population in the U.S. dropped from 67.3% in 2010 to 57.8% in 2020. In Georgia, the “White alone, not Hispanic or Latino” population is now at 52%. It is tied with Florida as the eighth most diverse state in the U.S. The parallel rise of nationalism in both nations may very well be a backlash to increasing diversity. But it doesn’t appear strong enough to stop it.
Last October, a few weeks before the 2020 presidential election, my family and I felt this tension close to home. We had taken the weekend off from waving Biden-Harris campaign signs on busy intersections in heavily Republican Forsyth County, where passersby cursed us out, hurled racial slurs, and demanded that we go back to our country. We needed a break and decided to spend it at Oktoberfest in Helen. After completing a hike, we settled on a picnic bench outside Hofer’s. While the kids tore into baguettes and my husband and I downed ice cold beer, we spotted a dozen or so people strolling along North Main Street in lederhosen and MAGA gear.
Watching white, MAGA-wearing men boldly take up space in Helen cut deep. Helen had been our place of refuge for 11 years. It is where we have escaped from the stressors of life, for a change of pace, and scenery. Amid the sounds of horses’ hooves clopping against the pavement and notes flowing out of accordions and dulcimers, their presence here, and their open embrace of Trump, felt like a particularly egregious desecration. One of my children remarked, a little too loudly, that they should go back to where they came from. In the privacy of our own home, I would have laughed at her use of a phrase that has been directed at us. Instead, I quickly shushed her.
In that moment, I wondered, briefly, whether our beloved Bavarian village was safe for us anymore.
Our family is privileged compared with many other racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. We have not been targeted the way Black, Muslim, Latinx, Jewish, Sikh, or East and Southeast Asians have been in recent years. Even though we are a multiethnic family, our calculations for danger are different. Generally speaking, we are not the intended targets of the most violent acts of bigotry in the U.S.
Still, the issue of safety does cross my mind. We are living in a republic on the brink of disintegration in the midst of a global pandemic. North Georgia is a landscape dotted with “Trump won” yard signs. I often wonder whether we should stop coming to Helen. But so far, at least, I find myself arriving at the same conclusion.
This world is a hard place to live in right now. Why give up something that brings us joy?
Surely, one day, the white-walled chalets that seem to glow when we round the bend into Helen will finally lose their luster. Surely we’ll grow tired of waiting for the Alpine Express train to scoot through Main Street before crossing the road, or weary of the yelping tubers clogging the Chattahoochee River, or the beer that sticks to the bottom of our shoes during Oktoberfest. Maybe we’ll get bored with Helen as we once did carnivals in mall parking lots and Cinderella’s castle at Magic Kingdom.
But we’re not there yet.
It is fall again, when north Georgia delivers its finest. The summer heat has burned itself off, the cooler breezes wind down the length of Appalachia, and those golden, garnet, and ruby leaves hang like gems from the trees. It’s time for our family to pick out another trail to hike in north Georgia, and then afterward stop by Helen to rest, take in live music, and sink our teeth into Hofer’s mouthwatering pastries.
Maybe we’ll see you there.
Anjali Enjeti is a former attorney, journalist, and author based near Atlanta. Her book Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change and novel The Parted Earth were published earlier this year. Her other writing has appeared in Oxford American, Harper’s Bazaar, USA Today, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. A former board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Reinhardt University.
Truett Dietz is an artist, graphic designer, and semi-retired art handler based in Atlanta. He received a BFA in drawing, painting, and printmaking from Georgia State University, and attended The Creative Circus to study graphic design.
