On your right stands one of Frauenfeld’s most charming acts of civic mischief: the Penguin Fountain, a drinking fountain beside the Spanner schoolhouse. Otto Schilt created it and the city installed it in nineteen thirty-three. Schilt was born here, and he helped shape modern Frauenfeld’s shared visual world. His father pushed him toward law, so he studied in Geneva and Leipzig, sat in art classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, learned from James Vibert, passed his legal exams, even took the Thurgau bar exam here in town, and then quietly refused the lawyer’s life. He became a sculptor instead.
That choice mattered. In nineteen nineteen, his soldiers’ memorial near today’s state archive made him the city’s public artist. Later he moved to Zurich, married the pianist Hedy Kraft in nineteen twenty-six, and kept returning in stone and water.
Now, look closely at this fountain for a moment. A city of castles, churches, archives, and schools chose a penguin for one of its everyday landmarks. Why?
The answer is deliciously local. In nineteen thirty-one, the council planned merely to move an old fountain onto the schoolyard. Then the municipal community offered something new from Schilt’s workshop. He had already sent in a model in August nineteen thirty-two: a fountain a little over two metres high, in reddish cast stone, topped by a standing penguin. The council hesitated, not over the price of two thousand francs, about thirteen thousand Swiss francs today, but because a penguin seemed too exotic for a Swiss schoolyard. Schilt defended it calmly. The bird, he said, worked artistically, practically, and everyone knew what a penguin was. The council gave way, but insisted on two drinking spouts so children could actually quench their thirst.
At first the water overflowed; workers corrected the problem, and by the nineteenth of July nineteen thirty-three the town recorded the fountain as finished. Later, many forgot who made it, even though generations of children drank here.
And perhaps that is Frauenfeld’s quiet secret: memory does not live only in grand facades. It also perches, unexpectedly, on a school fountain, where art and usefulness meet. That is how the city’s hidden treasures speak to one another. This little landmark is accessible at any hour, day or night.
