Frank Wessels takes it, this choice of words dictates the subject, Erwin Gottschlich by no means crooked, that Suurhusen, Wessels' place of residence and work, will probably lose a world record this weekend.

“I have always argued that this is fair competition.

If a church thinks it has a leaning tower, I've always encouraged it to have it measured.

And if they are weirder then we congratulate them.”

Daniel Meuren

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Frank Wessels is the pastor of the East Frisian town where, according to the current record lists such as the famous "Guinness Book of Records", the world's leaning tower is located.

The tower of the Old Church, which is a good 27.37 meters high, leans so menacingly to the west that when entering the cemetery below, one doubts one's own upright posture.

Since the adjoining nave is even slightly tilted in the other direction, there is a warped feeling like on a sailing ship in rough seas.

"And in the tower it only gets really crazy when you stand next to the bell," says Wessels.

"Because it's in balance."

But now the record is gone, despite all the weirdness.

The Rhenish-Hessian village of Gau-Weinheim measured and received the certificate from the Record Institute for Germany on Sunday to coincide with the Open Monument Day and the local notch.

The former fortified and today's bell tower of the municipality with barely 300 inhabitants a good 30 kilometers south of Mainz inclines 5.4277 degrees - and thus almost a quarter of a degree more than the competitor in northern Germany.

"It is clear to us that our tower is not as impressive as that of Pisa, perhaps less impressive than in Suurhusen, but it is sloping," says Erwin Gottschlich, initiator of the Gau-Weinheim record efforts.

The people of Gau-Weinheim have known for a long time that he is “schepp”, as they say in Rheinhessen.

But until Gottschlich's initiative, no one suspected that it was so crooked and even a lot sloppier than the most famous leaning tower.

In a way, Gottschlich's home village is the real Pisa.

After all, the most famous leaning tower in the world only had an inclination of a good four degrees, although this was also stabilized with expensive safety work at the end of the last century Titles - albeit not quite upright - stand.

But perhaps it is also evidence of the best statics that the towers, despite their inclination, have not yet fallen to the ground.

A toppled leaning tower is no longer a tower.

In Suurhusen, for example, a group of students from the Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences visit twice a year.

As part of a practical exercise, they then measure the leaning tower and look for changes in the inclination, which once came about after the construction in the mid-15th century, because in the course of draining the landscape behind the North Sea dike, the oak trunks that served as the foundation after the sinking of the groundwater level had decayed.

As a result, the tower tilted.