This summer I was invited to a reading in Briedel. Gert Eisenbürger and Gaby Küppers, who have lived for about ten years in the old train station in Pünderich and converted it into a small museum for the Moseltalbahn railway, had let me know beforehand. They were interested in our family, the Arns family from Reil on the Mosel, where my family still runs Weingut Arns today.
That we're related to the Arns family in Brazil had actually always been known in our family. What was new to me that evening was something else: how much weight this story actually carries, and how precisely it has since been documented, by people who have looked into it in depth, not just preserved in our own memory.
A Book About People Who Left Everything Behind
Gaby and Gert worked for many years for the magazine ila, which covers Latin America. Küppers also writes for der Freitag. Two people, then, who know how to research a story before telling it. Their new book, MoselbrasilianerInnen, published in 2026 by Rhein-Mosel-Verlag, deals with something almost no one along the Mosel remembers anymore: that in the 19th century, entire families from villages like Reil, Pünderich, Briedel and Zell set out for southern Brazil, because there simply wasn't enough here to go around.
For us, the person around whom nearly this entire book revolves is no stranger. It's Nikolaus Arns, a winemaker from Reil on the Mosel and, as it later turns out, a direct ancestor of the Brazilian branch of our family. He first married Anna Margaretha Simonis, who probably died around 1835, then, in a second marriage, Maria Elisabeth Klering. In 1846, he packed up with the four children from his first marriage and emigrated, together with several families from Briedel, among them the Back family. So not a lone wanderer, but someone who set out together with half the neighborhood, because there was no future left here.
What became of this emigration is the part that surprised me most, not that it happened, but how far its ripples still reach today.
The Great-Great-Grandson Paulo Evaristo Arns
Nikolaus Arns' great-great-grandson was Paulo Evaristo Arns, later Archbishop of São Paulo and cardinal. As I said, I already knew there was this relative in Brazil.
Until now, our family ties to Brazil had meant two things to me: the occasional visit from Brazilians searching for their roots, and a not-insignificant advantage in religious education for me and my siblings, thanks to a teacher who was clearly a big Evaristo fan.
Why someone could get so enthusiastic about this cardinal became especially clear to me at the book reading in Briedel!
Arns was born in 1921 in Forquilhinha, a town in Santa Catarina co-founded by his father Gabriel Arns in 1912, today home to around 32,000 people. During Brazil's military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985, he was one of the few church leaders who openly stood against the regime. He was behind the documentation project Brasil: Nunca Mais, an effort that systematically exposed the torture carried out by the military courts, often at great personal risk to those involved. On June 8, 2026, he was honored posthumously for this, alongside several fellow campaigners, with the Troféu Audálio Dantas from the São Paulo journalists' union, recognized as a journalist, not only as a churchman.
His sister Zilda Arns founded the Pastoral da Criança, one of Latin America's largest children's aid organizations, and died in 2010 in the earthquake in Haiti. I have a childhood memory of her visiting Reil. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a picture of that occasion. But I do clearly remember that she gave a talk in the Reil parish house and later visited us at our house.
A Second Book Where You Can Find the Traces
You'll also find traces in the Chronik der Gemeinde Reil, Tausend Jahre Reil (Chronicle of the Reil Parish, A Thousand Years of Reil), published by our own local community: it contains a dedicated chapter on Paulo Evaristo Arns and Zilda Arns-Neumann. It states in black and white:
"His parents were the couple Gabriel Arns and Helena Steiner, who had emigrated from the Mosel region (Reil)."
On the same page there's a photo: the cardinal, surrounded by relatives from Reil. I know the three people next to him well, they're my grandparents Hannelore and Rainer Arns and my great-grandfather August Arns. The photo was presumably taken at his elevation to cardinal, on March 5, 1973, at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, at least that's how the family remembers it; I'm not entirely certain.
August Arns is really the one who dug deepest into this story. He researched our family's ancestry and traveled to Brazil himself in 1960, long before anyone wrote a book about it. I don't know the details of what he found or brought back at the time. But without him, we would probably know even less today than the little I picked up as a child.
Why I Don't Want to Keep This to Myself
I could easily have kept this story to myself, a nice anecdote for family gatherings, nothing more. But since I started working at the winery, I've realized it's bigger than that. Every year, descendants of emigrants show up at our door, not only from Brazil, but also from the United States, following their ancestors' trail back to the Mosel. Curious, often a little overwhelmed, and almost always genuinely interested in what we do here. So this story isn't only ours. It belongs to a larger pattern: people leave, people stay, and sooner or later paths cross again.
That's why this won't be the only article on the topic. In the coming installments I'll tell you more about Zilda Arns and the Pastoral da Criança, about the cardinal and his resistance to the dictatorship, about the emigration from the wider region, and about what it feels like for me to make wine today in exactly the place from which part of our family set out almost 200 years ago.
To Close: a Wine for This Story
If one of these 1846 emigrant families came from Briedel, the Back family, who set out together with Nikolaus Arns, then the recommendation is an obvious one for me: our Briedeler Weißerberg Riesling trocken. A single vineyard from exactly the neighboring village where part of this story originates. Lean, elegant, with a hint of peach, a wine from the very soil these families left behind almost 200 years ago. Certified organic, hand-picked, like everything we make.
If you'd like to explore more of our wines, you'll find the full selection in the shop.
If you're interested, here's the book "MoselbrasilianerInnen". For a deeper dive, there's also the piece "Weggehen, ankommen, gestalten" on the taz blog Latinorama as well as the article "Was ein Merler im 19. Jahrhundert in Brasilien bewegt" in the Rhein-Zeitung.
