Ich bin ein Venturan : The folks of Deutschland and Ventura County are fostering a mutual fascination.

Klaus Scheikel’s mayoral office in Ohrdruf, Germany, looks out over a typical small-town scene: There are crammed-together gray and white brick office buildings, narrow cobblestone streets winding past small shops and a statue in the middle of the town square.

But inside Scheikel’s office are a few things that aren’t so typical: A hat, embroidered with “Ventura, California”; a 12-star flag with the names of Ventura and Ohrdruf in the corners, and on Scheikel’s desk, a small, water-filled plastic dome that contains sand from a Ventura beach.

All are symbols, Scheikel said, of a friendship he hopes will flourish.

“The contact (with Ventura) to this point has been limited to friendly letters,” Scheikel told a local German newspaper. “But I can imagine now that Ohrdruf soccer players could come to a tournament in Ventura. . . . Business relationships also may be possible.”

Scheikel’s town, not far from Dresden in what formerly was East Germany, isn’t the only German city that has developed a fondness for Ventura. Two other towns--Elmshorn and Herrenhof--have recently put Ventura on their maps as a special point of interest.

The fondness, from the look of things, is by no means one-sided. Throughout Ventura County, a variety of small but hearty groups have formed to express their mutual fascination with Deutschland:

* Genealogical societies report that interest in tracing German roots is flourishing. One recent meeting on the subject packed more than 70 county residents into the Thousand Oaks Library.

* Language classes at the county’s only German-American school include many attendees who have no German background but want to learn the language and customs. Others say they consider learning German a steppingstone to their cultural heritage.

* A Ventura high school embarked on an educational exchange program a few years ago that now has German students arriving here in the spring and Ventura students living with German students in the summer. Students say the experience has opened their eyes to another culture.

* Monthly meetings of Club Rhineland, a German-American group in Oxnard, typically bring together about 250 county residents with a penchant for accordion music. The goal, according to one club member, is to “let everyone dance and experience (the music), not just people of German descent.”

* Three years ago, a German-American friendship organization was formed in Ventura to foster cultural and professional exchange. In May, Ventura Mayor Gregory Carson and a small group of local businessmen associated with the organization will visit Germany to boost Ventura’s profile in a former East German town.

So what’s the impetus behind the groups?

Some say the recent spotlight on a country no longer divided has played a major role. But others believe there are other forces at play.

Herewith, several local Germanophiles talk about what some are calling “the German connection.”

Familial Roots

Jerry Timmons was not craving sauerkraut every day, but there were these other symptoms.

There was the lifelong love of Beethoven. Her fondness for Wiener schnitzel. Her interest, in fact, with “just about anything German. I just never knew why.”

A few years ago, Timmons got the chance to find out. After joining the Conejo Valley Genealogical Society, the Westlake Village resident was able to trace a great-great grandfather to a small German village.

With encouragement from other members of the group, she went to the library and looked up her ancestor’s last name in a German phone book.

To her surprise, 75 people with the same last name were listed. All, it turned out, were relatives.

“I was so thrilled, I can’t even begin to tell you,” Timmons said. “I went out and bought a book of 500 already-conjugated German verbs and wrote letters to them. One said he was doing research on my side of the family, and he actually invited me to come and stay with him and his wife.”

That trip, she said, “was one of the most incredible experiences of my life.”

Not everyone who goes digging for familial roots hits genealogical gold the way Timmons did.

But many other members of the society said that since joining the group they have received enough research skills and encouragement to trace back at least a few Teutonic branches of their family trees.

Lois Burlo of Thousand Oaks said she gathered her first pieces of family history when her mother was in the hospital.

“I knew she wouldn’t make it until Christmas, and I thought, ‘What do you give someone who won’t be around?’ ” Burlo said. “So I started doing research, and I put together some charts and stories and pictures about the family. It gave her a real lift. It was as if she understood where she fit in.”

Since then, Burlo has learned a lot about common stumbling blocks that genealogy buffs encounter with German records.

She said: “I wasted a lot of time looking through records to find people with the name Hable. That’s how my father spelled it. It took me a long time to find out that the German spelling was different--Hebel--and got changed in America. That happens a lot.”

In 1980, the last year for which figures are available, the U.S. Census Bureau counted nearly 30,000 Ventura County residents who identified themselves as coming from single German ancestry. Many more, however, might not be aware of their German heritage.

The society meets one night a month at the Thousand Oaks Library.

Members talk about helpful books they have come across, successes they have had since the previous meeting and offer suggestions for newcomers.

Guest speakers, featured at each of the meetings, address everything from conducting library searches to the latest in computer software programs. One, for instance, can now store up to 600 research books on a single compact disk.

“A lot of the research is the same, no matter what country you’re from,” said Randi Berry, the organization’s president, as more than 70 members seated themselves for a two-hour lecture on “Basic German Research.”

Of course, even using the most up-to-date research techniques still leads some members to what feels like a stone wall.

One woman said she had traced one line in her family back to 1066 and another to 1400. But when it came to more recent German records--many of which were destroyed during World War II--her luck hasn’t been so good.

“The frustrating thing is when you know that much about one part of your family, and then can’t learn anything at all about another part,” she said.

Then again, finding the records sometimes can be a bit disappointing.

Burlo, who expected to find at least one robber baron, composer or philosopher in her family tree, said she has come up with amazingly little.

“These are such incredibly ordinary people,” she said, shaking her head. “It boggles the mind.”

2nd-Language Exposure

Three years ago, Barbara Baldwin didn’t know a Vaterland from a Volkswagen. And to the question, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?,” her most likely reply would have been “Gesundheit.”

Today, Baldwin, a Simi Valley resident, can hold her own in German.

In halting but grammatically correct phrases, she can comment on everything from weather along the North Sea to swimming pools for sick horses.

“Das Wasser ist gut, weil die Pferde mit ihren gebrochenen Beinen sich bewegen konnen,” she said, or the water is good because the horses with broken legs can move around.

Baldwin isn’t aware of any German ancestry in her background.

She was prompted to immerse herself in the language, she said, after going to Berlin to visit friends. The language and culture were interesting enough that she felt compelled to learn more.

Lila Kruger, principal of the German-American school in Thousand Oaks, the only such school in the county, said Baldwin’s motivation isn’t unusual.

In contrast with past years, when most students had family connections, Kruger said the school now has a large percentage of adults who have no German heritage.

“We have business people who want to learn it for travel, people interested in genealogy so they can search for material, and people who simply don’t want to stay in the big hotels with everyone else,” she said. “A lot want to be able to mix with the natives.”

The school, in existence for 20 years, also teaches German to children on Saturday mornings.

For many, Kruger said, it is their first exposure to a second language.

“We have all kinds of children enrolled--children who speak no German at home, children who have one German-speaking parent who wants to pass the language on, and children whose parents don’t want to wait so long before introducing them to another language,” she said. “Some just don’t want their kids sitting in front of the TV on Saturday mornings.”

So how hard is it to learn to conjugate verbs, memorize idiomatic expressions and generally get a handle on a language that has as a word for a little old lady: Dampfschifffahrtsgesellshaftkapitaenswitwe?

“It’s a difficult language, but my goal is to one day be able to speak it perfectly,” John Folgert, a student in an advanced class, said in mistake-free German.

As with many students, Folgert said he also wants the opportunity to be able to put his new skill to use.

“Unfortunately, except for here, I don’t get much of an opportunity to speak it,” he said. “I’ve never been to Germany. But one day I will. The German culture, I think, is very beautiful.”

Exchange Effort

If it were a popularity contest, Joan Lofing knows her German class would lose hands down.

As it is, having a small number of children in her 11th-grade language class at Buena High School in Ventura doesn’t bother her a bit.

“There are hardly any of us taking it compared to Spanish or French,” said Lofing, a 16-year-old junior. “But we’ve got this thing going that they don’t. I think it’s really teaching us a lot.”

“This thing” is the county’s only high school German exchange program.

Begun five years ago, the program’s goal has been to enhance language abilities as well as to give students from both countries a taste of another culture.

Each spring, about 15 German students from Elmshorn, a small German town not far from the northern city of Hamburg, come for one month to Ventura. They live with the families of students studying German at Buena High. The following summer, Ventura students travel to Elmshorn and live with the families of the students who stayed with them.

“For most students, it’s just a real awareness of life being different,” said Brook Sturtevant, Buena’s exchange program coordinator. “Two years ago, we arrived in Berlin the day after they opened up the border. We rented hammers and chisels and helped tear down the wall. Experiences like that help to change your outlook of the world.”

Of course, not every experience is as dramatic. Most of the time, students say they are simply given a glimpse of the day-to-day goings-on that make German and American high school life different.

The German school system, Sturtevant said, varies greatly from the American.

In Germany, students can attend one of three schools: One provides technical training, one for students most likely to enter white-collar jobs, and the Gymnasium, a 13-year curriculum for students likely to go to a university.

The school in Elmshorn falls into the more rigorous Gymnasium category.

“They’re pretty intense there. It’s kind of like college,” said Daniel Swaney, a 17-year-old senior at Buena High who was part of the exchange program in 1990.

Swaney, as with many Ventura students in the program, had studied only two years of German before his departure--compared with about six years of English that German students take before coming here.

“I went into a religion class one day and ended up walking out,” Swaney recalled. “The only word I understood was ‘Jesus.’ ”

And what about German students who come here?

Richard Underhill, a German teacher at Buena, said exchange students give mixed reviews to attending classes with students of all levels.

But he said they are impressed with the number of school clubs and “strong school spirit” here.

Naturally, there are many questions.

Students from each culture want to know about the other, Underhill said. They ask about driver’s licenses, food and music.

And sometimes, Underhill said, they even get serious.

In one conversation, Ventura students asked their foreign classmates if they felt guilty or ashamed about Germany’s role in World War II. The question led to a discussion on how history had been presented by both countries, and how it had affected the students’ perceptions of each other.

“Some (German students) said they felt a little bit ashamed, but most said no,” Underhill said. “These kids are just 16, and some of their parents were just being born then. They said they thought it was important to realize it was part of their heritage and national identity, but that they were not responsible.”

Underhill paused for a moment. “What that kind of dialogue does is break down stereotypes. And that, I think, adds a real dimension to the school.”