The Hohlhippe is what happens when the wafer abandons all remaining pretence of substance and becomes purely a gesture. Rolled into a cylinder while still hot and pliable, it sets into a crisp hollow tube whose only function is to look elegant balanced against a dessert or standing upright in a coupe glass.
It contains nothing, does nothing, contributes nothing to the eating experience beyond a brief snap and a faint sweetness. It is the wafer in its most aristocratic and least necessary form, ornament for its own sake, which makes it the direct descendant of the communion host in the most unexpected possible way: both exist to mark an occasion rather than to provide nourishment.
There is one further twist. Many Hohlhippen are no longer hollow at all, filled instead with chocolate or hazelnut cream, the wafer that defined itself by its emptiness quietly becoming full. The object that began as a vessel for the sacred, spent centuries as a vessel for ice cream, and reinvented itself as pure ornament has ended, in its most commercial form, as a vessel for itself.