Bad Hersfeld
The festival and spa town of Bad Hersfeld is the district seat of the Hersfeld-Rotenburg district in northeastern Hesse, Germany, roughly 50 km southeast of Kassel.
Bad Hersfeld is known countrywide above all for the Bad Hersfelder Festspiele, which have taken place each year since 1951 at the monastery ruins. These themselves are said to be Europe's biggest Romanesque church ruin.
In 1967, the town hosted the seventh Hessentag state festival.
Geography
Location
The town lies in the Hersfeld Basin formed here by the forks of the Fulda and the Haune. The inner town lies on the Fulda's left bank. Furthermore, the Geisbach and the Solz empty into the Fulda in the municipal area. In the southwest lie the Vogelsberg Mountains, in the northwest the Knüll and in the northeast the Seulingswald.The town's lowest point, at 195 m above sea level, is to be found in the area where the Solz empties into the Fulda, whereas the highest point within town limits is the Laxberg in the Knüllgebirge, at 408 m above sea level.
The town can be said to belong both to Northern Hesse and Eastern Hesse.
The nearest cities are Kassel, 52 km to the north, Gießen, 79 km to the southwest, Fulda, 36 km to the south and Eisenach, 45 km to the east. Through Bad Hersfeld runs the Deutsche Fachwerkstraße, a holiday road that showcases many of Germany's timber-frame houses and buildings.
Geology
The Old Town stands on an alluvial or fluvial fan made of gravel and pebbles, which were washed up between Fulda and Geisbach. Also in the Fulda valley are found gravel and pebbles from the Holocene that are mostly of alluvial origin. There are layers of flood-deposited loess and loam of Pleistocene origin running through them. The gravel and pebbles are to a great extent made up of Middle Bunter, the most widespread stone here. In the west and east, this layer reaches from the Germanic Triassic on the Stellerskuppe and the Haukuppe up to 400 m above sea level. In the east, on the Wippershainer Höhe, the layer reaches up to 440 m above sea level. The Middle Bunter's lower limit is found at about 110 m above sea level.Newer mineral layers from the Triassic are found only in sporadic deposits and discontinuous layers within town limits. This is the Röt formation, which crops up in the headwaters of the many small brooks around the town. The Lower or Middle Muschelkalk that overlies it can only be found in a narrow, west-to-east running rift stretching between Heenes and Oberrode, north of the inner town. The newest mineral layer from the Triassic – the Lower Keuper – is only preserved in the region under a lava flow, which does not show itself above ground anywhere near the town.
Owing to uplift in the Jurassic and Cretaceous, there are no mineral layers from these geological time periods. Volcanic rock from the Miocene can be found on the Haukuppe.
Mineral layers that do not reach the surface here are the Lower Bunter, running from a depth of some 90 m underneath the town down to some 390 m farther down, and, following at yet greater depths, Upper and Lower Zechstein from the Permian. From this layer come the two mineral springs in Bad Hersfeld. This layer is also used in underground mining from the 400-metre level on down on the Werra and on the Fulda, yielding potash.
Municipal area’s extent
Today's main town spreads over the slopes of the Tageberg, the Frauenberg, the Wehneberg and the Wendeberg, further reaching into the valleys of the Meisebach and the Geisbach. From southwest to northeast it stretches some 4.5 km, and from northeast to southwest some 3.5 km.The Old Town in the Fulda valley has an oval shape and an area of some 40 ha. From west to east it stretches some 960 m and from south to north some 570 m. This can still clearly be seen today, as where the town moat once led around the town there is today a ringroad that leads traffic around it.
Constituent communities
Besides the main town – also called Bad Hersfeld – the town also has the outlying centres of Allmershausen, Asbach, Beiershausen, Eichhof, Heenes, Hohe Luft, Johannesberg, Kathus, Kohlhausen, Petersberg and Sorga.Further subdivisions in the main town are not officially Stadtteile. The Old Town itself is divided into the Stiftsbezirk and the Unterstadt to the east. Between the two lies the oldest part of the Old Town. The spa is centred in a spot west of the Stiftsbezirk and is considered part of the main town. Furthermore, there are Kalkobes, Wehneberg, Zellersgrund, Oberrode, Hof Hählgans and Mönches.
Neighbouring communities
Clockwise from the north, these are Ludwigsau, Friedewald, Schenklengsfeld, Hauneck, Niederaula, Kirchheim and Neuenstein.Climate
The town's sheltered location in the Fulda valley with the surrounding Hessian and Thuringian low mountain ranges leads to a relatively high average yearly temperature in Bad Hersfeld of 8.7 °C and a rather dry climate with yearly precipitation averaging only 718.1 mm. The average yearly sunshine, therefore, is quite high at 1,385.4 hours. On average over the year, Bad Hersfeld has 34 "summer days", 86 "frost days" and 22 "ice days".History
Bad Hersfeld's written history begins with the monk Sturm, who established a monastic settlement in Haerulfisfeld but later evacuated it to Fulda, and with Lullus, who reëstablished the Benedictine Hersfeld Abbey in 769. Both had been missionary bishop Boniface's disciples. The monastery was enlarged between 831 and 850 and Lullus's remains were moved in 852 to another grave in the new basilica. During this ceremony his canonisation was announced by Rabanus Maurus. Since 852, the Lullusfest, the oldest folk festival in Germany, has been celebrated in the week of Saint Lullus's day, 16 October. Martin Luther visited the monastery, on his way back from the Diet of Worms in 1521 and held a sermon in the abbey church on 1 May. About two years later, the town and the territory of the abbey was mostly Protestant.It has been shown, however, through archaeological digs that today's townsite has a considerably longer settlement history, with traces of habitation going back to the New Stone Age about 2000 BC; a Bronze Age grave from about 1200 BC has also been unearthed, as have finds from La Tène times about 400 BC.
Hersfeld was first mentioned as a market centre in 1142 and as a town in 1170. At this time also came the Hersfeld Abbey's greatest importance in Imperial politics. In the centuries that followed, the Abbey's might ebbed as after the Great Interregnum it could no longer enjoy the Holy Roman Emperor’s support. Beginning in 1373, the Landgraviate of Hesse acquired influence over the town through defensive alliances. On Vitalisnacht 1378, the power struggle between the Abbey and the town reached its high point. Because of the German Peasants' War in 1525, great parts of the town and the Abbey passed to Hesse. In 1606, the last abbot died and in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the Imperial Abbey, raised to Electorate, was awarded to the Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel. Hersfeld, now a worldly electorate, henceforth belonged to Hesse-Kassel.
In 1439, great parts of the town were destroyed by fire. The oldest timber-frame house in town is the Küsterhaus from 1452. Abbot Ludwig V brought the town its last building boom for centuries in which he had the Abbey's buildings expanded and converted in the "Weser Renaissance" style. These can still be seen throughout the Old Town, for instance the former mint and the Schloss Eichhof.
During the Seven Years' War the French army used the former abbey church as a supply and food depot. In 1761, the French burnt the church and the monastery buildings down to destroy their supplies during their retreat, thus destroying one of the largest churches in Germany, and in 1807, the town was almost utterly destroyed by Napoleonic occupation troops, but was spared when it turned out that Baden Lieutenant Colonel Johann Baptist Lingg von Linggenfeld would only carry out Napoleon's orders "literally": he was supposed to set fire to the town on all four sides, and this he did by having four buildings, each standing away from others, set on fire.
During the American Revolution King George III of Great Britain hired the Musketeer Regiment Prinz Carl along with other regiments from Frederick II, Landgrave of Hesse. The Musketeer Regiment Prinz Carl was stationed both before and after their return from America at Hersfeld.
In 1821, Hersfeld became the seat of Hersfeld district in the Electorate of Hesse. In the same century, Hersfeld was linked to the railway network in 1866, and the town has also had an Autobahn link since 1938 northwards via Kassel and Hamburg to Scandinavia and southwards via Kirchheim, Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria to Austria. The Bundesautobahn 4 coming from Kirchheim links eastwards via Dresden and Görlitz to Poland. The development into a spa town began when the Lullusbrunnen was tapped in 1904.
In 1935 the barracks was built in the outskirts of Hersfeld, by the Wehrmacht. In 1945, Hersfeld was once again spared utter destruction, when two officers who had been taken prisoner guaranteed the town's peaceful handover.
The United States Army took over the Wehrmacht's barracks. Between 1948 and 1993 it was the McPheeters Barracks. Here served the 3rd Squadron, 14th Armored Cavalry Regiment and 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment at the Inner German border. About 800 American soldiers manned the barracks and its three observation posts, designated OP Romeo, OP India and OP Oscar. They also conducted two patrols daily along the border trace. The Americans had no interest in civilians crossing the border. Theirs was a tactical mission to halt possible Warsaw Pact aggression. Bad Hersfeld lies in the Fulda Gap, a historical avenue used for armies of the past. Bad Hersfeld was the northernmost American border garrison and the first line of defense during the days of the Cold War. While small in numbers, the US forces were heavily equipped with a nuclear capability. They were primarily equipped with armored personnel carriers, artillery, and main battle tanks. They were augmented with combat engineers and an anti-aircraft missile site. However, they patrolled the Russian-American Demarcation Line in pairs of jeeps to avoid damage to the roads.
Beginning in 1949, the town was called Bad Hersfeld, and as of 1963 it became a Hessian State Spa, which was municipalized in 2006..
In May 1983, 5,000 people in the town demonstrated against a reunion of soldiers from the Waffen-SS. Among the protest organizers were also the organizers of the Bad Hersfelder Festspiele.