Grumbach
Grumbach is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Kusel district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Lauterecken-Wolfstein.Geography
Location
The municipality lies in the Western Palatinate on the river Glan’s left bank, roughly 2 km up the Schwinzbach, which empties into the Glan at the biggest valley cut on the reach of the Glan between Niederalben and Meisenheim. Here, the valley broadens out, and the mountain spur being formed by the mouth of the Hundsgraben affords the site some solid ground. The settled centre is found exclusively on the south slope at an elevation of 235 m above sea level. The valley is bordered in the south by the 354 m-high so-called Hellenwald and in the north by the 338 m-high Roman road. The outlying centre of Windhof, lying 3 km to the northeast an elevation of 340 m above sea level offers the visitor an outstanding panorama of the surrounding countryside, owing to its exposed location. The municipal area measures 331 ha, of which 48 ha is wooded.Neighbouring municipalities
Grumbach borders in the north on the municipality of Kappeln, in the east on the town of Lauterecken, in the south on the municipality of Hausweiler, in the west on the municipality of Herren-Sulzbach and in the northwest on the municipality of Merzweiler. Grumbach also meets the municipality of Buborn at a single point in the southwest, and has an exclave to the northeast that borders in the northeast on the municipality of Medard, in the southeast and southwest on the town of Lauterecken and in the northwest on the municipality of Kappeln.Constituent communities
Also belonging to Grumbach is the outlying homestead of Windhof.Layout of the Municipality
The mountain spur formed by the meeting of two valley cuts, and the resulting crags that stand here have made it possible to build a settlement here. Examinations of the still preserved stonework at the castle point to Salian times, but without better, more verifiable sources, this remains unclear. Nor is it at all clear, for lack of any proof, that the lore handed down in the village itself about the village’s founding has any truth to it; this would have the listener believe that Grumbach was founded by the Knights Templar. What is clear, though, is that in the 13th century, there was indeed a castle upon the heights of the mountain spur. The word castrum used in the document in question attests to such a complex in what was then the legal sense. This first documentary mention and the continuous accounts thereafter, based on solid sources, lead to the conclusion that the village’s founding came about in the earlier half of the 13th century, which would also match what is classically believed to be the castle’s building date: 1200-1250. The said continuous habitation, however, is in no way to be disregarded. How this complex or possible forerunner building might have looked is utterly unknown, as is the area over which it held sway. Arising during the course of the castle’s building was a settlement in the dale, which had its beginnings in what is now Unterstraße. Insofar as the street lying higher up – called, of course, Oberstraße – reached up the Middle Ages to the castle or to the settlement lying at its foot, this is something that cannot be determined today, although there is mention of Burgmannen’s houses “within and without”, and it is to be assumed that there would have been fortified structures at least at the way into this street. Despite having been granted town rights, the village remained wedged in between these two streets, and a town wall was never built. The way that the village has today quite contrarily spread out to the west was ensured by the Hundsgraben, which despite the ending —graben is a natural waterway. This now stretches to the street “In der Hohl” and along its extension. The village’s east side was protected merely by manmade ditches, palisades and hedges. Several gates were mentioned, such as the gates in the dale that were mentioned in 1590. These had to be maintained by the citizenry. The gates might have stood at the beginnings of each of the two streets mentioned above. To this day, the western end of Unterstraße is still customarily called “Untertor”. Worth mentioning is the hierarchical division of building practices, which reflected the feudal societal structure: On the heights stood the old castle, which represented the way the nobility lived. Below lay Oberstraße with its impressive residential buildings, which set themselves apart by the size of their plots. Farther below lay Unterstraße, in the bottom of the dale. Here lived “the little people” with correspondingly little plots for their little houses. While the settlement down below in the dale kept its shape over several centuries, the castle underwent several changes, which themselves fundamentally altered Grumbach’s appearance. Quite likely the most far-reaching change came in the course of the end of the whole concept of the castle, in the latter half of the 16th century, when it was chosen to be a noble residence. If the ruling family was to live there permanently, the mediaeval castle would have to be adapted to more modern requirements, which would end up fully overhauling very nearly all aspects of the then existing building. In other words, the castle was converted from a Burg – the customary German word for a castle used as a military fortification – into a Schloss – the word used for a palace or a palatial castle. This semantic distinction was one that had arisen in German only over the two foregoing centuries. The terracelike, well aligned building work done in the areas known as “Auf dem Schloss” and “Im Lustgarten” still bear witness today to the way that architectural imagination strove for harmony, here in a V-shaped convergence of the two at a newly built residence. Parallels can be drawn with the Hortus Palatinus at Heidelberg Castle. Only relatively late, in the latter half of the 18th century, did the settlement in the dale, this time in the course of an economic upswing, begin to spread out to the west and east, giving rise to representative residential buildings, some of which can still be recognized today. However, as also in all later expansions, these ones might not have left Grumbach with its old character, that of a late mediaeval-early modern castle-market town that presented itself in a well-nigh unique way within the district of Kusel. One thing that also characterized the building in Grumbach may have been the French Revolution and its consequences, which destroyed feudalism, as symbolized by the Schloss. Peripheral buildings, though, among others the last lordly building project, the reconstruction of a Schloss building that was never finished, and the archive building, still remain. The result of these events is not least the church, which now stands on the spot once occupied by the Schloss, and now crowns the village in much the same way as the former building complex once did. In the 19th century, too, Grumbach spread only along the paths already mentioned, filling in gaps in the built-up area, and pushing the edges outwards. Perhaps the foremost building project was the Amt courthouse in 1834 and 1879. In 1906, Grumbach had 116 residential buildings. Out in the Ortsteil of Windhof lay six independent farms, and there were three more at the Sonnhof north of the village. In the 1920s, once more gaps in the built-up area were being filled, sometimes with striking buildings, before the Second World War put an end to such work, at least for a while. In 1937, the gymnasium on Gemeinde-Zimmerer-Platz, which also fulfilled the function of a village hall, was built by a building bee organized by the gymnastic club. Building activity begun in the 1960s, which mainly involved the area called “Im Grund”, opened up an extensive expansion by the 1970s, one vaster than the village had hitherto known, in the new building zone called “Auf’m Vogelsheerd”. In 2001, there were 185 houses in Grumbach.History
Antiquity
finds bear witness to human activity in the current municipal area as far back as the Old Stone Age. The presence of a Mithras monument from Roman times is unfortunately only known from literature and may somehow be linked with the Roman road that once passed by the village to the north. More recent examinations of aerial photographs have shown that there might have been a settlement in Roman times in the area of the Schlossberg, west of the current village of Grumbach. However, verification of this assumption awaits archaeological examination, but until that is done, a definitive pronouncement as to the village’s beginnings cannot be made.In March 1243, Grumbach had its first documentary mention, when the then holder of the castle, Waldgrave Conrad II of Kyrburg, enfeoffed the Duke of Brabant with it. The occasion was a dispute that the Waldgrave was waging with the Archbishop of Mainz. The castle is said to have been one of the ancestral seats of the Waldgravial family that in literature could be traced back to the Emichones, the counts in the Nahegau. They were in ownership of the Waldgraviate, which had as its hub the area around Kirn on the river Nahe. In 1258, while he was still alive, Waldgrave Conrad divided his holdings up among his sons, whereby his son Gottfried was given the castles of Dhaun and Grumbach. Until the late 16th century, Grumbach was supposedly tightly bound with Castle Dhaun’s fate, with both always remaining together in subsequent divisions of inheritance. The ruling count of this sideline resided at Castle Dhaun, with Grumbach being occupied and administered by Burgmannen in this time. Grumbach was sacrificed as a pledged holding in the then pervasive and customary monetary politics, first to the Counts of Sponheim from 1363 to 1444, and then to the Counts Palatine of Zweibrücken from 1444 to 1477. In 1350, Rhinegrave Johann II joined the Waldgraviate’s inheritance through marriage, and henceforth, the comital family called itself “Waldgraves and Rhinegraves”, later adding to this the title Count of Salm in 1475. On 29 July 1330, the village was granted town rights on the Kaiserslautern model in a freedom certificate by Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian, although there were no major attendant effects. The village was still habitually called a Tal or Flecken. From 1385, records show that Grumbach was the seat of an Amt. The holder of rights over Grumbach also presided at the High Court on the Heath at Sien, though for a time there was also a Hochgericht auf der Höh’ between Grumbach and Kappeln, whose authority was limited to the then parish of Herren-Sulzbach. In its heyday, the lordship of Grumbach comprised all together more than 70 villages.