Rammelsbach
Rammelsbach 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 Kusel-Altenglan, whose seat is in Kusel.Geography
Location
The municipality lies within the Kusel Musikantenland in the Western Palatinate. Rammelsbach lies in the Kuselbach valley between Kusel and Altenglan and also stretches into the valley of the Rammelsbach, which flows to the Kuselbach from the south. In its upper reaches, the Rammelsbach is known as the Tiefenbach. The Kuselbach valley floor lies at 215 m above sea level. Prominent elevations on the Kuselbach's right bank are the Rammelsbacher Kopf and the Remigiusberg, while over on the left bank is the Hinzigberg, which near the Schlichterhof reaches a height of almost 300 m. The great basalt quarry, locally known as “Dimpel”, spreads over the whole Rammelsbacher Kopf. An electronics factory stands in the village's west end between Bundesstraße 420 and the Kuselbach. The industrial lands in this area have over time come to abut those in Kusel. The municipal area measures 264 ha, of which 31 ha is wooded.Neighbouring municipalities
Rammelsbach borders in the north and east on the municipality of Altenglan, in the south on the municipality of Haschbach am Remigiusberg and in the west on the town of Kusel. Rammelsbach also meets the municipality of Theisbergstegen at a single point in the southeast.Constituent communities
Also belonging to Rammelsbach are the outlying homesteads of Haus Menges, Kreuzhof, Rechenhäuschen and Schlichterhof.Municipality’s layout
Rammelsbach was originally made up of only a few houses and was even once called the Rammelsbacher Hof. The village core spread out until the 19th century over both banks of the Rammelsbach, and only the mill stood on the Kuselbach. Beginning in the 17th century, the village began to spread outwards, but only slowly at first. A small outlying centre arose in the 19th century, the Rechenhäuschen, on the Kuselbach's left bank. This centre has since grown together with the village itself. Another outlying centre, the Schlichterhof, is an Aussiedlerhof, an agricultural settlement established after the Second World War to increase food production. Even by 1819, the village of Rammelsbach only had 30 houses. The original cadastral survey done in 1848 showed that Rammelsbach had grown by 10 houses. Since the villagers earned their livelihoods mainly at farming through to the mid 19th century, old farmhouses can still be spotted in the original village core, all of them Einfirsthäuser, as was customary in the Westrich, an historic region that encompasses areas in both Germany and France. After the great stone quarry was opened in 1868, the village began growing rather quickly. About 1888, new houses sprang up on the old village street leading to the bridge, and even beyond the bridge all the way to the road running through the Kuselbach valley. Beginning in 1894, the valley location down at the Kuselbach was opened for building. About 1901, Steinbruchstraße was built, as was what is nowadays called Friedrich-Ebert-Straße about 1905. Beginning in 1902, it was mainly workers who settled on the slopes of the lower Hinzigberg. More new houses were built on Flurstraße and Höhweg at about the turn of the 20th century, although these streets were not actually expanded until 1932. Since the Second World War, particular effort has gone into opening further new residential areas. There came the “Tiefenbachsiedlung” and the new housing estate on the upper Hinzigberg. Some gaps in the built-up area were opened to building, and thus the building in the already existing streets was expanded. Rammelsbach is first and foremost a residential community. The built-up parts of the municipality could to a great extent be described as workers’ settlements. The graveyard stretches over a slope on the Kuselbach's left bank in the village's east end. The Evangelical church stands nearby, while the Catholic church stands in a new building zone on a slope on the Kuselbach's right bank. Both churches were built in 1954. The building that is now the primary school for the Verbandsgemeinde of Altenglan came into being in 1964 at first as a replacement for three other schoolhouses in the village. Nearby stands the kindergarten. A great sporting ground can be found in the village's south, west of the road leading to Haschbach am Remigiusberg. A shooting sport clubhouse with a shooting range stands near the Rechenhäuschen.History
Antiquity
After the First World War, a cylindrical stone hatchet made of diorite was found on the Rammelsbacher Kopf that dated from the New Stone Age. During building work on the Catholic church in 1954, workers unearthed a great many Roman-era potsherds. It is likely that this church now stands on the foundations of a Gallo-Roman villa rustica.Rammelsbach lay in the Remigiusland. While it is assumed that the places Kusel and Altenglan already existed by the time that this landhold was donated to the Bishop of Reims, likely about 590 by King Childebert II to Bishop Egidius, Rammelsbach was only founded some 200 years after this donation. In the 12th century, the Counts of Veldenz took on the Vogtei over the Remigiusland and founded the County of Veldenz. Rammelsbach and the whole Remigiusland were subject for centuries at once to the Abbey of Saint-Remi in Reims and the Counts of Veldenz. In 1444, the County of Veldenz met its end when Count Friedrich III of Veldenz died without a male heir. His daughter Anna wed King Ruprecht's son Count Palatine Stephan. By uniting his own Palatine holdings with the now otherwise heirless County of Veldenz – his wife had inherited the county, but not her father's title – and by redeeming the hitherto pledged County of Zweibrücken, Stephan founded a new County Palatine, as whose comital residence he chose the town of Zweibrücken: the County Palatine – later Duchy – of Palatinate-Zweibrücken. Rammelsbach now found itself in this state. In 1552, the Dukes of Zweibrücken acquired the Remigiusland through sale, thus becoming the sole rightful owners. In 1364, Rammelsbach had its first documentary mention in a document that Count Heinrich II of Veldenz issued for his son Heinrich III and his wife Loretta of Sponheim. According to details in this document, Rammelsbach then belonged to the Veldenz Unteramt of Brücken/Altenglan. In Castle Lichtenberg's taxation rolls, a man named Hans von Rammelsbach was mentioned about 1450.Modern times
In line with Zweibrücken Ducal ecclesiastical policy, the Reformation according to Martin Luther’s teaching was introduced into Rammelsbach about 1537. Beginning in 1588, Count Palatine Johannes I forced all his subjects to convert to Reformed belief as espoused by John Calvin. At the time of the 1609 ecclesiastical visitation, there were seven families with all together 27 inhabitants living in the village. During the Thirty Years' War, the village was utterly destroyed, and only one woman survived the war. Newcomers settled, and repopulation was furthered by French King Louis XIV’s policies later on in the century. At the time of Louis XIV’s politique des Réunions, the Catholic faith once more gained a foothold in the village. Rammelsbach belonged, as before, to Palatinate-Zweibrücken, and would until that state was swept away in the course of the French Revolution.Recent times
While limestone had been quarried in the Rammelsbach area since the Middle Ages, a proper limestone industry only developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, contributing to the village’s growth and creating jobs in such occupations as lime burning and goods transport, alongside the traditional farming. Rammelsbach underwent a thorough shift towards being an industrial village after 1886, when large-scale quarrying of basalt began. The population first doubled and then trebled before the 19th century ended. Hard work characterized village life for both men and women. After Revolutionary France had annexed the German lands on the Rhine’s left bank, Rammelsbach lay in the Mairie of Kusel, the Canton of Kusel, the Arrondissement of Birkenfeld and the Department of Sarre. The village also remained tightly bound with Kusel after it was united with the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1818. It also now belonged to the Landkommissariat, Canton and Bürgermeisterei of Kusel. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Nazi Party did not become quite as popular in Rammelsbach as in some other places in the district. In the 1924 Reichstag elections, only 0.2% of the local votes went to Adolf Hitler’s party, and in the 1928 Reichstag elections, only 2.0% but by the time of the 1933 Reichstag elections, after Hitler had already seized power, the Nazis fared no better than 26% in terms of local support. Until 1933, though, the Social Democratic Party of Germany had always enjoyed an absolute majority in federal elections locally, and even though they lost that in this election, they still outpolled the Nazis by quite a hefty margin. Nevertheless, Hitler's overall success in these elections paved the way for his Enabling Act of 1933, thus starting the Third Reich in earnest. Also in 1933 came another merger with Kusel instigated by the Nazis, but this was undone in 1945, when Rammelsbach once more became a mayoral seat. In 1954, both Rammelsbach's current churches were consecrated. A new schoolhouse was built in 1963, and in 1966, Grundig opened a plant in Rammelsbach. In the course of administrative restructuring in Rhineland-Palatinate, Rammelsbach became an Ortsgemeinde within the Verbandsgemeinde of Altenglan in 1972. The old mayoralty was dissolved and the municipality became one of 16 Ortsgemeinden within the Verbandsgemeinde. In 1984, Grundig closed its Rammelsbach plant, and in 1986, TDK took over Grundig's old workshops. In 1999, it concentrated its Compact Cassette production in Rammelsbach. In 2003, though, TDK closed the workshops and RME, a daughter company of a Taiwan-based business, moved into the premises.