Heinzenhausen


Heinzenhausen on the Lauter 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 North Palatine Uplands in the Lauter valley at an elevation of roughly 175 m above sea level, about halfway between the towns of Lauterecken and Wolfstein. The elevations either side of the dale reach up to 350 m above sea level. The municipal area measures 221 ha, of which roughly 15 ha is settled and 93 ha is wooded.

Neighbouring municipalities

Heinzenhausen borders in the east on the municipality of Hohenöllen, in the south on the town of Wolfstein and in the west and north on the municipality of Lohnweiler. Heinzenhausen also meets the municipality of Oberweiler-Tiefenbach at a single point in the southeast.

Municipality’s layout

The village of Heinzenhausen stretches along the dale, for the most part on the Lauter's right bank and is concentrated towards the north where a small brook empties into the river at the village core. Here, Bundesstraße 270 crosses the Lauter. The Lauter Valley Railway runs along the brook's left bank with a stop in the village's south end. The graveyard lies east of the village core.

History

Antiquity

It is certain that the area around the village was settled in prehistoric times, and this is witnessed by comprehensive prehistoric archaeological finds, particularly from the municipal area of the neighbouring municipality of Lohnweiler. In Heinzenhausen itself, a stone hatchet made of volcanic material was found east of the village. Formerly, two barrows were also known, but today they can no longer be found. Roman finds are also known from neighbouring municipalities.

Middle Ages

It was likely in the Early Middle Ages that today's village of Heinzenhausen was founded, although it is impossible to pinpoint the founding date. The village lay in the Nahegau and then later passed to the County of Veldenz when this was founded in the earlier half of the 12th century. In 1282, King Rudolph I of Germany gave Count Heinrich III of Hohenecken and his wife Margarethe leave to sell the estate of Mittelrohrbach, a royal fief, with all its appurtenances and serfs to Otterberg Abbey. Against this sale, the king accepted from the comital couple the Lampertsmühle and a meadow in Heinzemanneshusen sub Castro Wolvestein, that is to say, beneath the castle of Wolfstein. Besides the documents from the year of first documentary mention, the village's name appears in further documents from the earlier line of the Counts of Veldenz. Among them is a 1379 document according to which Count Friedrich II of Veldenz enfeoffed Johann Mohr von Sötern with holdings in Heinzenhausen. A year later, Gerhard von Alsenz acknowledged the receipt of interest from, among other villages, Heinzenhausen. In 1422, Count Friedrich III of Veldenz enfeoffed the brothers Johann and Philipp Boos von Waldeck with a series of villages, along with the estate of Wusthausen and his own holdings in Heinzenhausen. The Barons von Boos zu Waldeck owned an estate in Heinzenhausen until the end of feudal times when the German lands on the Rhine’s left bank were occupied by French Revolutionary troops. The last of the mediaeval Counts of Veldenz, Friedrich III, died in 1444, leaving no son to inherit his title. His daughter Anna, however, had married 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. Heinzenhausen now belonged to this new County Palatine.

Modern times

Under the terms of the Treaty of Marburg, concluded on 18 November 1543, the new County of Veldenz-Lauterecken, later Veldenz-Lauterecken-Lützelstein, arose, an act that Duke Wolfgang had secured for his uncle Ruprecht “the Limping”. The newly created county was a courtesy for Ruprecht, who as Wolfgang's regent in his younger years had governed, together with Wolfgang's mother, the County Palatine. Heinzenhausen now lay in this new County of Veldenz. Count Palatine Ruprecht, its founder, died only the next year. Georg Hans, born in 1543, succeeded him, and Duke Wolfgang acted as his regent until he came of age. Like almost all villages in the Glan region, Heinzenhausen, too, suffered under the ravages of the 17th century's wars, both the Thirty Years' War and French King Louis XIV's wars of conquest. However, during the Thirty Years' War, the nearby residence town of Lauterecken afforded the villagers shelter, and it was never overrun by the French. Nevertheless, death reaped a rich harvest even here with hunger and the Plague. The County of Veldenz-Lützelstein met its end in 1692 with Count Palatine Leopold Ludwig's death, for he had no heir. Now came a dispute over whether the county – and thereby Heinzenhausen along with it – should pass to the Electorate of the Palatinate or the County Palatine of Zweibrücken. At first, the County Palatine of Zweibrücken, which at that time was ruled by Swedish King Karl XI, took ownership of the Ämter of Veldenz and Lauterecken along with the Remigiusberg, but in 1697, Palatinate troops showed up. The Amt of Lauterecken, and thereby Heinzenhausen, were now ruled by the Electorate of the Palatinate. A permanent solution to the dispute came only in 1733, in Palatinate's favour, with the so-called Treaty of Succession. Johann Goswin Widder, in his 1788 work Geographische Beschreibung der Kurpfalz, wrote about Heinzenhausen, among other things: “Heinzenhausen, a slight little village of 15 houses on the Lauter’s right bank, lying half an hour up from Lauterecke, was called long ago Heinzemanneshusen … Nevertheless, the village seems to have been subject, with the Vogtei, at all times to the Counts of Veldenz and Castle Lauterecke.”

Recent times

During the time of the French Revolution and Napoleonic times, the German lands on the Rhine’s left bank were annexed by France. Along the Glan ran the boundary between the Departments of Mont-Tonnerre and Sarre. Heinzenhausen now lay in the Department of Mont-Tonnerre/Donnersberg, the Arrondissement of Kaiserslautern, the Canton of Lauterecken and the Mairie of Lauterecken. In 1814, the French were driven out of the German lands on the Rhine's left bank, and after a brief transitional period, there was a new territorial arrangement, under which Heinzenhausen now lay in the bayerischer Rheinkreis, later called the bayerische Rheinpfalz, but by any name, it was the territory on the Rhine that the Congress of Vienna had awarded to the Kingdom of Bavaria. Within this, Heinzenhausen lay in the Landkommissariat of Kusel, the Canton of Lauterecken and the Bürgermeisterei of Lauterecken. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Nazi Party was quite popular in Heinzenhausen. In the 1928 Reichstag elections, 29.1% of the local votes went to Adolf Hitler’s party, but by the 1930 Reichstag elections, this had grown to 40.2%. By the time of the 1933 Reichstag elections, after Hitler had already seized power, local support for the Nazis had swollen to 83.3%. Hitler’s success in these elections paved the way for his Enabling Act of 1933, thus starting the Third Reich in earnest. After the Second World War, the Bavarian exclave on the Rhine’s left bank was grouped into the then newly founded state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Heinzenhausen now lay in the Regierungsbezirk of Pfalz within this state, and then later, after the Regierungsbezirke were reorganized, in the Regierungsbezirk of Rheinhessen-Pfalz. Regierungsbezirke have since been abolished in Rhineland-Palatinate and are therefore no longer a feature of the administrative structure. In the course of the 1968 administrative restructuring in Rhineland-Palatinate, Heinzenhausen was grouped as a self-administering Ortsgemeinde into the Verbandsgemeinde of Lauterecken with effect from 1 January 1972.

Population development

The village has remained rurally structured. Even today, the surrounding countryside is used for agriculture, though the number of farmers has shrunk. Thus, Heinzenhausen has become a small residential community with job opportunities in the area's major centres.
The following table shows population development over the centuries for Heinzenhausen:

Municipality’s name

The village's name underwent several changes through the ages:
The pet form of the name Heimrich developed through Heino and Heini to Heinzemann. The first name Heinzemann is a form that was particularly popular in the 13th and 14th centuries. Thus it may be possible to infer something about the roots of the name Heinzenhausen.

Vanished villages

Within Heinzenhausen's limits once lay the village of Wüsthausen, also called Wusthauserhof. It had its first documentary mention in 1422. The name still crops up in 18th-century documents.

Religion

It is likely that Heinzenhausen originally belonged to the Church of Lohnweiler, and later the Church of Lauterecken. In the time of the Counts Palatine/Dukes of Zweibrücken, the Reformation was introduced, and all the inhabitants had to convert to Lutheran teaching. A later conversion to Calvinism, as in the villages of the former County Palatine of Zweibrücken, did not come about in Heinzenhausen, for as of 1543, it belonged to the new County Palatine of Veldenz. Nevertheless, at the end of the Thirty Years' War, it became possible to convert to Calvinism, and indeed to Catholicism. Conversions to Catholicism and the coming of Catholic settlers became very common after 1733, after the village became an Electoral Palatinate holding. Of the 146 inhabitants in 1825, 76 were Evangelical and 70 were Catholic. In 1961, of the 336 inhabitants that were counted, 289 were Evangelical and only 45 were Catholic. This can be explained by the arrival of many Evangelical families during the 19th century. Jewish inhabitants do not show up in any available statistics at all.

Politics

Municipal council

The council is made up of 6 council members, who were elected by majority vote at the municipal election held on 7 June 2009, and the honorary mayor as chairman.

Mayor

Heinzenhausen's mayor is Frank Kohl, and his deputies are Sonja Wolke and Henning Baldauf

Coat of arms

The municipality's arms might be described thus: Per fess wavy sable a demilion Or armed, langued and crowned gules and argent a waterwheel spoked of four azure surmounted by a bridge arched of two issuant from base set slightly to sinister of the field masoned of the first.
The charge in the upper half of the escutcheon is the Palatine lion, a reference to the village's former allegiance to the Palatinate, while those below the wavy line of partition represent the bridge across the river Lauter and the mill on that river. The arms have been borne since 1986 when they were approved by the now defunct Rheinhessen-Pfalz Regierungsbezirk administration in Neustadt an der Weinstraße.

Culture and sightseeing

Regular events

Heinzenhausen's kermis is held on the first weekend in August, and the Nachkirmes on the third weekend in September. Old customs such as were once observed in all villages in the Glan area are nowadays hardly practised at all.

Clubs

The following clubs are to be found in Heinzenhausen:

Economic structure

Besides agriculture, there were in earlier times the customary craft occupations in Heinzenhausen. At the Petersgrube colliery in the 19th century, 5 to 8 workers were employed, who between 1835 and 1855 mined 2 567 t of coal. The gristmill was up and running as early as the 18th century with both grinding and husking stones. It was shut down after the Second World War. Agricultural businesses are today quite rare. A prefabricated house firm in the village specializes in building timber-frame houses and energy-saving prefabricated houses. High-grade stainless steel furniture, mainly for the restaurant industry, is made by another firm. Other crafts of the traditional kinds are no longer customary. Also in the village are insurance agencies and a firm for distributing advertising articles.

Education

It is highly likely that as early as the 16th century, there were efforts to teach children to read and write, since the Counts Palatine of Zweibrücken had introduced the Reformation and were especially interested in putting the country's children in a position to read the Bible. School was held in an ordinary house. Today, Hauptschule and Gymnasium students go to the corresponding schools in Lauterecken.

Transport

Heinzenhausen lies on Bundesstraße 270, which links Idar-Oberstein with Kaiserslautern. Branching off Bundesstraße 270 is Landesstraße 383, which leads to the neighbouring village of Hohenöllen. Lauterecken lies 5 km away, while Kaiserslautern lies 27 km away and Kusel 35 km away. Serving the municipality is a railway station on the Lauter Valley Railway.