Brücken, Kusel

Brücken (Pfalz) 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 Oberes Glantal, whose seat is in Schönenberg-Kübelberg.

Geography

Location

The municipality lies in the Ohmbach valley in the Western Palatinate. Near the village, the Ohmbach turns from its southerly direction of flow to a more southeasterly one where the valley floor also broadens out. Here it has an elevation of some 240 m above sea level, whereas the higher residential areas reach almost 300 m above sea level. The higher elevations within municipal limits, meanwhile, reach heights of some 380 m in the northeast and 320 m in the southeast. Also flowing through the municipal area in the southeast, near the small homestead of Paulengrund is the Kohlbach. The ''Neumühle'', originally a gristmill and from the late 19th century until after the Second World War a diamond-cutting workshop, stands in the village's north in the Ohmbach valley, and the homestead of Fuchsgrund lies on the valley floor to the southeast. Wooded land stretches eastwards and northwards from the village, and is also found in the southwest. The galleries of former coalmines lie in the village's northeast on the Dammfeld and the Buchwiese (rural cadastral names), at the Schenkelberg (mountain) and in the Schleckenborn. The municipal area measures 811 ha, of which 166 ha is wooded.

Neighbouring municipalities

Brücken borders in the north on the municipality of Steinbach am Glan, in the northeast on the municipality of Börsborn, in the east on the municipality of Gries, in the south on the municipality of Schönenberg-Kübelberg, in the west on the municipality of Dittweiler and in the northwest on the municipality of Ohmbach.

Constituent communities

Also belonging to Brücken are the outlying homesteads of Paulengrund, Neumühle and Fuchsgrund.

Municipality’s layout

The village stretches out along the bend in the Ohmbach on relatively even ground on the valley floor, and in the outskirts on roads that climb outwards in a star-shaped pattern. The main street is one of these, running from the upper Ohmbach valley through the middle of the village and then in a broad bow to the south going towards Schönenberg-Kübelberg. On this main street ("Hauptstraße") stands the schoolhouse, as does the Diamond-Cutting Museum (''Diamantenschleifermuseum''). In the northwest on the mountainside stands Saint Lawrence's Catholic Parish Church. Nearby lies the graveyard. The Evangelical parish church built in 1953 stands in the northeast on Straße Zum Krämel (a road). Old farmhouses of the type ''Quereinhaus'' type (a combination residential and commercial house divided for these two purposes down the middle, perpendicularly to the street) are still to be found in the village core. The outer residential areas are otherwise characterized by houses, mostly newer single-family dwellings. A major sport field has been laid out in the Karstwald (forest) southeast of the village on the road going towards Schönenberg.

History

Antiquity

As early as prehistoric times, the area around the village was inhabited by mankind, bearing witness to which are various finds from both Brücken itself and almost every neighbouring municipality. In the woods east of Brücken, at least according to a listing in the documents at the Office for Prehistory and Protohistory (''Amt für Vor- und Frühgeschichte'') in Speyer, is a prehistoric barrow with a diameter of some nine metres and a height of 70 cm. Nevertheless, there is no longer any sign of it on the ground. Much clearer are traces left by the Romans. In 1928, while ploughing over the heights near the Paulengrund in the field named "Auf der Burg", a farmer discovered some wall remnants of a Gallo-Roman villa rustica. This was temporarily unearthed so that it could be surveyed. According to statements made by earlier inhabitants, it is likely that in the early 20th century a vault with urns was unearthed. Later attempts at digging, though, yielded no such result. According to information from writer Tilemann Stella, in his time (17th century), A Roman stone, found within Brücken's limits, was known, showing on one side the goddess Minerva and on the other side the god Vulcan. Also, reports from the 19th century mention that a coin was found within Brücken's limits, but this has since been lost.

Middle Ages

The village of Brücken belonged from the time of its founding to the free Imperial Domain (''Reichsland'') around the town and castle of Kaiserslautern and the '' Amt'' and court district of Kübelberg in this domain. This ''Amt'' of Kübelberg, beginning in 1312, was taken over in succession by a whole series of secular lordships as an Imperial pledged holding, passing first to the Counts of Sponheim and in 1375 to Electoral Palatinate, and then in 1378 back to Sponheim, only to pass once again to Electoral Palatinate in 1437. Sometime before 1333 – the exact date is unknown – Brücken had its first documentary mention in a ''Weistum'' (cognate with English ''wisdom'', this was a legal pronouncement issued by men learned in law in the Middle Ages and early modern times) from Glan-Münchweiler in which the boundaries of the landhold held by the Hornbach Monastery in the Münchweiler Tal (dale) were outlined, in both German and Latin. According to this description, the boundary came from a now vanished village called Wanrneshoben, ran round the Steinberg to Bartenvogt (a ford near Waldmohr) "''…und darnach durch die mitten zwischen bruckhen bis gehn Brenheim''" ("…and thereafter through the middle between Brücken and up until Brenheim"). The corresponding Latin text reads "''…et tunc per medium inter Brugel et usque Berinheim"''. Brenheim (Berinheim, Breitenheim) is a former village, but in connection with this matter, nothing is clear. Writer Dieter Zenglein is of the opinion that the naming of ''Bruckhen'' and ''Brugel'' (another name used for the place in the ''Weistum'') is likely to have nothing to do with the village of Brücken, but rather with named rural areas (common in Germany even now). It may be that Brücken was named in even older documents in connection with the Hornbach Monastery. Nevertheless, it is quite unclear whether Brücken in the Ohmbach valley is meant. A 1372 document says that Johann von Wilenstein pledged taxes owed him and his holdings "in the estate at Brücken in Obenbach parishes" to his brother-in-law Frank von Wendelsheim. It is, however, certain that this refers to Brücken in the Oster valley. Otherwise, the village’s history is the same as that experienced by the whole ''Amt'' of Kübelberg. In the Late Middle Ages, the first of a series of ''Huberbücher'' (literally "books of farmers who work a whole ''Hube'', a land area roughly equivalent to the English oxgang) was published by the Knights of Mauchenheim, who as vassals of the Counts Palatine of Zweibrücken and Electoral Palatinate were enfeoffed with holdings in the ''Amt'' of Kübelberg.

Modern times

Further lists of ''Huber'' appeared in the 16th century, as did holding directories from the Wörschweiler Monastery. A comprehensive description by Electoral Palatinate Master Forester Vellmann comes from 1600. There was no great change in the arrangement of rulers in Early Modern Times. The Plague and the Thirty Years' War brought the village horror and death. "When in the autumn of 1635 the Imperial formations withdrew from Lorraine to the Rhine, they received orders to burn the villages on the army road down. Our village, too, was apparently overrun by troops in this year. The inhabitants were displaced, murdered or driven out, unless they had already fled sometime earlier." As if to confirm this, the taxation rolls thereafter showed hardly any entries, and towards the end of this harrowing war, and even for a few years after the Peace of Westphalia (1648), Brücken was a ghost village. It was 1656 before anyone – only two people – ever lived in the village again, and there then followed a sparse repopulation. French King Louis XIV’s wars of conquest, though, led to more hardship, destruction and loss of life. Only after the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) was there any effort aimed at repopulating the village. This was promoted by the Electoral Palatinate lord and brought newcomers from Switzerland, the Tyrol and even France to the region. The population figures rose swiftly in every village in the ''Amt'' of Kübelberg, including Brücken. Among these newcomers were also many Catholics, whereas earlier, from the beginning of the Reformation, only the faith according to Martin Luther had been tolerated.

Under the 1779 Treaty of Schwetzingen, Electoral Palatinate traded the court district of Kübelberg, and thereby Brücken, for the villages of Duchroth and Oberhausen and part of the village of Niederkirchen, all formerly belonging to the Duchy of Palatinate-Zweibrücken. Brücken was thereby also transferred from the Electoral Palatinate '' Oberamt'' of Kaiserslautern to the Zweibrücken ''Oberamt'' of Homburg and to the ''Schultheißerei'' of Waldmohr. One year before the exchange, the Electoral Palatinate geographer Goswin Widder described the village of Brücken for his four-volume work ''Geographische Beschreibung der Kurpfalz'' ("Geographical Description of Electoral Palatinate"), which only came out in 1788. Because of the territorial swap, Brücken could no longer be listed in the work, though the foreseen text has been preserved in manuscript.

Recent times

The interlude with Palatinate-Zweibrücken, however, did not last long, for the old feudal states were all swept away in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In 1793, the first French Revolutionary troops showed up in the region, exacting contributions from the populace and plundering the countryside. Brücken was spared none of this. In 1801, France annexed the German lands on the Rhine’s left bank and the oppression that had characterized the early days of French hegemony came to an end, although local young men were still being pressed into the French Army to fight France’s wars. During the short time of French rule, which ended in 1814, Brücken lay in the ''Mairie'' ("Mayoralty") of Schönenberg, the Canton of Waldmohr, the Arrondissement of Saarbrücken and the Department of Sarre (''Département de la Sarre''), whose seat was at Trier. In 1814, the French withdrew from the German lands on the Rhine’s left bank, and Brücken was at first assigned to the district of Ottweiler. After a transitional time – the changes brought about by the Congress of Vienna had not quite taken hold – the ''Baierischer Rheinkreis'' ("Bavarian Rhine District") came into being in 1816, later coming to be known as the ''bayerische Rheinpfalz'' ("Bavarian Rhenish Palatinate"), an exclave of the Kingdom of Bavaria. Brücken now lay within this new piece of Bavaria, and within the ''Bürgermeisterei'' ("Mayoralty") of Schönenberg, to which belonged not only Schönenberg itself, but also the villages of Kübelberg and Schmittweiler, and this ''Bürgermeisterei'' further belonged to the canton of Waldmohr in the ''Landkommissariat'' (later ''Bezirksamt'' and ''Landkreis'' or district) of Homburg. After the First World War, the district of Homburg was grouped into the autonomous Saar. The canton of Waldmohr, though, remained with Bavaria – now the Free State of Bavaria now that the last king of Bavaria and the Kaiser had abdicated – and thus with Germany, too. It belonged with a branch location of the administration to the ''Bezirksamt'' of Kusel, which remained in existence until 1940. As early as 1895, the citizens of Brücken put forth a proposal to the Kingdom of Bavaria to split the village away from the Mayoralty of Schönenberg and found their own mayoralty, and a year later the appropriate municipal council decision was made. The raising of the village to self-governing municipality came about in 1921. After the Waldmohr branch administration had been dissolved, this mayoralty belonged administratively to the district of Kusel. In the course of administrative restructuring in Rhineland-Palatinate, Brücken became an '' Ortsgemeinde'' in the ''Verbandsgemeinde'' of Schönenberg-Kübelberg in 1972.

Population development

In the village chronicle ''Brücken in der Pfalz'' (Bauer/Zenglein 1994), the village's population development is comprehensively documented. As early as the Late Middle Ages, there were roughly 100 inhabitants, which at that time already made it a big village. The repopulation after the Thirty Years' War proceeded only in fits and starts, only for the population to be adversely affected once again by more warfare in the 17th century as French King Louis XIV sought conquests in several wars. Only a well directed repopulation effort promoted by the Electors was able to bring about a steady rise in population in the course of the 18th century, and this resulted in a demographic change, not only in the greater numbers, but also in the predominant religious belief, for many Catholics heeded the call for new settlers, especially from French-speaking Europe. Eventually, they tipped the numeric balance in favour of their own denomination, becoming the majority in Brücken. The greater part of the population earned their livelihood at agriculture, and even the various craftsmen, merchants and innkeepers worked the land as a secondary source of income. Only with the opening of the collieries in the latter half of the 18th century did miners settle in the village, eventually building up to ten family heads. In 1753, the population count was once again more than 300, meaning that it had risen tenfold since the beginning of the century. Then, however, there was a definite flattening in the population growth curve. Further growth was indeed forthcoming, but now, there was also emigration. Growth once more began in earnest in the 19th century. Late that same century came another growth spurt with the spread of the diamond-cutting industry, which strengthened the village's economy until the mid 20th century. Neither agriculture nor diamond-cutting are of any particular importance today, and the villagers work at the most varied of occupations; most must commute to work outside the village. Nevertheless, the population has risen to a current total of about 2,600.

The following table shows population development over the centuries for Brücken, with some figures broken down by religious denomination:

Municipality’s name

"Brücken" means "bridges" in modern German. As the municipality's name makes clear, the village arose at a little bridge (''Brückchen'' in German) that crossed the Ohmbach here. The municipality is also known in the local speech as "Brigge". In some of the earliest documentary mentions from 1372 and 1420, the village was called ''Brucken'' (without the umlaut). Beginning in the 16th century, however, the spelling ''Brückhen'' (1592) or ''Brücken'' (1611) became the preferred form. The name first appeared sometime before 1333 in the Glan-Münchweiler ''Weistum'' mentioned above under "History/Middle Ages", in which the name appeared in two forms, ''Brückhen'' and ''Brugel''. The latter form is to be understood as meaning "little bridge" (it has no modern German form). It is, however, a point of debate as to whether the ''Brückhen'' or ''Brugel'' in the ''Weistum'' actually refers to the village in question. Later documentary mentions render the placename ''Brucken'' (1372, 1420, 1438), ''Bruck'' (1440, 1564) or ''Pruck'' (1570). The name seems to have settled on ''Brücken'' by the early 17th century, although the form ''Ohmbachbrücken'' has also appeared, to distinguish the village from others with the same name (see Brücken and Brücken). Since 14 January 1954, the municipality's name has officially been "Brücken (Pfalz)". On that day, the Rhineland-Palatinate state government approved the municipality's application to bear the tag "(Pfalz)", which means "(Palatinate)", as part of its name.

Religion

According to Dieter Zenglein's work in the chronicle, Brücken belonged with respect to ecclesiastical organization to the parish of Ohmbach as a branch with a chapel. The parish's main church had been given over as early as 976 to the Disibodenberg Monastery by Archbishop of Mainz Willigis. The Disibodenberg Monastery's holdings in the Oster valley and around Ohmbach were sold in 1256 to Count Gerlach V of Veldenz, who in turn, together with his wife Elisabeth, bequeathed these landholds and rights to the Wörschweiler Monastery in 1257. This monastery was secularized in the time of the Reformation. Even so, after the Reformation's introduction into Brücken, the village still belonged to the Church of Ohmbach, until its parish was dissolved in 1638. The chapel at Brücken might well have been razed during the Thirty Years' War. Since most of the newcomers who settled in Brücken after the war were Catholic, the chapel was reinstated for Catholic worshippers and consecrated to Saint Lawrence in 1724. Thereafter, the Catholic chapel in Brücken was occupied by a chaplain and functioned as a branch church of the Kübelberg mother church for Brücken itself and also the neighbouring villages of Ohmbach, Dittweiler, Altenkirchen and Frohnhofen. Soon afterwards, though, in 1730, this branch split away from the parish church and got its own priest, a process prompted by a number of issues that had put parishioners at loggerheads. In Napoleonic times, ecclesiastical organization was thoroughly overhauled. The Diocese of Worms, which had hitherto been responsible, was dissolved and the Church of Brücken passed to the Diocese of Trier

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