Heimweiler

Heimweiler is an "Ortsgemeinde" – a municipality belonging to a "Verbandsgemeinde", a kind of collective municipality – in the Bad Kreuznach district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the "Verbandsgemeinde" Kirner Land, whose seat is in the town of Kirn.
Geography.
Location.
Heimweiler lies at the edge of the North Palatine Uplands along "Landesstraße" 182 (Kirn–Meisenheim) and on "Kreisstraße" 71, which links the two centres of Heimberg and Krebsweiler together. The municipal area measures 9.07 km², and the average elevation is 259 m above sea level.
Neighbouring municipalities.
Clockwise from the north, Heimweiler's neighbours are the municipalities of Meckenbach, Merxheim, Limbach, Becherbach bei Kirn, Schmidthachenbach and Bärenbach, and the town of Kirn. Schmidthachenbach lies in the neighbouring Birkenfeld district.
Constituent communities.
Heimweiler's "Ortsteile" are Heimberg and Krebsweiler. The municipality's name is thus a portmanteau of its constituent communities’ names. Also belonging to Heimweiler are the outlying homesteads of Forsthaus Krebsweiler, Obere Horbachsmühle and Untere Horbachsmühle.
History.
The "Ortsgemeinde" of Heimweiler came into being in 1969 through the merger of the two formerly self-administering municipalities of Heimberg and Krebsweiler. Archaeological finds from the Early Roman cremation grave near Krebsweiler and the prehistoric barrow in Heimberg's outlying countryside show that there were early settlers within what are now both Heimweiler's constituent communities. Like most of the district's places, Heimberg's and Krebsweiler's foundings might have come about during the “opening up of the newer settlement area” (7th to 12th centuries). In 1375, both Krebsweiler and Heimberg had their first documentary mention as "Krebeswilre" and "Heymberch". Both villages belonged until the late 18th century to the "Amt" of Naumburg. The two together formed an "Ingericht" (“in-court”) within the court district of Becherbach. This mediaeval jurisdictional and administrative body, which was coterminous with the parish of Becherbach, might well first have been subject to Raugravial administration, which beginning in the 14th century passed to the Counts of Sponheim-Kreuznach. After that comital house died out, the "Amt" of Naumburg passed to joint administration under the Electorate of the Palatinate and the Margraviate of Baden. In 1776, the "Amt" passed wholly to the latter. At the mediaeval "Ingericht" of Krebsweiler and Heimberg in the Late Middle Ages, the Lords of Heinzenberg held a share of the rights, which Tilmann von Heinzenberg sold Waldgrave Otto von Kyrburg in 1375. Economically, the villagers of Krebsweiler and Heimberg turned to Kirn, where, to support the town's market, the so-called "Zollhafer" (a toll in oats) still had to be paid in 1579 to the Lords of Steinkallenfels. According to a 1785 description of the "Amt" of Naumburg, 30 houses then stood in Krebsweiler in which all together 32 families lived. The houses were said in this description to be “small and nasty, although the village was well-off”. Krebsweiler was the main wine centre in the "Amt" of Naumburg, with a yearly yield of up to 40 "Fuder" (“tuns”; roughly 40 000 L) of wine. The nicest house, or so it was said, was the "Barth’sches Haus". Heimberg counted only 16 bungalows in those days and a like number of families. The greater part of these twin villages’ population was Protestant-Reformed. After the German lands on the Rhine’s left bank were overrun and occupied by French Revolutionary troops, the subsequent new administrative order, on the French Revolutionary model, put Heimberg and Krebsweiler together in the "Mairie" (“Mayoralty”) of Hundsbach. After Napoleon’s downfall and the implementation of a new administrative order by the Congress of Vienna, this local administrative arrangement continued in 1815 as an "Oberschultheißerei", but in the 1820s, the seat was moved back to Becherbach, which thereafter stood as the seat of the Hesse-Homburg "Bürgermeisterei" (“Mayoralty”) of Becherbach in the "Oberamt" of Meisenheim. In 1866, the "Oberamt" of Meisenheim passed to the Kingdom of Prussia, which in 1869 raised the "Oberamt" to a Prussian district. Both Heimweiler's constituent communities remained in the "Amt" of Becherbach, which became part of the Bad Kreuznach district in 1932, until 1940, when it was dissolved. Then, Heimberg and Krebsweiler passed to the "Amt" of Kirn-Land, in which they remained, each as a self-administering municipality, until 1969. After the two villages were amalgamated to form the new municipality of Heimweiler, they also found themselves grouped into a newly formed "Verbandsgemeinde" that also bore the name Kirn-Land.
Municipality’s names.
The two names have been interpreted variously. With Heimberg, the name prefix "Heim—" corresponds with the name forms "Heym", "Heien", "Hen", "Hahn", "Haan" and so on, and goes back to the Old High German "hagan" ( = "—hagen") in the meaning “forest” ("Hag" = wooded lot), and indeed "Hain" is still a German word that means “grove”. However, since this Frankish “opening up” of new land was characterized by new homesteads (later growing into hamlets, and villages) being given names that were tightly bound to personal or family names, it seems likelier that Heimberg can be interpreted as meaning “Hano’s Mountain” – likely a mountain that was the site of a clearing (variations in the interpretation exist, with the early settler's name as Hein, Hagen, Henn, Heinrich or even some other form, and with the last syllable as "—burg" rather than "—berg", meaning “castle” rather than “mountain”). With the name Krebsweiler, too (appearing in a 1375 document as "Krebeswilre"), it seems that the name prefix "Krebs—" goes back to a personal name or a byname and could be interpreted as “Krebes’s (or Grebe’s, Greber’s, Krebs’s, etc.) Estate”. In the Hesse region, the "Grebe" was the reeve or village head, quite unlike the Modern High German meaning of "Krebs", which is “crab” (the Online Etymology Dictionary declares that the Old English word "gerefa", from which sprang the Modern English word “reeve”, has “no known cognates”). In the local region, the old words "Heimberger" or "Heymbürge" had the same meaning (see the German Wikipedia article “”).
Population development.
Heimweiler's population development since Napoleonic times is shown in the table below. The figures for the years from 1871 to 1987 are drawn from census data:
Religion.
The greater part of Heimweiler's population is Evangelical. The Evangelical church community, whose new church was consecrated in 1967, belongs to the Evangelical pastorate ("Pfarramt") of Becherbach. In 1996, a belltower was added to the church, as it had never before had a bell at its disposal. The Catholic inhabitants belong to the Catholic parish of Becherbach and are tended from Kirn. As at 30 September 2013, there are 406 full-time residents in Heimweiler, and of those, 296 are Evangelical (72.906%), 57 are Catholic (14.039%), 1 (0.246%) belongs to another religious group and 52 (12.808%) either have no religion or will not reveal their religious affiliation.
Mayor.
Heimweiler's mayor is Wilfried Schlarb, and his deputies are Rudolf Horbach and Harald Huck.
Coat of arms.
The German blazon reads: "Über blau-golden geschachtem Schildfuß in schwarz eine silberne Wasserfontäne über einem silbernen Sockel."
The municipality's arms might in English heraldic language be described thus: Per fess abased sable a fountain on a pedestal all argent, and chequy of eighteen azure and Or.
The “chequy” field is a reference to the village's former allegiance to the “Further” County of Sponheim. The fountain and pedestal symbolize the municipality's wealth of water. Heimweiler supplies water from its springs to several other nearby municipalities. The former municipalities of Krebsweiler and Heimberg each bore their own arms until they were dissolved on 7 June 1969. The council of the newly formed municipality of Heimweiler decided on 15 August 1969 to bear Krebsweiler's former arms. At a Krebsweiler council meeting on 11 April 1966, council had adopted the design that had been put forth by the graphic artist Brust from Kirn-Sulzbach. After consent by the state archive, the Ministry of the Interior in Mainz had then granted approval for Krebsweiler to bear its own arms on 1 July 1966. The approval for Heimweiler to bear these same arms was granted on 3 October 1969. The municipal banner also bears this coat of arms in the centre.
Culture and sightseeing.
Buildings.
The following are listed buildings or sites in Rhineland-Palatinate’s Directory of Cultural Monuments:
Clubs.
The following clubs are currently active in Heimweiler:
In the late 1980s, the men's singing club was granted the title "Meisterchor" (“master choir”).
Economy and infrastructure.
Transport.
Running to the west is "Bundesstraße" 41. Serving Kirn is a railway station on the Nahe Valley Railway (Bingen–Saarbrücken).