Old University (Eppingen)
The Old University (Haus Fleischgasse 2, corner of Altstadtstraße ) in Eppingen in the district of Heilbronn in northern Baden-Württemberg is a half-timbered house from the 15th century that was an alternative accommodation for Heidelberg University during a plague epidemic in 1564/65 . A local history museum has been set up in the building since the 1950s .
history
Little is known about the early history of ownership of the building. A coat of arms stone shows the coat of arms of the Electoral Palatinate and the Barons of Gemmingen , who owned Eppingen from 1469 to around 1520 as pledge from the Electoral Palatinate. As a supplement to the small medieval town hall, the building could have been built as a Gemmingen official cellar . The design of the building also corresponds to that of a late medieval department store with a meat hall, official hall, granary and wine cellar.
Eppingen had close ties to Heidelberg University in the 15th and 16th centuries. In the years 1450 to 1544, four rectors of the university, including Andreas Hartmanni , came from Eppingen. The renewed outbreak of the plague in Heidelberg in 1564 caused the university - after other refuge in the previous decades - to move to Eppingen, 40 kilometers away, from October 1564, where it moved into quarters on the first and possibly also on the second floor of the building. When the disease broke out in Eppingen, the students returned to Heidelberg in the spring of 1565, where the university reopened on March 11th.
During the Palatinate War of Succession , the building was temporarily a military headquarters. Since the city of Eppingen, impoverished as a result of this war, could no longer maintain the building and, moreover, the butchers were already allowed to slaughter in their houses at that time, the city sold the building together with the Ratsschänke in 1749 to the schoolmaster Johann Georg Rieger, who managed the building converted into a residential building in baroque form. At that time, the Jewish community in Eppingen probably also used the building for church services, which is where the name Judenschule for the building comes from, before the Eppingen Old Synagogue was built in 1772 . In 1821 the Jewish community owned two of four shares in the house, but sold the property again in 1873. In 1880 there was also a cigar factory among the four owners, which moved to the outskirts in 1913. The building was plastered in the mid-1920s. In the spring of 1945, during the last days of the war, the south gable of the Old University was damaged by artillery fire.
From 1948 onwards there were efforts to renovate the old town in Eppingen, as a result of which construction began in 1949 and a repair plan in the following year. The mostly older and poor owners financed the first repair work by taking out private loans: in 1952 the hygienic conditions were improved, in 1954 the endangered north gable and other parts of the building were secured and new chimneys were installed. In 1955, the owners voluntarily ceded space to build a home parlor on the ground floor; in the following year, 1956, the south gable facing Altstadtstraße was exposed. After the timber frame had been exposed, the State Office for the Preservation of Monuments in Karlsruhe and the Sinsheim District Office provided significant financial support for the completion of the repair. In 1957 small Gothic windows were uncovered on the ground floor, in 1957/58 the east and west sides were exposed and in 1959 a larger local history museum was set up on the ground floor, while four apartments remained on the upper floors. The number of owners rose to 16 through inheritance.
The city of Eppingen acquired the first 15 percent of the building in 1964 and was able to acquire the remaining shares by 1973. After the house became the sole property of the city, the museum, which was previously on the ground floor, was expanded to include the entire building. The museum held several well-known special exhibitions, including an exhibition on postal history in Eppingen in 1973 and an exhibition on the Staufer period in Kraichgau in 1977. In the 1980s, the building was again extensively renovated.
The main curator Emil Lacroix from the monument office in Karlsruhe described the old university "next to the Palm'schen house in Mosbach and the Baumann'sche house also in Eppingen as the most outstanding representative of this construction method in North Baden". Baumann'sches Haus and Old University are “unique architectural highlights” in Eppingen, to which “apart from Mosbach in North Baden, nothing equivalent can be found”.
description
The building has a footprint of 12 × 16.50 meters and a height of 22.50 meters, making it one of the largest historical buildings in the old town of Eppingen. It is a three-storey building with a half-hip roof . The ground floor is made of solid sandstone over two cellars of different sizes , the two full floors and two gable floors above are built from Alemannic half-timbered houses. The full floors and protrude slightly towards Fleischergasse and Altstadtstraße, and on the gable side towards Altstadtstraße there is also the first gable floor. The massive substructure is dated to the first half of the 15th century due to its Gothic pointed arch windows and other architectural characteristics, while the half-timbered structure seems to come from the second half of the same century. The building is dated with an inscription stone, but the Gothic year is interpreted in different ways, so that different years in the period 1417 to 1497 can be considered. The more recent literature considers 1495 to be correct, because dendrochronological studies of the timber have shown that the wood used in the house was not felled until 1494/95.
As a special feature, the building has a carved head of envy in the door leaf of the entrance door, which originally comes from a house on Altstadtstraße . The bald-headed grimace with sticking out tongue is the only known specimen of an envious head on a door in Kraichgau . Since old doors are rarely preserved at all, there may once have been envious heads at doors.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jakobs 1986, p. 173.
- ↑ Kiehnle in 1979 in Rund um den Ottilienberg Volume 1 ascribes the use of the building as a Jewish school, while Angerbauer / Frank referred to Kiehnle in Jewish communities in the district and city of Heilbronn from 1986, but the Jewish school was more in the house of Löw Mayer (Metzgergasse 1) see.
- ↑ quoted from Kiehnle (1979), see Ref.
- ↑ Röcker 1999, p. 354.
literature
- Edmund Kiehnle : Eppingen's "Old University" . In: Around the Ottilienberg. Contributions to the history of the city of Eppingen and the surrounding area , ed. von den Heimatfreunde Eppingen, Volume 1, Eppingen 1979, pp. 114-122.
- Edmund Kiehnle: Preservation of monuments and the cultural monuments in Eppingen city . In: Around the Ottilienberg. Contributions to the history of the city of Eppingen and the surrounding area , Volume 3, Eppingen 1985, pp. 439–478, here p. 455.
- Hermann Jakobs : Emigration from the University of Heidelberg in times of plague. The example of Eppingen 1564/65 . In: Around the Ottilienberg. Contributions to the history of the city of Eppingen and the surrounding area , ed. von den Heimatfreunde Eppingen , Volume 4, Eppingen 1986, pp. 173-187.
- Erwin Huxhold : The "Old University" in Eppingen. Refurbishment of a half-timbered building . In: Kraichgau. Contributions to landscape and local research , volume 11, 1989, pp. 220–247.
- Bernd Röcker: 500 years of the “Old University” in Eppingen . In: Our Country 1995 . Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung , Heidelberg 1994, ISSN 0932-8173 .
- Bernd Röcker: Envious people in Kraichgau. In: Kraichgau. Contributions to landscape and local research , volume 16, 1999, p. 349–364, here p. 353/54 with Fig. 11.
- Julius Fekete : Art and cultural monuments in the city and district of Heilbronn . Theiss, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-8062-1662-2 , p. 148.
- W. Thiem: Monument conservation value plan for the entire Eppingen complex . Regional Council Stuttgart, Department of Monument Preservation, 2008. ( PDF ).
Web links
Coordinates: 49 ° 8 ′ 15 ″ N , 8 ° 54 ′ 42 ″ E