Chopping knife side
The Hackmesserseite is an area in the Palatinate southwest of the city of Pirmasens ( Rhineland-Palatinate ). The name originated in the 1790s after the French Revolution and is based on a regional name for the guillotine , which was popularly known as the "cleaver".
Geographical location
The chopping knife side today covers part of the district of Südwestpfalz . The area extends from northwest to southeast along the French border from Trulben in the west to Eppenbrunn in the east. All the places belonging to it are quite small - a maximum of about 1300 inhabitants - and can only be reached via subordinate state or district roads .
history
The effects of the French Revolution also reached the border villages of Eppenbrunn , Trulben , Kröppen , Hilst , Schweix and Ludwigswinkel in 1792 .
On November 8th, 1792 several citizens came under the leadership of the head forester Weiß from the Lorraine community of Roppweiler (today: Roppeviller) together with twelve French national guards to Eppenbrunn and planted a freedom tree or - as they called it - a "witness of the Freedom". On the same day, the freedom fighters moved on to Trulben and planted a tree there too. The villages of Kröppen, Hilst and Schweix followed this example the next day, and Ludwigswinkel a little later.
The citizens, who called themselves “free Francs”, told the Oberamt in Pirmasens that they would no longer pay any salt tax and would not “pay a penny more” to the authorities of the Landgraviate of Hessen-Darmstadt . The rebels divided up 1000 fathoms of wood that Landgrave Ludwig X. had already sold to wood merchants from the nearby town of Zweibrücken . They declared the mayors deposed and drove out the stately hunters and forest rangers.
The rebellious villages immediately created a new municipal administration based on the French model and applied to the Paris National Assembly for admission to the French Republic . On February 14, 1793, the National Assembly approved the request and declared the freedom-loving villages to be French territory . Belonging to France ended with Napoleon's final defeat and abdication in 1815.
Freedom supporters from the nearby Lorraine garrison town of Bitsch (today: Bitche) gave their Palatine brothers a guillotine as a gift, which was then diligently used as an instrument of execution . In memory of the bloody victims, the name Hackmesserseite came up later .
present
In today's regional usage , a part of the communities that belong to the Verbandsgemeinde Pirmasens-Land is referred to as the chopping knife side . The villages of Vinningen , Obersimten and the hamlet of Hochstellerhof, which today belongs to the local community of Trulben, are added to the communities of Eppenbrunn, Trulben, Hilst, Schweix and Kröppen . In contrast, the Ludwigswinkel community , 12 km southeast of Eppenbrunn, in the Dahner Felsenland community, is no longer considered part of the chopping knife side in local use.
Every year the soccer teams in the area play the chopping knife trophy in preparation for the summer season.
literature
- Heiner Kröher : The chopping knife side . In: Karl-Friedrich Geißler u. a. (Ed.): The great Palatinate Book . 7th edition. Pfälzische Verlagsanstalt, Landau in der Pfalz 1995, ISBN 3-87629-299-9 , p. 551 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Heiner Kröher : The chopping knife side . 1995, p. 551 .
- ↑ a b c The chopping knife side. hackmesserseite.de, accessed on March 5, 2016 .