Black hole

Black hole in Tübingen

Panorama from Schwärzloch looking north

Garden restaurant of the Schwärzlocher Hof with the must bowl popular with students

Historical view of the Romanesque apse of the Schwärzloch chapel by photographer Paul Sinner

Christoph Friedrich Dörr : Portrait of a stranger , in the background the Schwärzlocher Hof (oil on canvas, around 1807–1810)

Schwärzloch (or Schwärzlocher Hof ) is a former country estate with the associated Romanesque chapel near Tübingen . The estate and the secular chapel are now a popular excursion destination in Tübingen.

location

Schwärzloch is 2.2 km west of the former Haagtor in Tübingen. It lies halfway up a northern foothill of the Spitzberg , on a well-rounded foothill. The Schwärzloch farm offers a good view of the Ammerhof and Tübingen.

Surname

The name has been handed down in different spellings. The Schwerzloch spelling goes back to the earliest times. 1120 was Swertissloch to 1203 Schwerzeloch and finally in 1323 and 1340 Schwertzloch handed. The black hole spelling became popular in the 19th century. The exact meaning of the name has not been clarified despite several attempts at interpretation. So tried z. B. Ludwig Uhland attributed the name to a grove of the Germanic sword god Ziu, which must be seen as a romantic crush.

history

The hamlet of Schwärzloch (with a total of around 200 acres) was first mentioned as early as 1085. This makes it one of the oldest residential areas on the Tübingen city mark . At that time, Schwärzloch was donated to the Blaubeuren monastery by a presbyter Albertus, a relative of the Count Palatine family. The monastery, which Schwärzloch served as the administrative center in the Tübingen area, had the chapel built around 1100. The little church was dedicated to St. Nicholas , the patron saint of water, whose choice is understandable if you consider that in earlier times the entire upper Ammertal from the Schwärzloch Hills to the Unterjesinger Mountains was supposed to have been a swamp or lake. Abbot Heinrich Faber ended the ownership of the Blaubeuren monastery in 1477, who as papal commissioner transferred the benefices to the canons of St. Georg in Tübingen. The reason for this was the founding of the University of Tübingen , so the donation was more or less a sponsorship gift to the university. Over the centuries, the former hamlet was only a farm that was used for agriculture. In 1484 the benefice with the chapel ( St. Nikolaus benefice ) was separated from the Hofgut ( Berg Schwärzloch ), and the chaplaincy was elevated to a canonical .

The estate was first sold in 1497 to Mathias Suberschwarz, then in 1522 to Hans Breuning, a subordinate of Tübingen and son of Konrad Breuning . In 1531 he left the privileges of personal easements, such as: B. Manual and clamping services, confirmed in a document by the Roman-German King Ferdinand . In 1535 the chapel was profaned as a result of the Reformation, attached to the estate and converted into a residential building. In 1544 the entire Schwärzloch with around 120 acres of land was sold to the Tübingen hospital by Konrad Breuning, son of Hans Breuning. In the following years, Schwärzloch was the main source of income for the hospital. Since 1746 the farm has been leased to changing tenants by the hospital. At the end of the 18th century, one of the tenants was the manager of the ducal sheep farm and innkeeper Johann Heinrich Steeb (father of Carlo Steeb ). When he sold the Gasthof Lamm in 1797 , he settled in Schwärzloch, which he began to use as a restaurant. The difficulties of the later tenants and the lack of lease forced the hospital to sell the land from Schwärzloch piece by piece from 1828, so that in 1829 only 36 acres of land remained on the estate.

Since 1829 it has often been owned by different owners. Some of them use it exclusively for agriculture, but others occasionally run an inn there. In this way, Schwärzloch became a destination for walkers and students. The guests of the earliest time included Eduard Mörike , Ludwig Uhland , Wilhelm Hauff , Justinus Kerner and Hermann Kurz . In 1863 Wilhelm Lechler set up a regularly open, successful summer restaurant there. In 1886, Schwärzloch was bought by the farmer Kilian Schmid, who in the same year received a license to serve beer, wine and brandy. In 1894 he also received a concession to serve must, and since then he has been running the inn all year round. This made Schwärzloch the most popular excursion restaurant in the immediate vicinity of Tübingen. Under Kilian Schmid the chapel of the chapel was converted into a guest hall; He also contributed significantly to the expansion of Schwärzloch: in 1904 he built a second house and in 1929 he had a hall added to enlarge the inn. In 1931 Gotthold Reichert, the husband of a niece of Kilian Schmid, bought the Schwärzloch estate from his heirs. The estate remains the property of the Reichert family to this day, who also run the restaurant after a break.

building

The buildings are connected by a wall and consist of the chapel, which has been converted into an inn, and two utility buildings. Significant parts of the Romanesque chapel are still preserved. Your originally flat-roofed ship is set up as a guest room and still shows the old base all around. The old, narrow, arched windows on the north side used to be preserved.

Figure frieze on the chapel

Remnants of Romanesque architectural sculpture on the former Schwärzloch chapel (photography by Paul Sinner)

On the south side, a round arch frieze stretches high under the eaves, in whose fields various bas-reliefs can be found. There are partly plant structures: palm trees, lilies, roses, clover and oak leaves, partly figurative representations: dragon, fox, bear and snake as well as a eating eagle and the bust of a man who prays with his hands raised in the ancient way.

The arched frieze above the new entrance is interrupted by a large wingless dragon. To the left of the door is a lion and a winged dragon approaching it with a tail ending in an arrow.

Above it stands a column with a long-winged angel half life size who is blessing with his right hand and holding a book in his left. The lower piece of a corresponding figure, dressed as a priest and holding a book, is now walled up in the barn. Both used to be attached to the posts of the old entrance. The highly primitive style of all these sculptures suggests the early Romanesque period. The eastern parts of the chapel that are still completely preserved, the square choir and its semicircular apse , which was previously used as a cellar , are, however, late Romanesque.

The Lindwurm legend and St. Nicholas legend

According to another interpretation, the row of roughly worked representations running along the frieze as a belt refers to a lindworm legend : a female figure with arms raised in fear is threatened by the jaws of a monster with a twisted tail spread over two fields. However, this monster is attacked by two dogs, next to which short-footed water birds and lilies appear. Saint Nicholas is often portrayed in connection with a water monster, on which he stands victorious while it rears up against him. The monster is then probably the symbol of the element conquered by St. Nicholas, and so the images on the St. Nicholas Chapel could relate to the legend of St. Nicholas.

But if you think of the series of pictures being supplemented, the saving knight St. George from the Lindwurm legend seems to have to follow behind the dogs , whose worship is so much at home in Tübingen that the Tübingen collegiate church was not just consecrated to him who repeatedly portrays his image as a dragon killer, but that, according to a folk legend, the Tübingen area is described as the main square of his legend.

The Wurmlinger Berg could have got its name from the Lindwurm, which the pious knight killed to save the king's daughter. In addition, the Knights of Wurmlingen have a dragon in their coat of arms. At the collegiate church, St. George and St. Nicholas appear next to each other. So it would be possible that they were also venerated next to each other in Schwärzloch, and while the altar was consecrated to Nicholas, the frieze decorations were supposed to remind of St. George, the other monster-killer.

The choir is narrower than the chapel and has columns in the four corners that support a high ribbed vault on wedge-shaped capitals . The triumphal arch, which leads from the nave into the choir, is ogival, the narrow windows are still semicircular and the vault ribs are pear-shaped. On the east wall of the choir, above the semicircular arch of the apse, there is a relief depicting a unicorn , another next to it has been broken off. Traces of frescoes still shimmer through the whitewash of the walls and the vault.

On the outside, the choir section, enlivened by pilaster strips, arched and toothed frieze, which steps right up to the green slope, gives a very graceful picture. Strong buttresses of late Romanesque shape standing around corners support the free corners of the choir; a square window filled with a Romanesque four-leaf rose window breaks through its east gable. The old higher stone gable of the ship is surmounted by the wooden roof of the current roof, sitting on it, built into the wooden gable, still the remains of the old stone bell gable, on it a stonemason's mark .

literature

Eugen Friedrich Beck: The black hole frieze. Hornburg 1981, ISBN 978-3-922541-07-3

References and comments

↑ ^a ^b Wolfgang Hesse: Views from Swabia; Art, country and people in photos by the first Tübingen photographers and the photographer Paul Sinner (1838–1925), Metz brothers , Tübingen 1989

↑ Hofgut Schwärzloch.

^ ^A ^b Thomasaltenbacher: The grove of the Ziu. Tübingen's most famous excursion restaurant is celebrating its birthday ( memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 1.8 MB). In: "Tübinger Blätter" 1994 @1@ 2