Location

The municipality lies in the Western Palatinate west of Lauterecken at an elevation of about 300 m above sea level on a brook called the Sulzbach, which rises within municipal limits and then flows less than a kilometre down to the Grumbach, which is also known hereabouts as the Rüllbach. The mountains around the village reach elevations of 340 to 360 m above sea level. The municipal area measures 296 ha, of which roughly 8 ha is settled and 69 ha is wooded.^[3]

Neighbouring municipalities

Herren-Sulzbach borders in the north on the municipality of Merzweiler, in the east on the municipality of Grumbach, in the south on the municipality of Buborn, in the southwest on the municipalities of Deimberg and Kirrweiler and in the west on the municipality of Homberg.

Constituent communities

Also belonging to Herren-Sulzbach is the outlying centre known as the Feriendorf Rheinpfalz, a holiday village.

Municipality’s layout

Herren-Sulzbach is a clump village set against a mountain slope, and it has old buildings. The church with its Romanesque building elements stands in the hollow at the village’s upper end. The graveyard lies on the right side of the road that links the village with the Grumbach valley and Bundesstraße 270. There is altogether very little in the way of new building. The former schoolhouse stands at Hauptstraße 22, near the church. It was built in 1849 and expanded in 1890. In 1966, the Evangelical church community built the municipal hall with financial support from the municipality. The holiday village Rheinpfalz came into being in 1970 with 46 holiday dwellings and lies outside the village to the side of the linking road to Bundesstraße 270.^[4]

Antiquity

It is assumed that the area around what is now Herren-Sulzbach was already settled in prehistoric times. Nevertheless, such early habitation has yet to be borne out by any archaeological finds from that time. It could be that as early as Gallo-Roman times, a small settlement had arisen within what are now Herren-Sulzbach’s limits. It is very questionable, though, whether this had anything to do with Salisso (see Municipality’s name below).^[5]

Middle Ages

Sulzbach, as a place with a name ending in —bach, was likely founded, like most places with names ending thus, in the 8th century. The village belonged until the early 12th century to the Nahegau, when it passed to the Waldgraves, who may be considered the Nahegau counts’ successors. The church that stands today holds clues in the oldest parts of its building that it must originally have been built about one thousand years ago. Sulzbach was surely the hub of a parish at that early date, too. Modern researchers cannot clearly tell whether the Sulzbach church’s forerunner was a church in the Kirrweiler area that now no longer exists. Whatever the truth is, in 1290, the Herren-Sulzbach church passed into the ownership of the Order of Saint John, which had its seat at first at the Schönbornerhof near Homberg, and then at the Commenturhof in Buborn. The actual convent was eventually moved to Sulzbach. The origin of the Knights of Saint John was a hospital for pilgrims and the sick in Jerusalem. Raymond du Puy de Provence (1083-1160), the order’s first Grand Master (1120-1160) enacted sometime about 1155 the order’s first constitution. The order first quickly spread in Mediterranean Europe. Beginning in 1137, the Knights also took on the task of armed border protection, thereby becoming an ecclesiastical knightly order. In 1309, the order founded on the island of Rhodes a sovereign knightly state. After the Reformation there was, besides the original Catholic branch a new Protestant branch, the Bailiwick of Brandenburg of the Chivalric Order of Saint John of the Hospital at Jerusalem, which persists to this day. Since 1859, the Catholic branch has borne the name Order of Malta. The Order of Saint John acquired in the early 14th century an estate in Herren-Sulzbach, whose buildings were renovated and expanded in the course of time. People first spoke of the altes Gebäu (“old building”), and then later of the Haus Sulzbach. It is believed to have been a stately house with a watermain built of clay pipes. It was fed by a spring, which is still known today as the Pfaffenbrunnen (roughly “Cleric’s Spring”). The Order’s landholds grew considerably in the course of time, mainly through land clearing and endowments. The convent at Sulzbach lost much of its original importance when, in the course of the 14th century, another of the Order’s seats sprang up in Meisenheim, where travel links were more favourable. As greatly important as the Order of Saint John might have been for the village, the Herren-Sulzbach villagers themselves were held to be subjects of the Waldgraves and Rhinegraves. Thus, the village, along with others, was pledged in 1363 by Johann von Dhaun to Sponheim-Starkenburg. Clearly, however, it did not belong to those villages of the court that were pledged in 1443 to the County of Veldenz as the “poor people of Grumbach” and later redeemed by the Waldgraviate. It may have been the knightly order’s importance that kept Herren-Sulzbach out of this pledge.^[6]

Modern times

In the time of the Reformation, the Order of Saint John lost its influence in Herren-Sulzbach. In 1556, under its Grand Master Prince Georg von Schilling, it first pledged all its holdings to the Lordship of Grumbach under Rhinegrave Philipp Franz. In the early 17th century, these holdings passed into the County’s ownership against a price of 3,200 Rhenish guilders, thus ending the village’s relationship with the Order of Saint John. The relationship with the Counts of Grumbach, though, wove itself even more tightly. Beginning in 1606, 62 members of the Rhinegravial house were buried in the crypt at the Herren-Sulzbach church. The village suffered particularly badly during the Thirty Years' War under occupation by foreign troops, and the Plague struck the village, too. Great harm was done by the Spanish troops who passed through the Glan valley in May 1632. In the autumn of that same year, the Plague claimed 38 lives within one month. In schoolteacher Schwarz’s family alone, six people died: his wife and five of their children. Only slowly did the village recover from these losses after the war, only to be stricken with further setbacks in French King Louis XIV’s wars of conquest. Until the time of the French Revolution, Herren-Sulzbach remained under the lordship of the Counts of Grumbach.^[7]

Population development

Herren-Sulzbach has remained rurally structured to this day. Until a few decades ago, the greater part of the population worked mainly at agriculture. Besides the farmers, there were also farmhands, forestry workers, quarrymen and a few craftsmen. There were hardly any other job opportunities. Now that only a few people work at agriculture, most members of the workforce must commute to jobs elsewhere. As early as 1955, there were 52 villagers in the workforce, 46 of whom commuted. Noteworthy is that the population figures during the 19th century did not grow as quickly here as in the neighbouring village of Homberg, and then before the turn of the 21st century, they actually began to shrink steadily.

The following table shows population development over the centuries for Herren-Sulzbach:^[9]

Municipality’s name

The Romans apparently maintained a post somewhere near what is today Herren-Sulzbach that they called Salisso. Springs that are particularly mineral-laden are found in this area, although the village spring itself is not as remarkable in this way. Over the centuries, the village has borne the following names: Solzbach (1290),Soltzbach (1319) and Herren Sultzbach (1550). Because there are many places with the name Sulzbach, the word Herren (“Lords’”) was prefixed to the village’s name as early as the Middle Ages. It refers to the Order of Saint John, which maintained a convent in the village. In the 17th century, the name prefix disappeared again, only to be revived in 1928 as part of the municipality’s new official name.^[10] A further source states that the municipality’s name most likely means “place at the salt spring”.^[11]

Municipal council

The council is made up of 6 council members, who were elected by majority vote at the municipal election held on 25 May 2014, and the honorary mayor as chairman.^[14]

Mayor

Herren-Sulzbach’s mayor is Michael Theobaldt.^[1]

Coat of arms

The municipality’s arms might be described thus: A riband sinister sable between Or a lion rampant sinister gules armed and langued azure and argent a cross Maltese of the third.

The upper charge in the arms, the lion, stands for the village’s former allegiance to the Waldgraves and Rhinegraves, while the other charge, the Maltese cross, is the traditional device borne by the Knights Hospitaller (Order of Saint John), who once held a seat in Herren-Sulzbach. The arms have been borne since 1964 when they were approved by the Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry of the Interior.^[15]

Buildings

The following are listed buildings or sites in Rhineland-Palatinate’s Directory of Cultural Monuments:^[16]

• Hauptstraße 21 – Evangelical parish church; belltower, about 1075, aisleless church with half-hipped roof, possibly from the 16th century, conversion 1714/1715; fittings, Stumm organ from 1820/1822
• Hauptstraße 22 – former school; five-axis sandstone-framed plastered building, 1849, further floor about 1890; characterizes village’s appearance

Regular events

Herren-Sulzbach holds its "Kirmes" (church consecration festival) on the third weekend in May. Old customs such as were once common in all villages of the Glan area are otherwise hardly ever observed nowadays.^[17]

Clubs

• Radfahrverein — cycling
• Frauenhilfe — “women’s aid”
• Landfrauenverein — countrywomen’s club
• Gemischter Chor — mixed choir
• Posaunenchor — trombone choir
• DRK-Ortsverein — German Red Cross local chapter
• Förderverein der Freiwilligen Feuerwehr — volunteer fire brigade promotional association
• Verein Heideheck
• Vereinsgemeinschaft — ″association community″ ^[18]

Economic structure

In the time after the Second World War, the number of agricultural operations shrank sharply, though the amount of land usable for farming was largely preserved. Thus, the operations still in business became bigger. The main occupation was changed into a secondary occupation. Herren-Sulzbach also produced a number of Wandermusikanten (see the Eßweiler article for more on this phenomenon). Over the last decade, agricultural operations have been being given up. A big building firm has its head office in the village.^[19]

Education

It could be that schoolchildren were being taught in Herren-Sulzbach even before 1600. The church register begun in 1627 mentions a few schoolteachers’ names. In 1632, schoolteacher Jakob Schwarz lost his wife and all his children to the Plague, before he himself died a few weeks later. In the time that followed, the schoolteacher’s post, which involved a one-class school, was continuously occupied. At first, classes were taught at a herdsman’s house, and indeed this was for all schoolchildren from not only Herren-Sulzbach but also every other village in the parish that did not yet have its own school. In 1684, the Rhinegraves transferred to the village a school estate to maintain the teacher. At the same time, the municipality bought an empty house to serve as the schoolhouse. In 1846, a purpose-built schoolhouse, which for those days was quite big for a village school, was built, complete with a teacher’s dwelling. This served as Herren-Sulzbach’s school until it was eventually dissolved in the 1960s. Standing before the building, besides a fountain, were great limetrees. Meanwhile, schools had been springing up in more and more neighbouring villages. The school journals, which were kept beginning in 1877, are still fully preserved in three volumes. They contain exhaustive accounts of events that happened in the village. Schoolteacher Rudolf Licht, who served in Sulzbach from 1905 to 1949, filled one volume of the school journals all by himself. For a time he had as many as 90 pupils to teach in one class. In 1968, the school was dissolved. The last schoolteacher was Hans Joachim Krüger. Afterwards, the primary school pupils at first attended school at the Offenbach primary school while Hauptschule students went to the Offenbach-St. Julian Hauptschule, which had several streams. The old schoolhouse has since passed into private ownership and now serves as a house. There were formerly opportunities for vocational education in Offenbach and Idar-Oberstein. Young farmers could go to agricultural schools in Meisenheim and Baumholder, and after the 1968 regional reform, in Kusel, too. Nowadays, vocational education is only to be had at the vocational colleges in Kusel. Gymnasien are to be found in Lauterecken, Meisenheim and Kusel.^[20]

Transport

Running through the village of Herren-Sulzbach is Kreisstraße 64, which branches off from Bundesstraße 270 at the way out of the village of Grumbach to the north, linking this with Landesstraße 373 near Homberg. The nearest Autobahn interchange is the one near Kusel, some 25 km away. Serving Lauterecken, some 5 km away, is a railway station on the Lautertalbahn.^[21]