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The church in Niederkirchen
Niederkirchen is a municipality in the combined municipality of Deidesheim, within the administrative region covered by Bad Dürkheim. The village, which has a population of approximately 2500 people, is 2 kilometres to the east of Deidesheim.
[edit] History
The first identified mention of Niederkirchen appears in the Wissembourg monastic archive, where, in 699 it is named as Didinnes-chaime. A more certain reference concerns the viticulture characteristic of the area, and is to be found in the monastic archive of Fulda from 770. In 1060 work commenced on the Romanesque church, with its distinctive tower, and Niederdeidesheim (literally Lower Deidesheim, as it was then called) acquired a landmark which has distinguished it ever since. During the eleventh century, the village passed to the prince bishopric of Speyer: it was probably some two centuries later that the settlement grew to become administratively detached from Deidesheim: during the thirteenth century the name Niederkirchen replaced the former name. By the sixteenth century France, like England, was evolving towards a modern-style increasingly centralised nation state, in the process defining a pattern that would have been imposed on most of western and central Europe by 1919. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many settlements on the west bank of the Rhine repeatedly fell victim to the expanding power of the French state which combined with a resolute belief on the part of successive French rulers that France’s ‘natural’ eastern frontier was the River Rhine itself. The belief did not go uncontested, and for much of this period, the entire Palatinate region found itself at the heart of a war zone. During the Thirty Years’ War Niederkirchen was all but obliterated: the local focus of population shifted to Oberdeidesheim (modern Deidesheim) which was marginally less vulnerable in terms of geography, and which boasted town walls and a castle (albeit one that was regularly over-run and periodically ruined by invading armies). In 1794, with the left bank of the Rhine annexed to the French republic by the revolutionary armies, Niederkirchen had its own first experience of life within a nation state, finding itself after 1798 in the newly created French Département of Mont-Tonnerre. The Congress of Vienna deprived France of its territories in this region, and from 1815 till 1935 Niederkirchen found itself part of the western territories of the kingdom of Bavaria. The Nazi years saw an aggressive centralisation of power within Germany: the area was transferred in 1935 to the Saarpfalz Gau, and then in 1940 to the new Westmark region. The Federal Republic of Germany, inaugurated 1946, was characterised by a return to a more decentralised government model, and Germany's Upper Rhine region has since then formed a part of Rhineland-Palatinate.
Germany
