The history of Hofheim am Taunus
Hofheim am Taunus gathers ground shaped by long survival amid repeated ruin: a Roman fort near Diedenbergen, a village raised in the early 15th century on the site of three dead settlements, and a church organ from 1769 that outlasted the fires that twice destroyed its predecessor and every government since.
Diedenbergen, a village in Hofheim am Taunus, Germany, holds a church organ built in 1769 that has survived every government since, including Prussian, German and Federal Republic administrations. The village itself was founded in the early 15th century on land left empty by three abandoned settlements, and its church burned twice before that organ was installed.
An organ built in 1769 still plays in the church
Inside the Evangelische Kirche Diedenbergen, 959 feet from where you stand, an organ has played since 1769. That was decades before Prussia existed as a name on this ground. Napoleon had not yet been born. The instrument's pipework has survived every government that has claimed this village since. The church still uses it.
Governments changed twice while the organ kept its place
The Kingdom of Prussia took over this stretch of Hesse in the 1860s and started keeping its own books. By 1886, its surveyors listed Diedenbergen as a town under Wiesbaden district, part of Hesse-Nassau. That administrative name lasted about forty years, then changed again as Germany's borders and governments turned over twice in the twentieth century. In 1945, the village settled into the Main-Taunus-Kreis, the county that still holds it. Through all of it, the organ in the church kept its place.
Soldiers burned the village church twice in a century
The church that stood before this one burned twice. Soldiers torched Diedenbergen during the Schmalkaldic War in 1557. The church there dated to 1469 and was destroyed. The village rebuilt. War found it again in 1635. During the Thirty Years' War, troops burned the settlement once more. The church went down with it in 1637. Whatever stands under the 1769 organ today is at least the third building on that ground.
Three abandoned villages gave way to Diedenbergen
Diedenbergen itself is a replacement. Three earlier villages once stood on this same stretch of land: Kassern, Hartbach, and Oberweilbach. All three emptied out and were abandoned. In the early 15th century, people gathered on the vacated ground. They founded Diedenbergen as their successor. Diedenbergen only exists because three settlements before it had already failed. It would one day install an organ and get folded into Prussian record books.
Brass stones set into pavements name Nazi victims
Between 2008 and 2014, workers set 89 Stolpersteine into pavements across Hofheim am Taunus and its districts, Diedenbergen among them. Each brass stone names a person deported or murdered under National Socialism. Artist Gunter Demnig made this project. The stones lay at the last address someone chose freely, before it was taken from them. They sit in the same ground that has carried a burned church, a founding village, and an organ through two empires and a republic.
The organ still plays on Sundays, in a church built on the ashes of the one before it.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.