The history and origins of
Rundlinge
There are no contemporary historical
records of the founding of these circular villages, but a consensus
has arisen in recent decades that they were founded in the 12th
century, on land that had not been previously cultivated, probably
because of its essentially low lying boggy nature, its tendency to be
flooded and the relative poverty of its sandy soil. The current
leading theory is that of Professor Dr Wolfgang Meibeyer, who believes
that all the Rundlinge were developed at more or less the same time in
the 12th century, to a model developed by the then Germanic nobility
as suitable for small groups of mainly Slavic farm-settlers. Whether
these settlers were there by choice, by conquest or by forced
settlement is no longer known. It does seem to have happened without
much bloodshed, and the following centuries showed a living together
of Germans and Slavs. This eventually led to an assimilation and
eventual disappearance of the Slavs as a separate ethnic group with
their own language, “Wendisch” or “dravänopolabisch”, which is the
language used for the majority of the Rundling names, and still to
this day for certain unusual features of local rural architecture and
land-use. This separate Slavic language did however remain more
generally in use in the region of Lüchow until the 18th century, and
there is a written chronicle and dictionary still in existence drawn
up by Johann Parum Schultze of the village of Süthen, in around 1725,
which marks the increasing loss of the old language. The area of its
historical use is now often called “Wendland” after those Slavic
peoples who were called the “Wenden”, and it corresponds more or less
with the current administrative boundaries of the district of
Lüchow-Dannenberg. Two related Slavic ethnic groups were the Wenden of
the Spreewald and the Lusatian Sorbs of the Oberlausitz, together
making a group of about 60,000 who still are said to be able to speak
“Sorbisch” in the Spreewald, an area of Eastern Germany near the
Polish border around the towns of Bautzen and Cottbus.
Are Rundlinge Slavic or German?
“Rundlinge” are therefore closely
related to the existence of the Slavic ethnic group of the Wenden, but
seem to have been a German invention. There is absolutely no evidence
that the round form of those early settlements was essentially Slavic
in origin, as many once assumed. They arose as part of Heinrich der
Löwe (Henry the Lion)’s eastern colonization in the mid 12th century.
It seems that the German nobility hit upon the idea of creating new
villages in the form of a half circle or a horseshoe shape, with the
wide entrance to the central village green opening out to the fields.
It has been speculated though that this model could have been based on
a form of settlement dating from at least the 7th century. In our
later form each farmer would have an equally sized wedge-shaped piece
of land on which to build their houses, so that the basic outline of
the village is that of a half a circular cake cut into slices. Behind
each farmer’s plot would be their own personal wood for foraging, and
as a source of firewood and occasional building materials. This would usually be on somewhat
lower ground, and often had a stream running through it, or by it.
Slavic ceramics have been found but not directly in the Rundlinge,
more usually a few hundred metres outside of them. A continuation of
Slavic settlement perhaps in a new Germanic form remains therefore a
possibility. Proof one way or another will only come from more
comprehensive archaeological examinations perhaps of those Rundlinge
known to have been deserted in earlier centuries.
What do Rundlinge look like?
These villages were usually small,
with only a few farmsteads, averaging perhaps around 5, and built away
from tracks or roads, around an open central village green, which was
a part of the commons, not allocated to any one particular farmer. The
leading farmer, called a Schulze, had a slightly better plot, set in
the centre opposite the entrance to the village, and usually extra
land outside the circle called by its Wendish name “Güsteneitz”. They
are almost always to be found on the border between low-lying wetter
land near to water and higher drier land more suitable for cultivation,
called here “Geest”. The villages were fairly densely scattered across
the area to be colonized, with each one barely a kilometre from its
neighbour. This means that there were very many, fairly small,
settlements. In very very few cases have they been amalgamated into
larger villages or subsumed as suburbs of towns.
Even today this pattern has continued. Of the 324 named settlements in
today’s Lüchow-Dannenberg, over 200 are or were once Rundlinge, and
virtually none have been swallowed up by the encroachment of towns, or
have been amalgamated into larger villages, although since the reforms
of 1972, most have lost their political separateness. Prior to 1972
each village had its own separate political status, which led to there
being 230 entities, “Gemeinden”, in what was then and still is one of
the most sparsely settled areas of modern Germany, East or West. The
smallest of the 230 was Liepehöfen, which had the princely number of 3
adult voters! There are today , instead of 230, a more reasonable 27
Gemeinden.
The circular shape came later than
the 12th century origin
The original shape of the Rundlinge
was semi-circular or horse-shoe shaped. Most became circular through a
period of time in the later middle ages, when population densities
increased. This led to the original farmsteads being split into two,
three or four, and additional wedge-shaped land being made available
at the open entrance to the village, in effect closing the village in
and allowing only one track in from outside. This development appears
to have been ordained from above, rather than being the result of more
than one son taking over a farmstead. The greater prosperity, and
therefore greater population density of the Rundlinge of those times
may have been related to the increasing addition of flax-weaving to
the incomes of the farmers. In any event most of the originally
semi-circular villages became more nearly circular, although there
were in fact many slightly differently shaped solutions. Some of the
Rundlinge today are more oval in shape, others more irregularly shaped.
The original “one entrance to the village green” model was in some
cases altered to take account, say, of a path to the local church or
one to the local mill, and in later years these paths may have been
widened to take vehicles, and may today form a route through the
village.
Although very many Rundlinge of today have retained their separateness,
many have expanded during the last century and have modern houses
added, typically in one direction away from the original round. This
occasionally leads to an elongated village with the old Rundling at
the end.
Why do Rundlinge not have a church
in their centres?
One interesting anomaly, which marks
out these villages from others in other parts of Europe, is that the
Rundling villages virtually never have a church in them. There are
churches, even quite ancient ones, but they and their burial grounds
are almost always well outside the Rundling itself. This could have
come about because the Rundlinge were usually built only just above
the water-table , whereas the churches needed higher ground to give
enough depth for their burials. It could also be as a result of each
village being too small to maintain a church, so the church had to
serve several villages. However most researchers believe that it shows
that Christianisation came late to the villages, after their basic
structure had been created. There are reports by the church
authorities of heathen practices well into modern times
It also shows, I believe, that even where it had been possible to add
a church to the village circle (even in the middle - why not?) they
did not do so. There must have been a sense that it was not
appropriate to do so, or there would be examples among the 200+
villages, and there are not, even in the villages set on higher ground.
Rundlinge not only have no churches, they also never had schools, or
shops, or even trade outlets in them. These, where they existed, were
always outside. The central village was always purely for farmers.
The Rundling and the Lower German
Hall House
Although the Rundling shape and the
Rundling farmhouse architecture are two separate developments, with
several hundred years between them, and which therefore need to be
kept separate in our minds, it is the interplay between the two which
makes the Wendland Rundlinge of today so attractive to the visitor.
We have seen that the Rundling form seems to have been a planned form
of division of property in newly colonized areas east of Germanic
lands, and there are historically examples in a wide strip of land
running from the Baltic Sea near Kiel and Lübeck down both sides of
the Elbe river right down to the Czech Lands in the south. This
corresponds to the Eastern Colonisation of Henry the Lion after 1147
and others in the so-called Wendenkreuzzug, or Wendish crusade, where
the Pope had given his agreement to a northern crusade to conquer and
convert the pagan Slavs, at the same time as others were taking part
in southern crusades to retake Jerusalem from the Muslim Turks.
However the architecture of the much later mediaeval farmhouses to the
south of Wittenberg was different from those in the north, and so
different parts of the north-south Rundling strip through Germany
looked different as a result. The farmhouses of Wendland were a part
of an enormous East-West area running from parts of Eastern
Netherlands across the North German plain to Poland, where one form of
farmhouse predominated. This was the area of the Lower German Hall
House, in German “Niederdeutsche Hallenhaus”, an all-in-one building
of considerable size which housed not only the farmer and his family,
but also most of his farmyard animals, his hay loft and his implements.
Typically the hall house had the animals and the barn buildings at the
front facing the village green, whereas the farmer lived at the back
facing his garden or smallholding. The design of the house put the
main open fire in the middle at the back of the barn area, the smoke
disappearing through small apertures in the front facade.
The hall house was an invention of the North German plains, and did
not exist to the south of a line from Dortmund to Braunschweig to
Wittenberg to Stettin. This meant that only about one tenth of its
entire width crossed the strip of land running north to south that was
part of the 12th century Wendenkreuzzug, which created the Rundling
form. Within this strip were the cities of Kiel, Lübeck and Hamburg
and the four rural areas of Uelzen, Wendland, Prignitz and the Altmark
around Salzwedel.
The three types of Lower German
hall houses
The three types of hall house are
called after the number of rows of pillars which carry the roof
construction. They are pillars and not posts because they rest on
foundation stones, and are not sunk into the earth. The oldest form, which would also have the lowest roof,
was called a “Zweiständerhaus” because the whole construction rested
on two rows of pillars (front to back) carrying beams across the centre.
A typical house might have 14 rows of pillars, with a corresponding 14
beams, each of them being originally a single oak tree. Nothing else
is carrying, although the half-timbered construction with infill does
give some extra stability. The infill these days is likely to be
brickwork, but was originally wattle and daub, covered with a lime
mixture. The oldest house in Wendland of this construction is around
1611, but only about 10 are 17th century in origin, most of the others
being 18th century. They are comparatively rare, with less than 80
still standing in Wendland, only half of these directly in Rundling
villages.
The more recent form which became common throughout the 19th century
is called in German “Vierständerhaus” which means that the roof
construction is carried by four rows of pillars carrying beams. This
means that the central barn area is narrower than for
“Zweiständerhäuser” but the two single storey sides are larger. The
overall building will also be larger, and are sometimes three stories
high, or have two stories with much larger hay lofts and storage above
the barn.
There is a third form which is called a “Dreiständerhaus”, with three
rows of pillars. This looks like a two pillar-row house on one side, with
lower eaves, and a four pillar-row house with higher eaves on the other.
It also looks lopsided because the barn door is no longer central
under the roof apex. This hybrid form can be found across all the eras
but was commoner during the 18th century. Interestingly it is much
commoner in Wendland than almost anywhere else across Northern Germany
and there is one Wendland village, Prießeck, where it is the commonest
form. Here there are 3 such houses, out of a total of no more than 40
in Wendland. It does not appear to be a transition between the two
and the four pillar-row models but a genuine attempt to get the best of
two different models, an experiment which ultimately did not make it
through to the very end of the 19th century when almost the last hall
houses were being built.
Why have Rundlinge shrunk to this
one small part of Germany?
Why only Wendland should retain the
Rundling form, plus the Lower German Hall House, is not immediately
clear, but will have more to do with the relative wealth of the cities
to the north, which would have swallowed up the “primitive” Rundlinge
and its “primitive” rural architecture over the centuries.
It is less easy to see why Uelzen, Prignitz and Salzwedel should have
so few existing Rundlinge, as they did have them as recently as the
1820-1850 series of enclosure maps, “Verkoppelungskarten”. Prignitz,
Salzwedel and the Altmark were politically parts of Prussia, and
Wendland and Uelzen parts of the Kingdom of Hannover at this time. We
know that the Government of Prussia had become alarmed at the numbers
of fires caused by putting an open fire in the same building as the
hay loft and a thatched roof, as well as the animals. They had
therefore issued a decree in the early 18th century forbidding the
building of traditional hall houses, and requiring farmers to separate
out the functions of cooking and storage. This seems to have led to
different solutions in Prussia from those traditional to the wider
area, favouring “Querdielenhäuser” or transverse farmhouses, with the
barn entrance to the side. In the Altmark they also had the tradition
of putting gatehouses across the fronts of their farmsteads, thus
blocking the view of the large barn doors from the centre of the
village green.
It is however probably as much poverty as decrees that led farmers to
“make do and mend” rather than demolish their old houses and build new
ones in their stead. And Wendland has always been at the poor end of
the scale. This has continued right up to the present day, with its
unfortunate position as part of the old West Germany sticking out into
the old East Germany, so that it was bound on three sides by an
electric fence which was the barrier to the Communist East for most of
the second half of the 20th century. Wendland has always somehow been
passed by, right from the times of the early Christianisation, and
even today it has no motorways, virtually no railways, very little
industry, very little employment and a shrinking population. If it is
known for anything today, it is known for its decades-long fight
against the deposit of radioactive waste in Gorleben, a site chosen by
the politicians of a generation ago precisely because so few people
live there.
The Rundlinge in the 20th century
From the 1880s onwards began a time
of greater prosperity in Germany, and this was reflected in Wendland
too with the arrival of some industry. A few large brick buildings
typical of the time called the “Gründerzeit” were built in the modern
style, and were often faced sideways to the village green, but these
were the exceptions. Most farmers had only enough spare to renovate
their houses, occasionally replacing the half-timbering with brick, or
tiling the outside to give better warmth inside. Most Rundlinge
survived intact.
Up to the second world war, the small scale farming of areas such as
the Wendland was still just sustainable, although the domestic flax
industry had by then disappeared. Briefly in the late 1940s and early
1950s Wendland became home to very many refugees from the east, but
the increasing pull of the industrialised parts of the new Federal
Germany led to many moving on. The subsequent division of Germany into
East and West affected Wendland a great deal, as it became isolated to
the north, east and south by an electric fence for almost 40 years
until 1989. This development, whilst largely negative for the region,
had two major positives. Firstly the rural isolation of the Rundling
villages was not affected negatively by industry or motorways, and
secondly Wendland became a second home for a large number of West
Berliners, who were anxious about their position, surrounded as they
were on all sides by an unfriendly state. It was largely Berliners who
invested in the old property of the Wendland, which was cheap and
spacious. They rescued whole villages from certain ruin.
At the same time the local population, reflecting post-war prosperity,
was embracing modernization, and pulling down old hall houses to
replace them with far less sympathetic modern housing, which was
cheaper to maintain and warmer in winter! This trend was noticed with
alarm by many lovers of the old hall houses in their picturesque
circular villages , and the Rundlingsverein was brought into existence
in 1969 to educate the population to the potential loss of a heritage
that had become unique not only in Germany but in the whole of Europe.
It was those early pioneers that eventually stopped the old
houses being demolished, thought through alternative uses for the
buildings and supported the initiatives of the “Denkmalpflege” (the
government agency for the protection of monuments in Germany) to
preserve the cultural heritage of the Rundlinge and their hall houses.
How many Rundlinge are there today?
This is a more difficult question to
answer than one might think. Originally there were perhaps a thousand
such villages created in the 12th and 13th centuries, perhaps 400 of
which survived into the 19th century. In Hannoverian Wendland alone we
know of over 200 which were clearly still Rundlinge at the time of the
“Verkopplungskarten” (a type of enclosure map, marking the ownership
of land and property) in the early parts of the 19th century. Many had
already succumbed to catastrophic fires, and been fully or partially
rebuilt, not always as Rundlinge. Modernization has led to the
destruction of many of the older hall houses, and their replacement by
modern housing, sometimes but not always affecting the circular
structure of the villages.
The Rundlingsverein
carried out in 2013 a full appraisal of the 204 villages in Wendland
known from old maps to have once been Rundling villages. It judged 96
of them to still be recognisable to the untrained eye. About a third
of these 96 are of potential interest as tourist destinations. This is
currently of major interest because of recent initiatives by the
Samtgemeinde Lüchow to have some Rundling villages recognised by
UNESCO for World Heritage Status. The Rundlingsverein changed its
constitution to enable it to better support this bid.
UNESCO World
Heritage Status
An area of Wendland to
the west of Lüchow, called the Lower Drawehn, has the most
concentrated and best preserved Rundling villages in the world. A „cultural
landscape „ containing 19 Rundling villages, with no other types of
settlement or modern estates, has been chosen for the second bid to be
considered by the National coordinators. The first bid in 2013 was
sent back for reconsideration, and this, with the help of the
Institute for Heritage Management in Cottbus, has now happened.
In 2021 Lower Saxony has chosen the cultural landscape of 19 Rundling
villages as one of its two candidates for consideration at a national
level. They will compete with candidates from other German states in
2023. Germany will then choose 5 candidates to put forward to UNESCO
in Paris.
Adrian Greenwood
(revised version
February
2022)
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Dr. Wolfgang Meibeyer, Rundlinge und andere
Dörfer im Wendland
ISBN 3-925861-21-1
Lübeln
Bussau
Mammoißel
Weitsche
Krummasel
Dolgow
Zebelin
Zweiständerhaus in Trebel
Dreiständerhaus in Rehbeck
Vierständerhaus in Meuchefitz
Dünsche
Jabel
Gühlitz
Göttien
Süthen
Breese i. Br.
Lüsen
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