While waiting for our dog to recover after surgery at the veterinarian clinic there, H and I took a quick tour of Arnstadt, an old and storied town also known as the Gateway to the Thรผringer Wald due to its location on the northeast corner of the forest, the oldest settlement once in East Germany due to its first documented mention in 704, a candidate for the origin of Bratwurst and Weizen beer outside of Bavaria thanks to a fourteenth century mention, and mostly famously for its native son Johann Sebastian Bach (see previously), who had his first posting in the New Church—now known as the Bachkirche—as organist.
Granted a charter as a city by
Hersfeld Abbey, heavy sanctions were levied against the town for aiding fugitives during the
Peasants’ War in the thirteenth century and nearly a hundred rebels were burnt in the market square.
The main landmark is the remaining tower of the ruin of the Neideck palace, already in disrepair by the end of the reign of the dukes of Schwarzburg by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the rest was bombed into rubble during World War II. The church’s Baroque pipe organ has been restored to its condition and appearance in 1703 when the eighteen year old prodigy first played it. The monument is pure speculation as no portraits or physical descriptions of Bach and locals refer to the bronze as the ‘Marktflรคtz’—one whose sprawled out in the square—cf, Marktplatz.
