Given the central location, the place now called Rhaunen was already settled in
Roman times, as witnessed by the
sandstone blocks in the
Evangelical church's north wall, which were formerly walled up.
Rhunanu, first named in a record from
Lorch Abbey (not to be confused with
Lorsch Abbey) in the late 8th century, crops up again in 841 as
Rhuna in a donation to
Fulda Abbey. Rhaunen became the seat of the like-named
high court district. Until the 14th century, the
Waldgraves were the unqualified owners of the court and the places that it governed. Besides Rhaunen itself, these were
Bollenbach,
Bruschied,
Bundenbach,
Gösenroth,
Hausen,
Krummenau,
Laufersweiler,
Lindenschied,
Oberkirn,
Schwerbach,
Stipshausen,
Sulzbach,
Weitersbach and
Woppenroth. Also under the court's sway was the Schmidtburg. With this Waldgravial
castle’s loss to Archbishop
Baldwin of Trier in 1330, however, part of the court’s territory in the form of three villages also passed to the
Electorate of Trier. Baldwin also managed at the same stroke to relieve the Waldgraves of one fourth of the high court. Territorial relations remained so until an end was put to the
Old Empire in the late 18th century and the old
mediaeval governmental body, the court, was likewise swept away. In the course of the
French occupation of the lands on the
Rhine’s left bank in the wake of the
Treaty of Lunéville, Rhaunen was grouped into the
Department of
Sarre, the
arrondissement of Birkenfeld and the
canton of Rhaunen. After the French withdrew in 1814, Rhaunen found itself in
Prussia’s new
Rhine Province, also becoming the seat of a
Bürgermeisterei (“mayoralty”) in the Bernkastel-Kues district. Parts of the old high court district, however – Bundenbach, for instance – now belonged to the Principality of Birkenfeld, an
exclave of the
Grand Duchy of Oldenburg, most of whose territory was in what is now northwest Germany, with a coastline on the
North Sea. Even after the
First World War, through the
Weimar Republic and on through the time of the
Third Reich, Rhaunen was the administrative seat for the surrounding villages. In the course of administrative restructuring in the 1960s, the
Amt of Rhaunen became the
Verbandsgemeinde of Rhaunen in the Birkenfeld district. This arrangement still stands. The
Baroque house at Otto-Conradt-Straße 5 (until 1978, Am Bach 5) was the Waldgravial
Oberamtshaus (administrative centre of the
Oberamt), and later, through inheritance, it fulfilled the same function for the comital family of
Salm. Under French rule, it was the
Gendarmerie barracks. In Prussian times, it first became a
Catholic rectory, and then until 1899 a court building. Today it is an
inn. The
Amtmann who oversaw the
Electoral-Trier fourth of the Rhaunen high court sat at the Schmidtburg (near Bundenbach). The parish of Rhaunen comprised not only the like-named village but also
Sulzbach, Weitersbach and, until 1504, Stipshausen. Rhaunen had a
simultaneous church beginning in 1685, used by both Catholics and Evangelicals. This arrangement lasted more than two centuries, until 1887/1888, when the Catholic community built its own church on the way out of the village towards Sulzbach. Rhaunen was for centuries a judiciary, administrative and commercial hub. Its development peaked in Prussian times when it had the mayor's office, the
Amt court and
prison on the way out of the village towards Hausen, the chief forester's house on Hauptstraße, a notary's office, the cadastral office – later a professional college – on Poststraße on the way out of the village towards Bundenbach, a
dairy likewise there, Catholic and Evangelical churches, a
synagogue on Salzengasse and a
hospital on the way out of the village towards Stipshausen, although this last site has been occupied since the 1960s by the
Verbandsgemeinde administration building. Over the last few decades, though, with the growth of regional centres, the village has gradually lost its functions as a centre. Still left, however, are the
Verbandsgemeinde administration, the two churches and a
Mittelpunktschule (“midpoint school”, a central school, designed to eliminate smaller outlying schools) on the road towards Weitersbach. The long timespan during which Rhaunen functioned as a centre for the other local villages has left its mark on the village's structure: Unlike the scattered settlement pattern seen in most of its neighbours, Rhaunen has a much more heavily concentrated built-up centre. The old neighbourhoods can still be made out in the three heavily built-up blocks bounded by Otto-Conradt-Straße (formerly called Am Bach, for its geographical location alongside the brook), Unterdorf, Hauptstraße, Straße am Wartenberg and Marktplatz (“Marketplace”). The church stands a short way outside this zone on a slope overlooking the village. This seemingly odd location is explained by the church's construction on top of an existing building – one of
Roman origin. ==Politics==