Antiquity The Wahnwegen area is rich in
prehistoric archaeological finds going back to the
New Stone Age. On the Heidenhübel north of the village, a heavily weathered stone axe was found, and unearthed south of the village was a red stone arrowhead. Also on the Heidenhübel may once have lain, for many centuries, a prehistoric settlement. A burying ground belonging to this site contains archaeological sites from several epochs stretching from the time of the
Urnfield culture (about 1200 BC) to
Gallo-Roman times (50 BC to AD 400). Many individual objects from the graves were unearthed and described, but their whereabouts are for the most part now unknown. Further
barrows, some in groups, were discovered in the south of the municipal area, and also in the north at the municipal limit with Hüffler. That the Wahnwegen area was inhabited in
Roman times is also known from its proximity to the well known
villa rustica in
Herschweiler-Pettersheim, lying only some 2 km from the Heidenhübel burying ground.
Middle Ages Wahnwegen lay in the so-called
Remigiusland around
Kusel, a part of the original
Imperial domain around
Kaiserslautern, which in the late 6th century was donated to the
Archbishopric of Reims by a
Frankish king. Only a few centuries later, though, did Wahnwegen actually arise as a village, perhaps in the 12th or 13th century. Thus, its first documentary mention came relatively late, namely in a 1446 steward's account from
Lichtenberg Castle. According to this document, the estate at Wahnwegen had to deliver four
Malter of grain to Count Palatine Stephan of
Zweibrücken. Other “estates” in the area were mostly deeper in debt to the Count Palatine. This may be a hint that Wahnwegen was then a comparatively small settlement. In 1127, the
Counts of Veldenz had taken over the
Vogtei (that is, they had become “lords protector”) over the
Remigiusland and incorporated the region into a newly founded county. More than 300 years later, the last Countess of Veldenz wed the said Stephan of the
Electorate of the Palatinate (as he was then known), who took his own landholds, combined them with the lands that his wife inherited in 1444 – namely the County of Veldenz – and founded the County Palatine of Zweibrücken, which was later generally described as a duchy. Appearing for the first time in a 1480 document are inhabitants’ names from the village of Wahnwegen. It can be gathered from this and other documents that the Counts of Veldenz, and later the Counts Palatine (Dukes) of Zweibrücken, owned a great plot of land in Wahnwegen, which they lent a local family under an hereditary lease (
Erbbestand). Besides having to pay taxes to the secular
Vögte, the villagers also had to pay part of the fruits of their labours to the monks at the Monastery on the Remigiusberg. There was also an estate whose profits flowed to the priest.
Modern times Wahnwegen shared Palatinate-Zweibrücken's history until that state fell in the time of the
French Revolution. In the 1588 description of the
Amt of Lichtenberg by Johannes Hoffmann, Wahnwegen was assigned to a side valley of the
vierter Hauptgrund (“fourth main ground”) in the
Oberamt of Lichtenberg, which corresponds exactly with the valley of the Bledesbach. Hoffmann described this dale as being 1,500
Schuch (“
feet”) or 100
Rutten (“
rods”) long. This would make its length roughly 450 m. According to the 1609
Oberamt of Lichtenberg church Visitation protocol, 82 persons were then living in the village, making it one of the bigger villages in the parish of Kusel. It would seem that the village was not stricken with the
Plague, for death rates in Wahnwegen during the worst Plague years were not particularly high. On the other hand, the
Thirty Years' War struck the village particularly hard. While before the war there had been up to five births noted in the Kusel church books for Wahnwegen each year, from 1632 until the war ended in 1648, only one wedding was recorded, and only two births. Deaths were no longer being registered at all. Even for the decades following the war, the church books only record the odd entry about Wahnwegen. Only in 1668 – twenty years after the Thirty Years' War had ended – were three births in one year recorded, which had been average before the war. There was not as much hardship to bear, however, in King
Louis XIV's wars of conquest, although perhaps it was a hardship that the village's population had only risen back up to 15 by that time. During the 18th century, population figures swiftly climbed until at the turn of the 19th century, there were 300 people in Wahnwegen.
Recent times The
French Revolution put an end to the Duchy of
Palatinate-Zweibrücken towards the end of the 18th century. The German lands on the
Rhine’s left bank were
annexed by
France. Between 1801 and 1814, Wahnwegen lay in the
Department of
Sarre and the
Mairie (“Mayoralty”) of Quirnbach in the
Canton of Kusel and the
Arrondissement of Birkenfeld. In the time that followed, after
Napoleonic times and under the terms of the
Congress of Vienna, Wahnwegen belonged to the
Kingdom of Bavaria, within which it found itself in the
Bürgermeisterei (“Mayoralty”) of Quirnbach and the Canton and
Landkommissariat (later
Bezirksamt and
Landkreis, or “district”) of Kusel. In the early 1930s, the
Nazi Party (NSDAP) became quite popular in Wahnwegen. In the
1930 Reichstag elections, 3% of the local votes went to
Adolf Hitler’s party, but by the time of the
1933 Reichstag elections, after Hitler had already
seized power, local support for the Nazis had swollen to 36.1%. Hitler’s success in these elections paved the way for his
Enabling Act of 1933 (
Ermächtigungsgesetz), thus starting the
Third Reich in earnest. In the course of administrative restructuring in
Rhineland-Palatinate, Wahnwegen was grouped as a self-administering
Ortsgemeinde into the
Verbandsgemeinde of Glan-Münchweiler in 1972.
Population development Wahnwegen was, even into the 19th century, a village characterized by
agriculture, in which, however, the share of the population represented by workers in other industries began to rise considerably quite early on. There was work at the nearby stone quarries and in the collieries and ironworks in the Saarland. Today, most villagers only live in the village,
commuting to jobs elsewhere. As for religious affiliation, most villagers are
Evangelical. The following table shows population development over the centuries for Wahnwegen, with some figures broken down by religious denomination:
Municipality’s name The village's name, Wahnwegen, means
an den Wagenwegen, or “on the wain ways” (or for “wain”, read “wagon”, “cart”, “carriage”, etc., as
Wagen can mean all these things in
German). This refers to the village's location at a crossroads, where
mediaeval roads crossed. The name first appears as
Wanwgen in 1446 in a steward's account from
Lichtenberg Castle. That same year, the name also cropped up in documents as
Wanwinden,
Wangwegen and
Wernswinden. It was also called
Wangwegen in 1578. The interpretation of the name's meaning as something to do with the old crossroads is not shared by all researchers. Alternative interpretations see the first syllable as coming from a personal name, perhaps
Werni, and the ending
—wegen or
—winden as meaning
bei den Weiden (“by the meadows”, or perhaps “by the willows”).
Vanished villages Vanishing long ago was the village of Derschbach, which lay north of Wahnwegen. It had its first documentary mention in 1445 (slightly earlier than Wahnwegen itself), but by the early 16th century, it had been forsaken by its inhabitants. The name supposedly goes back to a
Celtic word for “body of water”, onto which the German placename ending
—bach was added. ==Religion==