The puzzles of Lorsch Abbey in Germany

LORSCH, Germany—Here’s a pleasant way to contemplate the mysteries of Lorsch Abbey: sit in a café on the town square, Cafe am Kloster, say, and look at the odd Carolingian building at the top of the square.

This small structure is one of the few still standing from the Carolingian Age (roughly the 9th and 10th centuries) and just about all that’s left of Lorsch Abbey, once one of the wealthiest monasteries in Europe.

In the 9th and 10th centuries, Lorsch Abbey’s holdings included four castles (you can see the tower of one on the hilltop across the valley) and tracts of lands containing 40,000 to 60,000 people. It was renowned for its library, which had Europe’s most complete collection of Virgil, and its imperial scriptorium, where important volumes were copied.

Carolingian rulers, possibly including Charlemagne, came here and at least two were buried in its crypt.

Where you’re sitting on the square would have been the ceremonial entrance to the abbey, used by pilgrims and kings. They would have passed through the gate and come to the little red-and-yellow sandstone building, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. And what would they have done there?

“We don’t know,” says Hermann Schefers, administrator of the historical site. “We don’t know its function and we don’t know exactly when it was built,” although between 820 and 900 is the current guess.

The ground level is an open arcade, with spiral stone staircases at either end leading up to a shoebox-shaped room above. It might have been meant to celebrate the arrival of a king, or it could have been where court cases were heard.

Another mystery is why the room’s stone floor tilts noticeably to one side. It’s not from the building settling, it was made that way.

But the biggest puzzle is why this building has survived at all. The monastery was destroyed in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648); its stones plundered for homes and barns. Twenty-five metres [Eighty-two feet] of the church, once 70 metres [230 feet] long, still exist because tobacco farmers stored crops there until 1955.

Everything else is gone, except the puzzling Carolingian building. Never attached to anything, it should have swiftly vanished, but didn’t.

“It may have been a chapel,” says Schefers. “Chapels were often respected, even in times of war.”

Another answer may be suggested by the herb garden on the north side of the church ruins. It was opened in 2001, but its 140 medicinal plants were selected from the 240 mentioned in the Lorscher Arzneibuch, the Lorsch Abbey Pharmacopia.

Written in 795, the pharmacopia is one of the oldest medical books in Europe. In an age when illness was a judgment from God, this book helped legitimize the treatment of the sick. Its monk author wrote that while, yes, God was punishing you, he also sent illness to activate our charity—and here was a book of ways and means to put that warm-heartenedness to work.

Which raises one more possibility of what the surviving building, always separate from everything else, may have been: a hospital.

Explore more:

Lorsch Abbey, a UNESCO World Heritage site, has a website at www.kloster-lorsch.de, but the contents are currently only in German.

For information on travel in Germany visit the German National Tourist Office website at www.cometogermany.com.