Found in northern Saxony are the seventeen districts of Wiedemar, located just to the north of the Leipzig/Halle Airport. It used to be the Verwaltungsverband Wiedemar, but thanks to government intervention it now has a simpler name — and its once independent villages are now merged.
Would that be the Musketeers’ motto, “all-for-one” and “one-for-all”? Probably, but there’s no guessing the Leipzig Lowlands countryside will have you snapping photo after photo for your album.
And it was here in the village of Zschernitz the Adonis of Zschernitz was found. Who knew such a tiny clay figure would cause an uproar in the field of Archaeology — but it seems the Neolithic figure with its prevalent male body parts was such a rarity when it was found in 2003.
After a stint at a museum in Dresden, its new home is now in Chemnitz if you want to see it.
The seven-thousand year old Adonis is probably the oldest thing ever left in Wiedemar, but a couple of medieval churches are still around. In the village of Kölsa, you can’t miss the Dorfkirche’s Romanesque tower.
There’s another old medieval church in the village of Kyhnsa, its medieval tower is quite severe looking — with little to no ornamentation on the outside — and for some reason, it’s my favorite of them all.
With all this beauty surrounding the place, it’s a wonder where the ugliness of Theodor Fritsch came from. Who’s that, you ask? I’ll tell ya — he was a late 19th/early 20th century writer from Wiedemar, whose anti-Semite rantings in the Anti-Semitic Catechism was the foundation of the doctrine of the SA, and the author of The Handbook of the Jewish Question.
I certainly wouldn’t say Friedrich Nietzsche was a contemporary, as Fritsch managed to anger the philosopher enough for him to tell him to stop sending him these writings. Not everyone felt the Fritsch did, which is why there’s a memorial to Resistance Fighter, Will Grübsch (who was killed in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp), at the Dorfplatz.
While there’s not a whole lot else to experience in Wiedemar, sometimes it’s about the stories of those who once lived here that make it truly memorable — even those who lived more than seventy centuries in the past.
