Nerzweiler

Nerzweiler is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Kusel district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde Lauterecken-Wolfstein. Nerzweiler is nestled in the Eßweiler Tal (dale) in the North Palatine Uplands between Hinzweiler and Offenbach-Hundheim at an elevation of roughly 190 m above sea level. The elevations on either side of the dale reach some 300 m above sea level (Auf der Platte 310 m, Stiehlberg 280 m). The municipal area measures 213 ha, of which roughly 10 ha is settled. Nerzweiler borders in the north on the municipality of Offenbach-Hundheim, in the east on the municipality of Aschbach, in the south on the municipality of Hinzweiler and in the west on the municipality of Glanbrücken. Nerzweiler is a loosely settled clump village on the road running through the Eßweiler Tal (Landesstraße 372). In the village core, the village's sidestreets cross the main street, and also here, settlement is a bit heavier. The graveyard lies to the northwest, outside the village. Given the many prehistoric archaeological finds in the broader Nerzweiler area, it can be assumed that people likewise inhabited the area right around what is now Nerzweiler during the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, and perhaps even as early as the New Stone Age. There were people here during Roman times, too. In state scrivener and geometer Johannes Hofmann's 1595 description of the Eßweiler Tal, he wrote: “Likewise one also finds a walled sign near Hintzweiler and Nerzweiler in the fields down below at the Gutleuthaus (literally “good people’s house”, but actually a house for lepers) on the road. There, too, such stones, coins and quite solid pieces of limestone, like one fashioned into a table, have been found in the earth.” He was writing about finds from Roman times, such as many that were found throughout the dale. The Hachenbach chronicler, Ludwig Mahler, also speaks of Roman finds between Nerzweiler and Aschbach.