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Korbach (), officially the Hanseatic City of Korbach (German language: Hansestadt Korbach), is the district seat of Waldeck-Frankenberg in northern Hesse, Germany. It is over a thousand years old and is located on the German Timber-Frame Road. In 2018, the town has hosted the 58th Hessentag state festival.
The town lies on an unwooded tableland called the Waldecker Tafel that once harboured a great many wild , leading to the townsfolk's nickname as "Feldhühnerchen" ( ≈ "little field chickens"). Not only the main town, but also outlying centres such as Lelbach (615 inhabitants), Lengefeld (512 inhabitants), Nordenbeck (195 inhabitants), Ober-Ense (228 inhabitants) and Nieder-Ense (272 inhabitants) lie on the Waldecker Tafel or at its edge. In the eastern part of the municipal area, where the outlying centres of Helmscheid (202 inhabitants), Strothe (250 inhabitants) and Meineringhausen (947 inhabitants) lie, begins the North Hesse Hills ( nordhessisches Hügelland), which stretch from the Rhenish Slate Mountains to the Habichtswald range west of Kassel. In the west lie the constituent communities of Alleringhausen (91 inhabitants), Eppe (686 inhabitants), Nieder-Schleidern (193 inhabitants) and Hillershausen (334 inhabitants) in the foothills of the Sauerland. The highest peaks in the Korbach municipal area are the Widdehagen (635 m) near Rhena (584 inhabitants) and the Eisenberg (562 m), which despite its name – meaning "Iron Mountain" – is well known for gold-bearing ore found there. Perhaps more fittingly, the outlying community lying on the Eisenberg is called Goldhausen (329 inhabitants).
Through the main town runs the Kuhbach, a tributary to the Itter, itself a tributary to the Eder. In a German grammar quirk, the name "Kuhbach", which most German speakers would regard as masculine, is often locally inflected as though it were feminine – die Kuhbach instead of der Kuhbach.
The Korbacher Spalte, a 20 m-deep, up to 350 cm-broad and roughly 1 km-long cleft in the Earth's surface near Korbach, discovered in 1964, has yielded important fossil finds, indeed the only finds of Procynosuchus in the Northern Hemisphere.
Worth seeing is the Korbach Village Church, which stands in the middle of the town. Likewise worth visiting is the old castle inside the "Hühnenkeller" ringwall near Lengefeld.
With the coming of the Reformation, the town, and indeed the whole County of Waldeck, became Protestant. Even nowadays, Korbach is still mostly Protestant, even though beginning in the 19th century, a great number of moved into the town. On the other hand, the outlying communities to the west on the boundary with North Rhine-Westphalia are almost wholly (Hillershausen) or mostly (Nieder-Schleidern, Eppe) Catholic.
In the Thirty Years' War, Korbach had to make ever greater contributions to the troops who were passing through. By the time the war ended, only half the town's houses were still fit to live in, and the town's population had fallen from 2600 to 1100. In 1664, a great town fire burnt almost all the residential houses down. There is only one half-timbered house in town today that was built before the fire. The Gothic stone churches and the stone from that time, on the other hand, are still well preserved.
It was only towards the end of the 18th century that a modest prosperity was restored to Korbach. The town first achieved a new economic boom late in the 19th century. Contributing to this in no small measure was the new railway to Kassel that opened in 1893. Moreover, the industrialist Louis Peter established in 1907 a rubber and tire factory in Korbach. The town was mostly spared any great damage in further wars, particularly the two world wars. After the Second World War, the population rose sharply as those driven out of formerly German territories to the east flooded into town.
The rubber factory continues to dominate the development of the city. It is one of the production sites of Continental AG, one of the major companies in its sector.
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The arms come from the town's oldest known seal, from 1236. The human figure in the chief is the Bishop of Paderborn, who granted Korbach town rights in 1188, although it could be his successor Bishop Wilbrand, who had the townsfolk swear him in as their overlord in 1227. The aforesaid seal was made not long after this. There is an erroneous belief that the human figure is Saint Kilian, the town's patron saint, but this is believed to be rather unlikely, as the figure looks like a bishop.
The eight-pointed star – only half of which appears in these arms – is quite a common charge in civic heraldry in Waldeck, the region in which Korbach lies, for the simple reason that it was the arms borne by the Counts of Schwalenberg-Waldeck, who were the town's rulers as the bishops' vassals beginning in 1227. The star shown on the original seal, however, was six-pointed (and again, halved). This was eventually changed to the eight-pointed version still seen now, to match the star in the counts' arms.
The objects that the bishop holds changed in the early days, with some old seals showing him without the book. Also, the original 1236 seal shows him with the two objects transposed, holding the staff in his right hand, not the book. Since 1377, however, the composition still seen today seems to have been settled on. The colours were chosen in 1947.[1]
Korbach is a railway hub where once four railway lines met, one through Brilon-Wald to the Ruhr area (the Uplandbahn), one southwards through Frankenberg to Marburg (the Untere Edertalbahn and Burgwaldbahn), one northeastwards through Volkmarsen to Kassel and one southeastwards through Waldeck to Wabern (the Ederseebahn). The Ederseebahn from Bad Wildungen to Korbach is out of service. The stretch running to Kassel was reopened on 4 October 1998 (then one of the first examples in Germany of a railway line being reactivated). The stretch as far as Korbach Süd was reopened on 29 September 1999 and the Untere Edertalbahn (stretch between Korbach Süd and Frankenberg) was reopened in September 2015, to connect with the Kellerwald-Edersee National Park. There is now a direct link from Korbach to Marburg with trains running every two hours.
Korbach is somewhat remarkable for a town its size in having two on the same line that are also both in service. Since the original one ("Hauptbahnhof" – Main Station) lay too far from the Old Town, a further station ("Korbach-Süd") was built 1.5 km farther south.
In 1997, a bus service was instituted in Korbach with two looping routes that partly intersect. These buses run at 40-minute intervals, thereby meet each other at the main railway station every 20 minutes. The system also connects important places within the town, such as the inner town, the town hospital or the school centre to both routes.
There are two airfields in Korbach, used only for sport flying and gliding.
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