Monks, Murders, Mutiny - On the History of Isen

Created: 03/28/2022, 16:00

The Isen brass band provided hearty breaks with their musical interludes at the opening event of the festival year in the Isen Klementsaal.

© Anne Huber

The start of the 1275th anniversary celebrations in Isen: Reinhold Haertel gives an entertaining lecture on the dazzling and dark chapters in the community's history.

Isen

– Educated monks, mutinous citizens and a cold case: the Isen market started the celebration year “1275 years of Isen” with a somewhat different view of history.

At the kick-off event in the Klementsaal, keynote speaker Reinhold Härtel managed to highlight individual events, certificates or structural features and entertain the guests in an entertaining way.

When welcoming the guests, Mayor Irmgard Hibler thanked everyone who had contributed to the organization of the year of celebrations.

In addition to the mayors of the neighboring communities and the municipal councils, numerous representatives of the Isen clubs took part.

The brass band from Isen provided music during the breaks.

The focus of the ceremony was the historical review of Härtel.

He went into detail about the document to which Isen traces his founding in 747.

"The Isen founding document is actually not a document, it is a summary of many documents," said Härtel.

Because the Freising bishop Joseph wanted to know "what belongs to him", several documents were written together.

The terms for place and church, "Locus and Domus", led Haertel to conclude that Isen was an important place at that time.

The speaker attributed the fact that the high status soon came to an end, despite "important documents, important students and an important missal", to the subordinate position of the monastery as an economic monastery, which Freising had to do the groundwork for.

Nevertheless, the level of education in the monastery was high, the classical philologist, who teaches Latin and Catholic religion as a high school teacher, deduced from a tombstone of the monks and canons in the parish church.

The keynote speaker Reinhold Haertel offered a look back to the year 747.

© Anne Huber

"Tombstones can be entertaining," he cited the unfinished inscription on a tomb commissioned during his lifetime as another example.

Because the client was "devoted to drinking" and also had an illegitimate child with that of a maid, there was obviously no reason to complete the inscription after his death.

The visitation of the collegiate monastery in 1642 also does not give a good look at the canons in retrospect: their behavior was "a scandal for others and a shame for themselves", according to the minutes.

And it is advised to abstain from "drinking and gambling with the lower classes".

As little as the canons shied away from dealing with the common people when drinking, they took care to keep to themselves in their own quarter, the upper row.

The fact that the citizens then placed their town hall directly at the interface between their houses and those of the collegiate monastery was intended to show the canons: "We are there too".

Because the citizens of Isen were not always satisfied with the authorities.

In 1638, ten years after the Isen brewers had founded their own guild, a kind of beer war escalated.

"It's unclear how it happened, but at some point it burned," said Härtel.

Haertel came to a "classic criminal case" to speak.

Andreas Göttner, the last dean of the monastery until 1802, was found dead in the cemetery.

Suspicion fell on Pastor Johann Baptist Hibler – what really happened could never be proven.

Haertel also spoke about the bust of Saint Zeno, the eponymous saint of the church.

"It is believed that Zeno was a dark-skinned person from North Africa".

He concluded with a quote from the saint: "Without hope there is no humanity".

With which Härtel had found a suitable final word in times of war.

BY ANNE HUBER

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