Exhibition and public festival for the anniversary

Created: 07/04/2022, 09:05

The exhibition "50 Years Wörthsee" was opened on Friday in the presence of (from left) Dirk Schwebe, Mayor Christel Muggenthal, Ingo Muggenthal, Edeltraud Schramm, Horst Schramm, Ilse Pflaum, archivist Barbara Blankenburg and Edgar Pflaum.

© Photographer: Andrea Jaksch

The municipality of Wörthsee is 50 years old.

A round birthday with history, because the merger of Steinebach, Auing, Etterschlag, Walchstadt and Schluifeld did not go smoothly at the beginning of the 70s.

At the same time as the exhibition, the municipality celebrated its citizens' festival on Saturday.

Steinebach

– Exciting and humorous background information on the merger of the municipalities 50 years ago can be admired in the Wörthsee town hall foyer until July 16th.

At the vernissage of the exhibition “50 Years of the Wörthsee Municipality” on Friday, archivist Barbara Blankenburg allowed her audience to take a look behind the scenes.

“The districts of Wörthsee attach great importance to their independence.

Steinebach and Etterschlag were municipal seats for around 200 years, before that only the Hofmark Walchstadt had an identity,” explained Blankenburg, who spent months working through thick archive files and numerous photos of the local heritage association.

Although a regional reform had been discussed for years, the merger only became concrete in 1970, when Heinrich Lang, former mayor of Steinebach, actively took matters into his own hands.

At the time, there was an urgent need for action, especially in the area of ​​school education.

“A new elementary school was needed, the small village schools are bursting at the seams.

Those were conditions – one had to expect that education would suffer,” says the archivist.

Time was tight: with a voluntary merger of the districts by the beginning of April 1971, high subsidies were to be expected, which could be used to finance the long-awaited school building.

Steinebach's initiative was initially met with skepticism in Etterschlag.

The mayor of Etterschlag, Josef Wirth, first had to ensure that the population would not suffer any disadvantages, for example in terms of subsidies, as a result of the merger.

Numerous special sessions later, the Etterschlag councilors reluctantly agreed – by a vote of nine to two.

A real thriller, because the decision was made just one day before the deadline.

The names discussed for the new large community invite you to smile today.

Before "Steinettstadt" or "St.

Martin am See” eventually won out as “Wörthsee”.

When Josef Wirth was elected Mayor of Wörthsee on March 5, 1972, the lake community had fewer than 3,000 inhabitants.

Wörthsee's fourth mayor, Christel Muggenthal, is still observing 50 years after the reform: "I live in Steinebach and later realized that there are definitely sensitivities in certain areas." The Pflaum family experienced practical peculiarities very closely in the snowy winter of 1979 Border through for electricity and telephone.

Walchstadt and Etterschlag had no electricity during the power outage at the Fürstenfeldbruck public utility company,” Ilse Pflaum recalls.

"We then plugged in a cable at our direct neighbors in Steinebach - for the freezer," says husband Edgar Pflaum with a laugh.

The exhibition was also crowded on Saturday evening.

Because the citizens' festival was taking place on the square in front of the town hall, the town hall was also open as an exception.

And one or the other visitor immersed himself in the timetables designed by Blankenburg.

Hundreds of citizens sat down at white-covered tables under colorful pennants in the evening sun, including numerous refugees from Ukraine.

"It was uniquely beautiful," enthused Peter Hopmann from Wörthsee Aktiv.

The group had organized the festival with numerous helpers, the organizer was the municipality of Wörthsee.

There was even a dance floor where people danced into the night to the music of "Klangabasch".

"50 years Wörthsee"

The exhibition with vivid image material, archive documents and background information is on display in the town hall until Saturday, July 16, during opening hours (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m., also on Tuesday from 4 p.m. to 6.30 p.m.) and Visitable on Saturdays from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Nilda Frangos