What does the Church of Saint Martin commemorate?

Torsten Weigelt, journalist, Kelkheimer and now also author, did not choose the meeting point without ulterior motives.

Maybe the imperial cathedral in Aachen, which is also round after all?

But in 1947 the Frankfurt architect Christoph Rummel had a more domestic building in mind: the Paulskirche in Frankfurt.

Sankt Martin was built from Mammolshain natural stone, as the plaque next to the entrance informs.

It is the only Christian round church in the Main-Taunus district.

The site on which it stands today once belonged to the Barons of Gagern.

Andrea Diener

Correspondent in the Main-Taunus district

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The Gagern family is omnipresent on the city map in Kelkheim.

Gagernring, Gagern-Anlage, Max-von-Gagern-School, plus the Gagern circular route, which provides information about the family.

Then it gets thin very quickly.

You've heard the name once, they also have something to do with the Paulskirche, with democracy, but otherwise?

So far there has not even been a biography about the family, which was so formative politically at a crucial time.

At least this problem has now been remedied by Torsten Weigelt.

He had known the farm for a long time, which is popularly known as the "Gagern House", and at some point he became curious.

He would have liked to know more about this family, but the yield was disappointing.

In library reading rooms he only came across a habilitation thesis from 2004, which was never published.

Together with the mainbooks publisher Gerd Fischer, he came up with the idea of ​​taking matters into his own hands.

At first he only wanted to write about the brothers, but the father's generation in contrast to the sons turned out to be particularly exciting.

There are several reasons why the Gagerns settled in the tiny village of Hornau, which had just 300 inhabitants at the time.

The educated and worldly father Hans-Christoph von Gagern, a well-travelled diplomat and cultural historian, whose readers included Goethe, was able to save quite a bit of money while working as a government councilor and minister in Nassau-Weilburg.

For legal reasons, however, he was only allowed to spend it in Nassau.

He sold two Rheingau properties and finally came across the Hornau property, which had been vacant for a long time as a slow seller.

The landscape appealed to him, as did the proximity to Frankfurt and Wiesbaden, which is why Kelkheim became his permanent residence in 1822.

From then on, his wife Charlotte looked after the ten children, attached great importance to their education and was very popular with the population.

The actual Gagern-Hofgut, a manor house with 30 rooms, no longer stands; it was demolished in 1907.

Today, if you pass the round church and cross the bridge over the Liederbach, you will still find the courtyard house, which was probably a guest house and now serves as the Catholic parish office.

It looks quite inviting with its baroque facade and green shutters.

The numerous children liked to come back to their parents' property with their families in the summer, and sometimes they had presents in their luggage.

The courtyard house owes its eldest son Friedrich the Asian buffalo horns that he brought with him as a military inspector from the "Dutch East Indies", today Indonesia.

"I've read everything there is about the family," says Weigelt.

There is a biography of Friedrich written by his younger brothers Heinrich and Max out of admiration for the eldest.

Friedrich, an officer in the service of the Netherlands, was the mastermind of the three, the theoretician.

Max, the youngest, wrote and organized.

Heinrich, on the other hand, was the center of public attention and was a gifted speaker.