Matthew Alber's house

Matthew Alber

Matthew Alber was born in 1495 in the free imperial city of Reutlingen. He studied in Tübingen, initially with the aim of earning a living as a Latin teacher. While still at uni he got to know Melanchthon, Reuchlin and the writings of Martin Luther. In 1521 Alber was ordained as a priest and employed at Reutlingen's St. Mary's Church. Clearly influenced by Luther's reformatory ideas, he held church service following the new Protestant rites and therefore had to be repeatedly defended by the city council against pressure from the Catholic church. When he married Klara Baur in 1524, he was accused of breaking his celibacy vows and was excommunicated four years later. The couple had six sons and four daughters, from whom many well-known personalities can derive their genealogical roots. An ancestral line leads from daughter Klara to Friedrich Schiller. Also the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the theologian Carl Friedrich Haug, the writer Theodor Vischer, the poet Wilhelm Hauff, the philosopher Karl Christian Planck, the designer Wilhelm Maybach, the von Weizäcker family, and even the late Princess Grace Kelly and her offspring can count themselves among Alber's descendants.

Matthäus Alber was sent to Blaubeuren to run the newly established monastic school and to teach the townspeople the new Protestant faith. Alber prevented the destruction of the high altar by iconoclasts. When Alber died in 1570 he was buried in the parish church. An epitaph which shows Alber and his family kneeling under the cross finds itself in the sacristy of the church, but this room is not open to the public.

Matthäus Alber House

The house which now bears the name of the reformer Matthäus Alber did not yet exist in his lifetime. Alber had already been dead for 32 years when the ducal forester Heinrich von Gaisberg had it built as his home in 1602. The house got Alber's name in the 1960s, but for a long time it was still known to the people of Blaubeuren as the deanery, because the Protestant deans of Blaubeuren lived and worked here from 1710 to 1965.

The house was a representative aristocratic building with a high ground floor made of bricks and richly decorated half-timbering on the top floors. The large entrance door was crowned with an inscription  saying “Oh Lord, give steady peace and happiness to this house”.  Today the house serves as a community center for the town's Protestant congregation.