Matthew Alber's house

Matthew Alber

Matthäus 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. At the university he came into contact with Melanchthon, Reuchlin and the writings of Martin Luther. In 1521 Alber was ordained a priest and received a predicate at Reutlingen's St. Mary's Church, where, clearly influenced by Luther's reformatory ideas, he restructured the service according to Protestant standards and therefore had to be repeatedly defended by the city council against pressure from the church. When he married Klara Baur in 1524, he was accused of breaking his celibacy and excommunicated four years later. The marriage resulted in 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 von 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 future Princess Grace Kelly and her children can count themselves among Alber's descendants. When Alber died in 1570 after a long illness, he was buried in the Blaubeur town church. During renovation work in 1840, his tombstone broke. The rubble was used as a foundation for the new church floor; the exact location of his grave is no longer known today. The epitaph, which shows Alber and his family under the cross, hangs in the sacristy of the city church and is not open to the public. It is thanks to Alber, as the first Protestant abbot, that the high altar in the choir of the monastery church was not dismantled during the Reformation.

Matthäus Alber House

The house bears the name of the Protestant reformer Matthäus Alber, who was ordered to Blaubeuren in the 16th century, when he was already very old at the time, to run the monastery school and to bring the Protestant faith closer to the Blaubeuren townspeople. The house itself was not yet standing at the time; forester Heinrich von Gaisberg had it built as a residential building in 1602 - by then Alber had already been dead for 32 years. The house only got its 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. Heinrich von Gaisberg had a representative aristocratic house built with the high brick ground floor and the half-timbered structure decorated with many decorative shapes, such as the curved and bent foot bands and St. Andrew's crosses, the architecture of which clearly stands out from the town houses in the old town. Above the portal, the builder had the pious wish “Oh Lord, give peace always, happiness to the house” affixed. In the gable you can see his coat of arms with the abbreviation HVG for his name, and to the left and right of him are the coats of arms of his two wives. Today the house serves as a community center for the Protestant community.