Simmern

Simmern is the Hunsrück's capital, with a robber in the tower and dukes in the church. The stout Schinderhannesturm holds the region's most notorious memory: Johannes Bückler — Schinderhannes, the Hunsrück's legendary outlaw — sat imprisoned in this tower before his Mainz trial and execution in 1803, and the town keeps his ambiguous fame with documentation and a certain rueful affection, the bandit long since promoted to regional folklore's leading man.

The nobler chapter lies in St Stephan's: the late-Gothic church — the "Hunsrück cathedral" with its net vaults — shelters the splendid tombs of the dukes of Palatinate-Simmern, the residence line whose house rose in 1559 to the Electorate of the Palatinate itself: from this small residence town, a dynasty stepped onto Heidelberg's great stage. The Schloss, rebuilt after war's destructions, now serves culture and administration; the Hunsrück-Museum within tells slate, forest and farming centuries.

Around Simmern spreads the plateau that Edgar Reitz's "Heimat" films made an inner landscape for audiences worldwide — the Hunsrück of long horizons, village bells and emigration memories, now crossed by the Schinderhannes cycle path on the old railway and the Soonwald's trails nearby. A tower for the robber, a vault for the dukes, a plateau for the epic: Simmern administers its legends evenhandedly.