Biefang, Oberhausen — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in Biefang?

The Königschule carries a king's donation in its name. Parents in Biefang had the Holten judge send a petition to Frederick the Great, who sent twenty-five thalers toward the first Protestant school in 1753, and they gathered the timber and gave their labour for the rest. The name has outlived several buildings.

A succession of schoolhouses has carried it down to the present day. The arms tell the ground's story. A frog stands for the marsh of the Schwarzes Bruch and the Holtener Bruch, a juniper branch with blue berries for the poor soil that grew sour grass and juniper, and two ears of grain for the fields that spread once industry drained the bog.

What is the history of Biefang?

Mechthild von Holte endowed the monastery with houses here. Her gift of the houses just built at Byvanc went to the Sterkrade monastery on 2 February 1282, and the banner of the quarter carries the year 1281 for it. Kleve counted it as an office.

Biefang appears in 1447 as the Amt Holten, an administrative district of the county, and it kept that official name for centuries. The Reformation left it without a graveyard. Every citizen had joined the Protestant church by 1610, and with no consecrated ground the dead were carried quickly out of the village to be buried at Holten, which is probably why the plague of that year, which emptied much of Holten and Sterkrade, passed Biefang almost without trace.

The name changed in 1892. The council gave itself the name Biefang while the authorities went on writing Amt Holten, and on 1 April 1908 the communes of Stadt and Feldmark Holten and Amt Holten merged into the Landgemeinde Holten, which went to Sterkrade in 1917 and into Oberhausen in 1929.

Where is Biefang?

Biefang covers about a hundred and thirty hectares in the west of the Sterkrade district of Oberhausen, on ground that was once the marshy Schwarzes Bruch and Holtener Bruch.