The Wilhelm Hauff Museum @museum.de

Narrator:
There’s no evidence that Wilhelm Hauff ever visited Honau. And yet the Wilhelm Hauff Museum is located here in the parish. If you’re wondering why – well, one reason is, of course, because of his novel “Lichtenstein”. But also because of the castle of the same name.
And it also has something to do with a woman called Lore Ziegler, whose family has a special connection to Wilhelm Hauff, to Lichtenstein and to Honau. It was thanks to her efforts that the Wilhelm Hauff Museum was opened in 1982.
The building that now houses the museum once served as accommodation for an important beast. It was what’s called a “Farrenstall”. “Stall” is a stable or cowshed, and “Farre” is a Swabian dialect term for a mature male head of domestic cattle. In other words, a breeding bull.
In 1882, Württemberg passed a “law on the keeping of bulls”, which essentially says the following: “The parishes have an obligation to keep the bulls required for cattle breeding (...).”

In some cases, individual farmers were contracted to keep the bulls and received an appropriate fee. But over time, more and more communities switched to building their own byre specifically for the breeding bull – usually in the centre of the village.
When artificial insemination came along, the importance of the breeding bulls waned. They became surplus to requirements, as did their sheds. Those were converted into libraries, homes or, as in Honau, a museum.