Schillerhaus (Oberkochen)

The Schillerhaus in Oberkochen is a former school building now housing the town’s local history museum. It stands on Aalener Strasse, opposite a special exhibition about the Oberkochen History Society. The name was chosen in 2001 after a heated council debate, though the poet Friedrich Schiller never visited the place. The museum shows how the house itself reflects Oberkochen’s past. From 1860 it served as an evangelical school and teachers’ home, later becoming a library and youth centre. Today each room tells a different story: fossils of the White Jura, Roman finds from a 1971 cellar, Alamannic graves opened in 1980, and a reconstruction of the Bilzhaus excavated in 1989. Visitors walk through eight themed rooms. Room 1 displays Jurassic fossils, Room 2 holds stone tools and Roman artefacts, Room 3 shows Alamannic grave goods. Room 4 traces the village from 1337, Room 5 explains the potters’ trade once practised in thirty workshops, and Room 6 shows early industrial drilling tools. Room 7 covers the 20th-century growth into a town, while Room 8 hosts changing exhibitions. A stage area displays farm and forestry tools plus a 1950s shoemaker’s workshop.