Gau-Bickelheim

Gau-Bickelheim is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Alzey-Worms district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.

Location
Gau-Bickelheim lies south of the Wißberg (mountain) in the Rheinhessisches Hügelland (Rhenish-Hessian Uplands).

Municipal council
The council is made up of 16 council members, who were elected at the municipal election held on 7 June 2009, and the honorary mayor as chairman.

The municipal election held on 7 June 2009 yielded the following results:

Mayor
Gau-Bickelheim's mayor is Jürgen Vollmer (WG Gau-Bickelheim).

Coat of arms
The municipality's arms might be described thus: Per fess abased argent three pickaxes palewise in fess, the middle one abased, gules, and gules a wheel spoked of six of the first.

The pickaxes are a canting charge: “Pickaxe” is Pickel in German, which sounds rather like the second and third syllables of the municipality's name, Gau-Bickelheim. The escutcheon's base contains the Wheel of Mainz, an historical symbol of Electoral Mainz.

Town partnerships

 * 🇫🇷 Aiserey, Côte-d'Or, France

Buildings

 * Pfarrkirche St. Martin (“Saint Martin’s Parish Church”)
 * Kreuzkapelle (“Cross Chapel”)

Transport
Running through the municipality is Bundesstraße 420. Running nearby from northwest to southeast is the Autobahn A 61. The Gau-Bickelheim interchange (Nr. 52) is not right on Bundesstraße 420, but rather, it can be reached over Bundesstraße 50. The interchange itself is rather a sprawling one and looks somewhat like a half cloverleaf. This came about because the original plan called for there to be an interchange between the A 60 and the A 61 here. In the mid 1990s, an off-highway service centre was built nearby.

Gau-Bickelheim has at its disposal a railway station on the Rheinhessenbahn.

Public institutions

 * Gau-Bickelheim highway police station

Notable people

 * The writer Arno Schmidt lived for a short while in Gau-Bickelheim after the Second World War as an Umsiedler (member of a mass migration). The municipality is mentioned in passing at the beginning of the narrative Schwarze Spiegel (“Black Mirrors”). The narrative Die Umsiedler gives this time a literary treatment.