Bad Säckingen
municipality in Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Bad Säckingen (German pronunciation: [baːt ˈzɛkɪŋən] ; High Alemannic: Bad Säckinge) is a rural town in the administrative district of Waldshut in the state of Baden-Württemberg in Germany. It is famous as the "Trumpeter's City" because of the book Der Trompeter von Säckingen ("The Trumpeter of Säckingen"), a famous 19th-century novel by German author Joseph Victor von Scheffel.
Geography
Bad Säckingen is located in the very southwest of Germany on the High Rhine next to the Swiss border. The city lies on the southern edge of the Hotzenwald, which is the southern foothills of the Black Forest.
Constitutuent communities
The town of Bad Säckingen consists of the following former municipalities:
Harpolingen with the farms Lochmühle and Rüttehof and the houses Holdmatt
Rippolingen with the Flut farmstead and the Santihof houses
Säckingen with the district of Obersäckingen and the houses Am Bergsee
Wallbach
Nearby places
Close (<15 km): Wallbach, Wehr (Baden), Murg am Hochrhein, Laufenburg (Baden), Stein AG, Rheinfelden (Schweiz), Rheinfelden (Baden), Rickenbach (Hotzenwald)
Further away (>15 km): Waldshut-Tiengen, Schopfheim, Lörrach, Basel, Brugg AG, Aarau AG, Zürich, Schaffhausen SH, St. Blasien, Todtmoos, Freiburg i.Br., Konstanz.
Origin of the name
Säckingen (since 1978 Bad Säckingen, first mentioned in a document in 878 as Seckinga) is traditionally considered to be the foundation of an Alemanni group called Secco. However, the name of the city most likely originated from the Germanization of a Roman place name (Sanctio) (similar to Aachen, Baden-Baden and others), possibly from the name of the Diocletian province Maxima Sequanorum, founded in 297 AD.
In the Latin text of Fridolinsvita (970), Säckingen is called Secanis and Seconis (pronunciation a>o) and in 1207 also Seconia. Seconis is to be interpreted as a local case of Seconia, which can be easily derived from Sequaniacum (= sanctuary of Sequana). According to the belief of the Celts, the goddess of springs, the art of healing and health revealed herself in the swampy soil of the saline thermal baths of Säckingen (seik – "dripping flow", Sequana – "daughter of the springs").
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Bad Säckingen” is municipality in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Säckingen, municipality and Baden-Württemberg, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q522362. VIAF identifies the subject as 160305841. The Library of Congress control number is n82144483. Authority coordinates are 47.553, 7.947. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1978 and 1207.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bad Säckingen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.