According to the reports by Bishop Liutprand of Cremona, he assembled the East Frankish princes in Erfurt the next year, to arrange the succession of his son Otto I, and afterwards retired to the castellum of Memleben, where he died after another stroke on 2 July 936.

He granted market, mint and customs rights in the Memleben territory in 994 and donated the Thuringian Wiehe estates to the abbey four years later.

On his accession in 1002, Henry II, the successor of Otto III, initially had confirmed to Abbot Reinhold of Memleben the privileges and possessions of his predecessors, on par with the Imperial abbeys of Fulda, Corvey and Reichenau.

However, thirteen years later, he substantially disempowered and dispossessed the Memleben community in favour of Hersfeld Abbey, to whom he subordinated it, in return for estates for his pet project, the newly created Bishopric of Bamberg.

The Memleben convent existed until in 1525 the abbey was plundered during the German Peasants' War and after a steadily worsening decline in the wake of the Protestant Reformation it was finally dissolved in 1548.

The abbey's estates were taken over by the Electors of Saxony in 1551 and given to the school at Pforta, which had just been re-founded, and which retained possession of them until the end of World War II.

Of the first monumental church building erected in the 10th century, some walls and foundations are preserved, particularly the southwestern transept and crossing piers, as well as the southern side of the nave.

They now house a museum with a permanent exhibition relating to the royal and monastic history of the abbey and the town, directly perceptible also in an extended monastery garden and a medieval scriptorium.