Spring can't see beans between servlet-context and contextConfigLocation beans

Yes there are two contexts stacked on each other (parent and child context).

The beans from the DispatcherServlet (servlet-context.xml) can access the beans from the ContextLoaderListener (configuration-context.xml), but not the other way around.

So put the basic stuff in the configuration-context.xml and the web related once into servlet-context.xml.