Neue Kirche, Berlin

Coordinates: 52°30′46″N 13°23′33″E / 52.512756°N 13.392506°E / 52.512756; 13.392506
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
New Church, colloquially "German Cathedral"
Neue Kirche; colloquially "Deutscher Dom"
Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union
Location
LocationFriedrichstadt, a locality of Berlin
Geographic coordinates52°30′46″N 13°23′33″E / 52.512756°N 13.392506°E / 52.512756; 13.392506
Architecture
Architect(s)Martin Grünberg (design), Giovanni Simonetti (church construction 1701–8); Carl von Gontard (design); Georg Christian Unger (tower construction 1781–85); Johann Wilhelm Schwedler (design); Hermann von der Hude, Julius Hennicke (new prayer hall 1881–82); Otto Lessing (exterior sculptures 1885); Manfred Prasser, Roland Steiger and Uwe Karl (outside reconstruction 1977–81)
Completed9 April 1708 (1708-04-09), 1882 (new prayer hall), reconstruction 1988

The New Church (

Reformed Church) congregants used German as their native language, as opposed to the French-speaking Calvinist congregation of the adjacent French Church of Friedrichstadt. The congregants' native language combined with the domed tower earned the church its colloquial name Deutscher Dom. While the church physically resembles a cathedral, it is not a cathedral in the formal sense of the word, as it was never the seat of a bishop
.

After being heavily damaged during the bombing of Berlin in World War II, reconstruction was completed 1988; the church now serves as a museum.

Church and congregations

In 1701–1708, Giovanni Simonetti built the first church after a design of Martin Grünberg. It was the third church in Friedrichstadt, established in 1688, which was a town of princely domination, while the neighbouring

Hohenzollerns - themselves were Calvinists. But also more and more Lutherans moved in. Therefore, in 1708 the New Church became a Calvinist and Lutheran Simultaneum.[1]

The site for the church was disentangled from the so-called Swiss Cemetery, which had been provided for

Huguenots
, who had come to Berlin between 1698 and 1699 from their intermittent refuge in Switzerland. The original building had a pentagonal footprint with semicircular apses. The interior was characterised by a typical Protestant combined altar and pulpit leaning against the eastern central pillar opposite to the entrance.

The New Church after the collapse of its tower in 1781.

In 1780,

Panthéon), then still under construction by Jacques-Germain Soufflot. The construction of the domed towers aimed at making the Gendarmenmarkt resemble the Piazza del Popolo in Rome. Still under construction the tower of the New Church collapsed. Thus Georg Christian Unger was commissioned to carry out Gontard's plan.[citation needed
]

Christian Bernhard Rode created the statues, representing characters from the

Evangelical Church in Prussia
(under this name since 1821), with each congregation maintaining its former denomination or adopting the new united denomination.

Evangelical
service within the prayer hall outside an Evangelical pastor, a Catholic priest and a rabbi, one after the other, shortly addressed the audience, before the throng accompanied the coffins to the graves.

In 1881, the dilapidated prayer hall was torn down and Hermann von der Hude and Julius Hennicke replaced it with a new one on a pentagonal groundplan, according to the neobaroque design of Johann Wilhelm Schwedler. Otto Lessing designed the six statues on the attic of the new prayer hall. On 17 December 1882, the new prayer hall was inaugurated.

In 1934, the congregations of the New Church had united with that of Jerusalem's Church and have become - after further mergers - today's

Evangelical Congregation in the Friedrichstadt (as of 2001). For services it uses the French Church on the opposite side of Gendarmenmarkt and Luke's Church in Berlin-Kreuzberg
.

The Church in July 1981, overgrown with weeds and still domeless, its wartime damage still very much apparent.

In 1943, the New Church was almost completely destroyed in the bombing of Berlin in World War II and was subsequently rebuilt from 1983 to 1996. Meanwhile, the German government acquired the building and the site. The church building was updated, deconsecrated and reopened in 1996 as the Bundestag's museum on German parliamentary history (Milestones - Setbacks - Sidetracks, The Path to Parliamentary Democracy in Germany).

The New Church seen at twilight, with the marble monument of Friedrich Schiller in the foreground.

The two congregations of the New Church maintained cemeteries with the two congregations of the neighbouring

Jerusalem's Church (another simultaneum), three of which are comprised – with cemeteries of other congregations – in a compound of six cemeteries all together, which are among the most important historical cemeteries of Berlin. They are located in Berlin-Kreuzberg south of Hallesches Tor (Berlin U-Bahn) (Friedhöfe vor dem Halleschen Tor
).

Noteworthy parishioners

Notes

  1. ISBN 3-7674-0158-4
    .
  2. ^ Ingrid Bartmann-Kompa, Horst Büttner, Horst Drescher, Joachim Fait, Marina Flügge, Gerda Herrmann, Ilse Schröder, Helmut Spielmann, Christa Stepansky, and Heinrich Trost, Die Bau- und Kunstdenkmale in der DDR: Hauptstadt Berlin: 2 parts, Institut für Denkmalpflege (ed.) (11983), Berlin: Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 21984, part I, p. 217.

References

  • Ingrid Bartmann-Kompa, Horst Büttner, Horst Drescher, Joachim Fait, Marina Flügge, Gerda Herrmann, Ilse Schröder, Helmut Spielmann, Christa Stepansky, and Heinrich Trost, Die Bau- und Kunstdenkmale in der DDR: Hauptstadt Berlin: 2 parts, Institut für Denkmalpflege (ed.) (11983), Berlin: Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 21984, part I, p. 217. No ISBN.
  • Günther Kühne and Elisabeth Stephani, Evangelische Kirchen in Berlin (11978), Berlin: CZV-Verlag, 21986, pp. 374seq.
    ISBN 3-7674-0158-4
    .

External links

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