French Reformed Church (Frankfurt am Main)

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The French Reformed Church on Goetheplatz
Interior facing south
Location of the building in Frankfurt Neustadt

The French Reformed Church was a Reformed church in the Neustadt district of Frankfurt am Main . The most Goetheplatz located church was built from 1789 to 1792 and after its destruction in World War II, not rebuilt 1944th In 1951 a new building was built elsewhere.

history

Immigration of reformed refugees

The French Reformed community goes back to Réfugiés from Wallonia . In 1554 around 20 French-speaking families under the leadership of their preacher Valérand Poullain ( Valerandus Polanus ) settled in Frankfurt after an application to the city council. Just like the Dutch group of traders and craftsmen who came to Frankfurt as religious refugees in 1555 , after a long odyssey (with stops in London and Kleve ) they were seated in Frankfurt , i.e. H. Residents without citizenship , included.

The advocate of the settlement was the patrician Johann von Glauburg , who hoped for an economic upswing for the city by accepting the refugees, which had introduced the Reformation in 1533 and in which the Lutheran denomination had dominated since joining the Schmalkaldic League in 1537 . After the defeat of the Protestants in the Schmalkaldic War in 1546 and the forced acceptance of the Augsburg Interim in 1548, Frankfurt had retained its important privileges, but was weakened by a siege in the Prince's War in 1552.

The immigration of the Reformed , however, soon created new potential for conflict in the citizenry. On the one hand, the reformed new citizens as craftsmen (Bursat makers, traders, textile manufacturers) were a threatening and opposed competition for the established urban craftsmen due to their modern methods such as piecework and hourly wages , on the other hand there were soon confessional tensions with the Orthodox Lutheran clergy under the leadership of Hartmann Beyers .

Prohibition of Reformed worship in Frankfurt

On May 8, 1554, the council assigned the Reformed Church to the former White Convent as the place for the Sunday Lord's Supper . Between 1556 and 1559 the All Saints Chapel in the New Town also served as a place of worship for a group of English Reformed people. After conflicts arose because of the community order, the understanding of the Lord's Supper and in general because of questions of faith , the council commissioned the Lutheran senior Hartmann Beyer with a theological report "In what point and what does the Welsh and Angels Confession do not compare and agree".

However, the comparison sought by the Council did not materialize. Neither his efforts to get a Reich farewell because of the denominational conflict nor his inquiries in other imperial cities such as Strasbourg and Wesel were successful. In order to maintain public order and church peace in the city, on April 22nd, 1561, the council canceled the Reformed worship service and forbade supporters of the Reformed creed from building or using their own churches. Some of the exiles then left Frankfurt again and founded the city of Frankenthal in 1562 . However, most of them stayed in the city because of the greater attractiveness of the trade and exhibition center and preferred to hold their services in private apartments in the future.

The stream of Reformed refugees continued in the following years, especially between 1567 and 1573 because of the terror of the Duke of Alba in the Spanish Netherlands . There were now four groups of refugees in the city, besides the French ( Walloon ) and Dutch ( Flemish ) Reformed, a group of London Reformed and a Dutch congregation of the Augsburg Confession .

The city council did not want to turn the refugees away and stated that "one must have cheap Christian pity for such wretched and uff's very sad and depraved people so driven into misery from house, farm and everything." However, he feared the danger that the reformed refugees would be expected to further favor the relationship with the emperor and peace in the citizenry, and therefore stuck to the Lutheran course that had been taken. For the next 200 years there was a tense relationship between the denominations in the city, which was outlined by the saying "In Frankfurt the Lutherans have power, the Reformed the money and the Catholics the cathedral".

First of all, the council increased its pressure on the reformed minority. In 1593 he made the church available for the French-speaking church services of the Dutch Lutherans. In 1594 he banned the reformed services of the Flemish people in private households, and in 1596 also those of the Walloons. As a result, numerous Reformed people emigrated again, this time to Hanau , where the Reformed Count Philipp Ludwig II had introduced the Reformed Confession in 1595.

The council then gave in and in 1601 allowed the Reformed congregations to build a small wooden church in front of the Bockenheimer Tor . In return, the congregations recognized the council's right to appoint their preachers in 1603 and thus its sovereign church government . When the chapel burned down in 1608 under unexplained circumstances, the community had to move to Bockenheim , three kilometers away , then located in the County of Hanau .

After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 ( Edict of Fontainebleau ) , tens of thousands of Huguenots streamed to Frankfurt via Strasbourg and the (Reformed) Palatinate , above all via the Reformed communities in Speyer and Frankenthal, and from there to all of Europe.

Under the leadership of its Consistoire, the French Reformed congregation organized collections for the refugees, with the approval and probably also at the request of the council. The community elders distributed the money to around 26,000 people with extraordinary financial and personal commitment. This happened on the premises of the community, where the refugees were provided with the bare essentials, in order to then place them in the care of trading partners of the Frankfurt Reformed via Kassel , Karlshafen , Hanover and Berlin to East Prussia and Saint Petersburg . Quite a few came back to be mediated again, so that some sources speak of around 46,000 supply contacts through the community.

Building a reformed church

It was not until November 15, 1787, that the city council finally allowed both parishes "within the local city ring wall to build two prayer houses on places to be purchased by them in order to have an exercitium religionis privatum in them, to be able to build them at their own expense". However, this was subject to strict conditions: the churches were not allowed to have their own square or tower and not be recognizable as a church from the outside, but rather blend in with the adjacent house fronts.

With this recognition it was initially possible for the congregation to hold the service provisionally in Frankfurt again. For this purpose she rented a hall in the Red Court .

In search of a suitable building plot, the parish presbytery finally bought the so-called Pfeiffer houses at today's Goetheplatz on April 18, 1788 , which was approved by the city council.

The plan from Georg Friedrich Mack was approved on November 20, 1788, the houses on the building site were demolished, and the foundation stone was laid in July 1789. In addition to Mack, who, out of gratitude, received a golden box with a view of the church that was still in the family's possession at the beginning of the 20th century, there were also Friedrich Maximilian Meixner as a carpenter, Philipp Karl Kayser as a master mason, Gottfried Meyer as a stonemason and Bernhard Auffmuth and Karl Friedrich Oehme involved in the construction as stonemasons. The church was consecrated on September 16, 1792. The German Reformed Church on the Großer Kornmarkt was built almost at the same time .

After the loss of urban freedom in 1806, the Lutheran state church in Frankfurt was abolished. The other denominations received religious freedom under the Catholic prince Carl Theodor von Dalberg . On December 26, 1806, he also removed the requirement that the Reformed churches should not have a bell tower. However, these were never built because the building was not architecturally designed for it.

In 1822 Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy , the father of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy , was baptized in the church. On March 28, 1837, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Cécile Charlotte married Sophie Jeanrenaud , who came from an influential Huguenot family. Cecile's father was pastor of the French Reformed community from 1810 to 1817.

In the years 1873 to 1875 the church underwent extensive repairs according to plans by Heinrich Burnitz . Until 1916, the parish services were held in French.

Today's French Reformed Church on Eschersheimer Landstrasse

In World War II the building was burning in the air raids of 22 March 1944 of firebombs from inflamed, but the outer walls collapsed due to the relatively small damage to the stabilizing, adjacent buildings not down, so that the ruins had a reconstruction allowed. Nevertheless, it was canceled after the end of the war. Since the two Reformed churches did not belong to the Frankfurt endowment churches , the city was not obliged to rebuild.

The French Reformed Church was one of the earliest and most important buildings of classicism in Frankfurt. Despite the tendency towards the reconstruction of historical buildings, a reconstruction of the church is unlikely even in the long term.

After the traumatic experiences of pastor Walter Kreck in the Third Reich - the community had campaigned for the Confessing Church , whose seminary it housed and protected - the French Reformed congregation decided on a modest new building elsewhere. In 1951, a new community center was built on Eschersheimer Landstrasse in the Dornbusch district based on plans by Georg Scotti .

architecture

Facade structure
Floor plan of the building

On the east side facing Goetheplatz, the church appeared architecturally as a typical representative of classicism : geometrically structured in seven axes, the first two floors were combined into one and finished off with a prominent cornice . On the other side of this cornice was a residential floor for the pastor, the building was crowned by an elaborate cornice, which was finally adorned with an attic with a baluster and vases. Red sandstone was used throughout as building material, the roof was covered with slate.

On the ground floor, three massive, completely identical portals left, center and right provided access to the inside of the building. The portals were slightly elevated to the street level and were connected to this via single-flight S-shaped straight stairs with two quarter turns and five steps each. The following inscription could be read over the central portal: Dédié à l'Eternel. MDCCXC.

The three central axes of the building were emphasized by a total of four protruding Corinthian pilasters with fluting . There were seven windows on the ground floor, each smaller one above the portals and about twice as large in the corresponding axis between the portals; the size of the windows above the portals was also a row of seven windows on the second floor. The most splendid decoration on the facade was stuccoed , above and below the three central windows in the form of fabric hangings, on the capitals of the pilasters in the form of acanthus leaves and on the protruding middle part of the cornice as an antique frieze .

The west and back of the building, on the other hand, presented itself simply, it was plastered and only in the area of ​​the windows made of red sandstone, the rest was painted with gray oil paint. On the northern border, a corridor connected Goetheplatz with the courtyard. There were two flights of stairs in this corridor, one to the organ gallery on the first floor, the other to the pastor's apartment on the second floor.

The interior of the building presented itself as a hall church with column division. Two rows of chairs, interrupted only by a central passage, were offered as seating, facing the area of ​​the pulpit on the south wall. The wooden, plastered ceiling was completely straight and merged into the walls via a large, round cove . In accordance with the strict tradition of Reformed theology , the interior dispensed with any figurative decoration and was limited to the geometric shapes typical of classicism. Corinthian pilasters made of artificial marble were attached to the walls, which ended below a tooth-cut cornice. Above that there was rich stucco ornamentation in the area of ​​the haunch, the ceiling was decorated with a rose window. The organ gallery on the north side was supported by six Corinthian columns and was itself adorned by four Corinthian pilasters and cornices, as well as the pulpit and communion table on the south side. The colors were equally reserved, the walls were painted with gray-yellow glue paint, the chairs with yellow oil paint, which harmonized with the yellow and gray artificial marble elements.

Since the building did not fill the comparatively wide street between Goetheplatz and Rothofstraße to the west, there was still space for two outbuildings in the courtyard to the west of the building. These included living rooms for the sexton, classroom, library and halls for the meetings of the presbytery and diakonia.

literature

architecture

  • Hartwig Beseler , Niels Gutschow: War fates of German architecture - losses, damage, reconstruction. Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1988, ISBN 3-529-02685-9 .
  • Georg Hartmann , Fried Lübbecke (ed.), Alt-Frankfurt. A legacy. Sauer and Auvermann publishing house, Glashütten 1971.
  • Carl Wolff , Rudolf Jung : The architectural monuments in Frankfurt am Main. First volume. Church buildings , self-published / Völcker 1896, pp. 304–308 ( digitized version )

History of the community

  • Wolf-Friedrich Schäufele: Johannes Calvin and the reformed refugee communities in Frankfurt am Main, in: Yearbook of the Hessian Church History Association 61/2010, pp. 15–34
  • Georg Altrock, Herrmann Düringer, Matthias von Kriegstein, Karin Weintz (eds.): Migration and modernization. 450th anniversary of the Evangelical French Reformed Congregation Frankfurt am Main. Haag and Herchen Verlag, 2006, ISBN 3-89846-357-5 .
  • Frank Berger (Ed.): Faith Makes Art. Antwerp - Frankfurt around 1600. Series of publications by the Historisches Museum Frankfurt, Volume 25. Societätsverlag Frankfurt, 2005, ISBN 3-7973-0970-8 .
  • Irene Dingel (Ed.): Abraham Mangon, a short but true description of the history of the Reformed in Frankfurt. 1554-1712. EVA Leipzig 2004. ISBN 3-374-02177-8 .
  • Lothar Gall (Hrsg.): FFM 1200. Traditions and perspectives of a city. Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Sigmaringen 1994, ISBN 3-7995-1203-9 . (Catalog for the 1200th anniversary in 1994 with scientific articles).
  • Anton Schindling: Growth and Change from the Confessional Age to the Age of Louis XIV. Frankfurt am Main 1555–1685. In: Frankfurter Historische Kommission (Ed.): Frankfurt am Main - The history of the city in nine contributions. (=  Publications of the Frankfurt Historical Commission . Volume XVII ). Jan Thorbecke, Sigmaringen 1991, ISBN 3-7995-4158-6 .

Web links

swell

  1. ↑ Within a few years, the previously debt-free city had to borrow more than 330,000 guilders, the annual interest of almost 19,000 guilders consuming around a third of the annual income. See also: Siegfried Jahns: Frankfurt am Main in the age of the Reformation. In: Frankfurter Historische Kommission (Ed.): Frankfurt am Main - The history of the city in nine contributions . Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Sigmaringen 1991, ISBN 3-7995-4158-6 , p. 199.
  2. ^ Minutes of the Council of September 5, 1555
  3. ↑ Date not congruent in all sources, e.g. T. is also mentioned in 1581, see Michelle Magdelaine, lc ISBN 3-89846-357-5

Coordinates: 50 ° 6 ′ 48 ″  N , 8 ° 40 ′ 34 ″  E