Paulinerkirche (Göttingen)
The Paulinerkirche in the old town of Göttingen was completed as a monastery church in 1304 and now serves as an event and exhibition hall for the Lower Saxony State and University Library in Göttingen .
history
Monastery church
From 1294 the Dominican order was allowed to settle in Göttingen and began building a monastery in the western part of the old town. The monastery church built for the order was built in the style of a Gothic hall church typical of the order . This has three aisles with five bays and is spanned with cross vaults. With its completion in 1304, the Paulinerkirche is the oldest Gothic hall church in the old town of Göttingen.
In 1331 the church was consecrated to the apostles Peter and Paul and was named after it. Since 1341, relics of St. Thomas Aquinas have rested here , which annually attract large crowds of pilgrims to the Thomas Mass and gave the monastery a well-known reputation.
At least two altars used to be part of the furnishings of the church. One is from 1445 and a second late medieval passion altar with 41 panels from 1499 by Hans Raphon . Both were long considered lost. The latter probably came to the Walkenried Monastery with the Reformation and is now in the Prague National Gallery .
reformation
Twelve years after Luther's posting of the theses , the Reformation also prevailed in Göttingen in 1529 . Difficult times began for the Dominican Convention. The council of the city of Göttingen did not initially have any power of disposal over the parish churches. These were subordinate to Duke Erich I of Braunschweig-Lüneburg , Prince of Calenberg-Göttingen . This still adhered to the old faith and did not want to allow evangelical sermons in the parish churches subordinate to him. The city council therefore decided to hold the Protestant services in the mendicant churches. Since the Paulinerkirche was the largest of these churches in the city, services were primarily held here. On October 24, 1529, pastor Friedrich Hüventhal was able to hold the first regular evangelical service in the Pauline Church against the will of the monks. The first children in Göttingen were also baptized Protestants here.
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From high school to university
Shortly afterwards the monastery was closed and from 1586 it was used as a pedagogy for school purposes. This facility eventually became the nucleus of the Georg August University, which opened in 1737 . For this purpose, a college building was erected on the site of the monastery, although a first plan to preserve the cloister was rejected for structural reasons. Shortly before, in 1734, the university's library was founded.
The Paulinerkirche is the place where the Georg-August-Universität was inaugurated. In 1748 the celebrations on the occasion of George II's visit to the university he founded took place here. Until 1803 the church was used for academic services. Only when there was no longer enough space for the rapidly growing library did the services have to be moved outside, and the organ created by Johann Wilhelm Gloger and other inventory were expanded, including the roof turret. The library took over all parts of the building.
In 1812, under Jérôme Bonaparte, a renovation was carried out based on designs by Friedrich Weinbrenner and Justus Heinrich Müller. The lower windows were broken into and a false ceiling was put in. The upper part of the church was converted into a library room. In 1820 the Nikolaikirche took its place as a university church .
The church was badly damaged in an air raid on Göttingen on November 24, 1944. After the Second World War , the church was rebuilt and the book hall was first rebuilt as a large lecture room and then used for the Lower Saxony Central Catalog.
Todays use
Today the Paulinerkirche belongs to the building complex of the historical building of the Lower Saxony State and University Library in Göttingen, which was built on the former monastery area. The monumental hall construction with a length of 52 meters today combines the old spatial character with modern requirements. Despite a number of structural changes, the church has had almost completely unadorned outer and inner walls since it was built, so that the flat, stretched wall predominates. Since moving into the central library of the Lower Saxony State and University Library in Göttingen in 1992 and the renovation of the historic building (2000–2006), a lecture and exhibition hall has taken up the entire upper half of the room. Inside the hall are some of the books that formed the basis of the library in the 18th century on long shelves.
The majority of the holdings have been in the central library on campus since 1992 , but the historical holdings (published up to 1900) are housed in the historical building. In belonging to the Historical Building Prince Street building, a 1878 built and 1882 Gründerzeit Werkbau, are the reading rooms of Manuscripts and Rare and rare books , the Heyne -Saal , the Alfred Hessel -Saal , some magazines and the map collection on the ground floor, also in two Upper floor of the band catalog and some carrels .
Between this building and the Paulinerkirche is the Kollegienhaus, which was built from 1734 to 1737 from wall parts of the former monastery as a baroque plastered building with ashlar structure, and initially also housed the administration and lecture hall. Via the entrance of the Kollegienhaus in the street Papendiek as well as the Prinzenstraße you can get into the Wilhelminian style library building as well as the lecture and exhibition hall of the Paulinerkirche on the upper floor.
Temporary exhibitions took place here, for example, the Göttingen Nobel Prize Wonders exhibition in 2002 or in 2017 DingeDenkenLichtenberg . The permanent exhibition in the hall includes statues from the cast collection of the Archaeological Institute of the University of Göttingen , including Apollo and the sculpture of the Great Herculean Woman, shaped after Demeter or a Matrona from Herculaneum and copied from the original of the sculpture collection (Dresden) , as well as some busts of Göttingen professors.
literature
- Jens Reiche, Christian Scholl (Hrsg.): Göttingen churches of the middle ages. Universitätsverlag, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-86395-192-4 ( online ; PDF; 21.1 MB).
- Konrad Hammann :: University church service and educational sermon. The Göttingen University Church in the 18th century and its place in the history of the university church service in German Protestantism. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2000, ISBN 3-16-147240-3 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
- Elmar Mittler (Ed.): 700 years of the Pauline Church - from monastery to library , Göttingen, Wallstein, 1994, ISBN 3-89244-188-X
- Wulf Schadendorf: Göttingen Churches ( Small Art Guide for Lower Saxony , Book 2), Göttingen, 1953
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Wilhelm Mithoff : Art monuments and antiquities in Hanover, Vol. 2, 1873, p. 79
- ^ Alfred Oberdiek: Göttinger Universitätsbauten, 2002, p. 11
- ^ Konrad Hammann: University service and Enlightenment sermon, 2000, p. 109
- ↑ Burkard Ihlenfeldt: Renovation of the historical building, in: Margo Bargheer, Klaus Ceynowa (ed.): Tradition and Future - the Lower Saxony State and University Library Göttingen, 2005, pp. 182–3
- ↑ Gerd-Josef Bötte et al .: The historical library hall in the Paulinerkirche, in: Dietrich Hoffmann, Kathrin Maack-Rheinländer (ed.): The museums, collections and gardens of the University of Göttingen, 2001, p. 32
Coordinates: 51 ° 32 ′ 1.6 ″ N , 9 ° 55 ′ 55.3 ″ E