Andreas Church (Leipzig)

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The Andreas Church

The Andreaskirche was a church building damaged in World War II and blown up in 1958 for the Evangelical Lutheran Andreas parish in the southern suburb of Leipzig .

location

During the parceling of today's Südvorstadt according to the general development plan for the south side of the city from 1864, a so-called jewelry square was planned on both sides of Südstraße (today Karl-Liebknecht-Straße ) at the level of the former gymnastics festival grounds from 1863 . The church was then built on the eastern part of this square. The part of the square was named Alexis-Schumann-Platz in 1931 after the first pastor of the Andreas community.

In addition to Südstraße, the space was bounded by Scharnhorststraße, Andreasstraße and Hardenbergstraße. Today the address is Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 111. The church was oriented east-west with the tower facing Südstraße.

The church building

The St. Andrew's Church was a brick building built in the neo-Gothic style. The facades were covered with red facing bricks from the Siegersdorfer works in Siegersdorf, Bunzlau district ( Lower Silesia ) and decorated with Wehlener sandstone elements. A three-bay nave , a wide transept and a choir with a 3/4 end rose above the ground plan of a massive Latin cross . There was room for around 1,100 visitors in the church. She had an organ of the company Sauer , Frankfurt / Oder, in 1940 by the company Eule , Bautzen rescheduled was.

The choir was surrounded on the outside by various useful buildings. About the lancet windows were each rose window placed which were especially large at the transept ends.

The main tower had a transverse rectangular floor plan and was flanked by two stair towers that reached about the height of the nave ridge. The tower, covered by a very steep, pointed tent roof, had four decorative gables, with decorative turrets above the northern and southern one. There was a ridge turret over the crossing , and there were two other small towers by the choir.

The church stood a little above street level, so that a short wide flight of stairs led to the height of the double entrance portal.

history

predecessor

The Andreasgemeinde, separated from the Petersgemeinde in 1890 , already had almost 20,000 members in the first year of its existence in the rapidly growing southern suburb of Leipzig. Until the completion of her church, she initially used rooms in the 8th district school and later a provisional interim church building on Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse (today August-Bebel-Strasse), at the corner of Scharnhorststrasse, which was demolished in 1894.

The church

The Leipzig architects “ Weidenbach und Tschammer ” won two tenders for the construction of a new church .

After two years of construction, the church was consecrated to the Apostle Andreas on the 1st Sunday of Advent in 1893 (December 3rd) . At the same time, the parish parsonage was built at Scharnhorststrasse 21. In 1936, the community received a two-story community center on the property at Scharnhorststrasse 29–31 (architect Georg Stauch).

On December 4, 1943 and February 20, 1944, the St. Andrew's Church was badly damaged by bombs and fire during air raids on Leipzig . The south transept and all of the delicate rose windows were destroyed. In 1955 the tower floor was provisionally restored. In September 1958, however, the entire ruin was blown up and after the rubble had been removed, a green area was created on the square.

The tower of St. Andrew's Church was once a structural dominant feature of the southern suburb. In 1964, a twelve-story high-rise was built on the neighboring corner (Scharnhorststrasse / Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse) as a kind of replacement.

successor

Parish hall with hall (right) and bell tower (left)

After the destruction of the church, the services of the Andreas parish took place in the hall of the parish hall, which was converted into a sacred space by the architect Lieselotte Hering in 1949. A small, free-standing bell tower was built next to the parish hall.

After the Expo 2000 in Hanover , efforts were made in Leipzig to move the pavilion of hope (Expo-Wal), designed as a whale, to the former place of the Andreaskirche. These failed. Instead, the association “Pavillon der Hoffnung in Leipzig e. V. - Förderverein Ökumenisches Zentrum “Hall 14 on the old exhibition grounds , which was built in 1985 by VEB Carl Zeiss Jena , and called it the Pavilion of Hope.

Since there was no longer enough space in the community hall in Scharnhorststrasse due to the growing number of visitors, the services of the Andreas community were relocated to the Pavilion of Hope .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Leipzig Lexicon
  2. ↑ a b c Stephanie von Aretin, Thomas Klemm, Nikolaus Müller: Leipzig and his churches , Leipzig 2006, ISBN 3-374-02366-5
  3. ^ Website of the Andreas Community
  4. ^ [1] Post-war photo of the Andreas Church

Coordinates: 51 ° 19 ′ 8.7 ″  N , 12 ° 22 ′ 26.6 ″  E