German Reformed Church (Frankfurt am Main)

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German Reformed Church on Kornmarkt
Location of the building in Frankfurt's old town

The German Reformed Church was a Reformed church in the old town of Frankfurt am Main , located on the Großer Kornmarkt . The church was built from 1789 to 1793 and was not rebuilt in 1944 after being destroyed in World War II.

history

prehistory

As early as 1555 religious refugees from the Netherlands settled in Frankfurt and thus founded the German Reformed parish. A little later, like-minded people from southern Germany and Switzerland joined them. Initially, they were allowed to hold their services in the Weißfrauenkirche (destroyed in 1944) , until 1594 a mixture of the Lutheran orthodoxy then prevailing in Frankfurt and the business envy of the long-established Lutheran traders with a lot of influence prevented this. From now on, the congregation had to hold their services in a simple wooden shed outside the fortified city walls in front of the Bockenheimer Tor (which was demolished around 1806) . After it burned down the church service were even after Offenbach and from 1633 in what was then the county Hanau belonging Bockenheim laid. Around this time, the congregation began to wrestle with politics to realize their own place of worship in the Frankfurt metropolitan area.

More than 200 years later, on November 15, 1787, the city council finally approved - as did the French Reformed parish founded by Huguenots - “two prayer houses within the local city ring wall on spaces to be purchased by them, in order to allow an exercitium religionis privatum have to build 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. At the same time as the German Reformed Church, a French Reformed church was built on Roßmarkt , today's Goetheplatz .

Building history

At the beginning of 1788 the presbytery of the parish bought the patrician family Stalburg's ancestral home on the Großer Kornmarkt for 45,000 guilders as a future building plot. The building was popularly known as the Great Stalburg , dates back to the late 15th century and, as a still Gothic stone house, was an architectural specialty in old Frankfurt, roughly comparable to the stone house or canvas house that still exists today . The birthplace of Lili Schönemann , who became famous through Goethe, adjoined the building to the south or, viewed from the front, on the left.

The city approved the choice of this place by resolution of July 1, 1788. In the summer of 1789, the building was laid down, its foundations excavated, removed and, after the city gave its approval to the building plans submitted - probably by Nicolas Alexandre Salins de Montfort - the foundation stone for the church was laid on March 26, 1790. The master builder was Georg Friedrich Mack . Roofing work began on January 3, 1791, and the church should have been inaugurated in December 1792 if the delivery of the Stumm brothers' organ from Rhauen-Sulzbach, which was made for 6,500 guilders, had not been delayed due to the war. The inauguration of the building did not take place until March 17, 1793 in the presence of important guests. In addition to the two mayors and the other members of the city council, the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm II also came. The church was still not completely finished, however, as the last interior work was not completed until 1794. The costs for the new building amounted to a total of 145,000 guilders.

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.

Between November 6, 1848 and January 9, 1849 , the National Assembly, which otherwise met in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt , moved to the German Reformed Church for a total of 40 meetings during renovation work there .

As early as 1838 and 1839 the church was repaired for almost 10,000 guilders and equipped with steam heating in 1856. In 1881 the architects Heinrich Burnitz and Adolph Passavant carried out a major renovation and redesign . The wall behind the pulpit was given a different architectural structure, the doors to the right and left of the communion table were relocated and widened, the ceiling renewed, the windows provided with pilasters, a new communion table made of marble and a new chandelier installed. Furthermore, a high portal was built on the rear facade in place of the demolished vestibule. The ceremonial reopening on December 18, 1881 concluded the renovation.

During the Second World War , the building was burned down by incendiary bombs in the air raids of March 22, 1944 . Even if parts of the outer walls had collapsed as a result, the ruins would have allowed reconstruction. Nevertheless, it was canceled after the end of the war. Since the German Reformed Church did not belong to the endowment churches , there was no obligation on the part of the city to rebuild. Since hardly any people lived in the old town even after the district was rebuilt, the German Evangelical Reformed community built its new community center in the densely populated Westend of Frankfurt and sold the former location on Kornmarkt. The Federal Audit Office building in Frankfurt am Main was built on the site . After he moved to Bonn in 2000, the building complex stood empty for a long time. From 2015 to 2018, the listed facade on Kornmarkt was extensively renovated as part of the Kornmarkt Arkaden project .

Although the church was one of the earliest and most important neo-classical buildings in Frankfurt, it is very unlikely that the German Reformed Church will be rebuilt again.

architecture

Facade structure

Architecturally, the church was characterized by classicism throughout : on the ground floor of the strictly geometrically structured, two-storey facade, three massive portals gave access to the interior of the building. There were two simple portals at the left and right ends of the building. The central portal was framed by Doric columns and its protruding cornice was adorned with vase attachments. Above the portal there was an inscription that read "Christian worship". Johann Georg Christian Hess copied this portal for his design of the portal in the tower of the Paulskirche .

Rectangular pilaster strips between the three windows on the left and right on the ground floor reinforced the geometry of the building. Above the ground floor there was a row of a total of seven large windows, which were crowned by a sturdy cornice as well as fabric hangings above them, which were made of stucco in a typical style. An exception was the middle window, where there was a pediment instead of a cornice . Again, the geometric appearance was enhanced - by located between the windows fluted pilasters, which in indicated, decorated also of stucco capitals ended. Above it ran the eaves, which was finally adorned by an attic with a baluster finish, whereby the middle of this finish was not designed as a baluster, but as a load-bearing wall with an oval inscription plate (“Thanks to the Lord”). Red sandstone was used throughout as building material, the roof was covered with slate.

The west and back of the building facing the Citronengässchen, on the other hand, presented itself simply, it was plastered and painted with gray oil paint.

Although the church was laid out on two floors from the outside in order to fit into the surrounding buildings, the interior of the building was designed as a hall church. In addition to three rows of chairs, interrupted only by a central passage, facing the pulpit area on the west wall, there were also seating in the form of galleries on the north, south and west walls. The galleries were accessible via stairs in the corners of the church. 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, but limited itself to the geometric shapes typical of classicism. The cornices, pilasters, balusters and pediments used were partly made of stucco, partly painted illusionistically on the large hall walls, especially in the upper area. They also held back in terms of color, only the balustrades of the galleries and the chairs were painted gray-yellow. Even objects such as the organ located in a gallery on the south wall were not exempt from the classicist simplicity and were only enlivened by three-quarter columns, pilasters, epistyle, friezes and toothed cornices.

Under the gallery one could read another inscription on a marble plaque with gilded letters: “In the year MDCCLXXXIX, the building of this house of prayer, graciously granted by the honorable decree of a noble council of November fifteenth MDCCLXXXVII, began, and under God's blessing, through the willing contributions of the members and friends of the congregation so that the first service could be held in it as early as the seventeenth of March MDCCXCIII. Local community! who can now gather here to worship God and the Savior, think back to the former arduous church visit to Bockenheim! Rejoice in your current happiness! Tell in rapture what the Most High has done to you, and bless the fathers of our city gratefully. Establishes MDCCXCIV. "

literature

  • 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. 296–303 ( digitized version )

Web links

Commons : German Reformed Church (Frankfurt)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 50 ° 6 ′ 39.2 "  N , 8 ° 40 ′ 45.8"  E