Tempelhof village church
The Tempelhof village church is the oldest of three churches in the Protestant parish Alt-Tempelhof and Michael. It is located in the Berlin district of Tempelhof the district Tempelhof-Schöneberg on Reinhardt place south of the road Alt-Tempelhof, ie, peripheral to the medieval village founded Tempelhof. The current building, renovated with a different tower shape after being destroyed in the war, was built in the second third of the 13th century. Its archaeologically secured previous building was built around 1200 and is therefore one of the oldest tangible stone buildings in the Mittelmark .
The Tempelhof village church with 235 square meters is the largest of all village churches in Berlin . She was at the same time and probably even primarily the Komtureikirche a Komturhofs the Knights Templar , the Commandery Tempelhof , built around 1200 as part of the German Ostsiedlung .
History of origin
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From the beginning, today's church was located away from the village center, at a striking altitude within a walled churchyard between what were originally four lakes. Only two of these lakes ( Klarensee and Wilhelmsteich ) are now in the Alten Park and Lehnepark ; the pond under today's Reinhardtplatz was filled and filled in around 1900 in favor of a market area. It is unclear whether the Komturhof or the village or both were built at the same time.
After the bombing raids in 1943 and 1944 , only the surrounding walls were left of the village church. During the reconstruction, the interior was archaeologically examined in 1952. The following statements could be made about the building history, for which no medieval written sources have survived:
- The church had a previous building that had a nave-wide west transverse tower with otherwise the same floor plan. It was dated by the excavator to the time "around or even before 1200".
- A grave was found there, which implies the consecration of the church; so it was probably completed. The church was possibly destroyed by a (first) fire, but only faint traces of it were visible.
- The church (presumably destroyed by fire) was completely cleared, including the foundations - an unusual process, the reasons for which are not known.
- Probably around 1230, a new church with the same volume of space was built on the same floor plan with only a very slight change in the edges, but without the subdivision into hall and tower area.
- That church was certainly destroyed by fire, possibly during the Teltow War from 1239 to 1245. It was almost completely covered and plastered on the inside; however, the altar block was still missing . Its restoration is dated around 1250.
By converting the original tower area into an extension of the hall, the nave has the largest circumference of all village churches in Berlin with 235 m² (length with apse 27.2 meters, width 12.1 meters). This special position can also be explained by its special role as a commandery church. According to the excavator's judgment, the reconstruction took place “after the middle of the 13th century”.
All of his three dates are not based on scientific methods, but only on conclusions from the settlement history, which in turn is only known in its basic features, so that it is based on art-historical dates ( circular reasoning ).
Ecclesiastical constitution
In the late Middle Ages, Tempelhof belonged to the Sedes Spandau (around 1500, 1527), currently to the Tempelhof church district. It was originally an independent parish with daughter churches in Rixdorf and in 1541 in Mariendorf . From 1693 to 1893 Tempelhof belonged to Britz as Mater Vagans ; since then it has been an independent parish again. Tempelhof was equipped with only one church hoof (1450, 1480, 1541). The patronage was owned by the Templars, and since 1318 by the Order of St. John . In 1546 it came to the cities of Berlin-Cölln , which had already acquired Tempelhof from the Johannitern in 1435, and from 1590 to Cölln alone. The respective landowners had had it since 1601 : first Elector Joachim Friedrich until his death in 1608, from 1716/1717 the Really Secret Cabinet Councilor and War Secretary Levin von Scharden, from 1749 the Secret Finance Councilor Carl Franz von Reinhardt (after whom the square in front of the church was named is), since 1776 Major von Schau, from 1796 to 1804 Count von Podewils , before 1816 to 1863 Prince Otto Hermann von Schönburg and Erben, from 1863 to 1871 the banker Friedrich Carl Heinrich Ferdinand Jacques. There is no reliable evidence for the repeatedly accepted Katharinen patronage .
Building description
The building is a rectangular hall with an apse of almost the same eaves height . The floor plan type of the apse hall is rather rare in the Mittelmark ( e.g. only three of 116 medieval village churches on Barnim , including Berlin-Kaulsdorf ). Since the predecessor building, which had roughly the same floor plan, had a ship-wide , transverse rectangular west tower, which was not included in the successor, this has a hall of above-average size. The age of the roof tower , which has been modified several times, is unknown. The field stone masonry is exceptionally carefully ashlar , which is partly due to a technically too perfect reconstruction of the church, which was destroyed in the war from 1954 to 1956, except for the surrounding walls. All of the "late Romanesque" arched windows are overmolded; only the narrow apse window is original. The portals of the successor building were pointed arches from the beginning. Up to 1848 pointed arch windows, which were due to a late Gothic renovation, were preserved.
In 1751 (replacement of an older tower) and 1806, tower repairs were carried out on the church, which was looted during the Seven Years' War in 1760 . From 1847 to 1848 there was a more extensive renovation, both inside and outside, in which a southern extension was removed (1954–1956 replaced by today's sacristy). After two bombs damaged in 1943 and 1944, only the foundation walls were left, so that the interior of the church today is quite plain and the furnishings mainly consist of loans.
Interior
Elector Joachim II introduced the Reformation in Brandenburg in 1539 . Like all other churches in Brandenburg, the Tempelhof village church thus became a Protestant church. However, this only affected the form of the worship service ( liturgy ), not the external structural shape. The valuable copy of the Catherine Altar (1504) by Lucas Cranach made in 1596 is still preserved from this period (original in Dresden ). It was a gift from Electress Katharina , the wife of Brandenburg Elector Joachim Friedrich, who had taken over the Tempelhof estate with the church in 1601, but died in 1608. King Friedrich Wilhelm III. ordered its restoration in 1836. The massive Romanesque baptismal font is located since 1877 in the Mark Brandenburg Museum (now in the Berlin City Museum Foundation belonging Nikolai Church ). The five wooden panels with motifs from the Old Testament on the north wall of the church come from the Heiliggeistkapelle in Old Berlin, which was converted into a lecture hall of the commercial college in 1906. An altar cross from the 16th and a baptismal font from the 17th century are also noteworthy. The choir windows were designed by Paul Ohnsorge on the occasion of the reconstruction in 1956 .
Today's appearance
The reconstruction of the roof tower (1951) is a prime example of the notions of monument protection and preservation that have changed over time :
“With the construction of the ridge turret , the tower, the point of view of modern monument preservation is that one does not consider a true-to-life copy of the previous state based on old plans, photos or reconstructions to be desirable. The substructure was Romanesque, the portal vaulting Gothic, the tower roofing was Baroque and the dome top was classicist in somewhat primitive forms. This structural development has spanned centuries and, whether it corresponded to our current sense of form or not, grew organically ... Every work of art [...] is a uniqueness, an originality. And as sorry as we are and as painful as it is, the originality, the authenticity of a work of art is extinguished when it is destroyed. Reverence for genuine works must forbid us to degrade them by plagiarism . As people of the present time with a clear, honest will to build, after the destruction of the village church and especially the tower, all that remains for us is to take over the old proportions and dimensions and to fill them in with new forms that approximate our sense of time. In this way we are doing our time and the old building the best service […] The tower should rather be built from visible half-timbering […] A half-timbered tower also has a homeland-like feeling. In Berlin itself, numerous churches were previously built with visible half-timbering, e.g. B. the village church Pankow , Kaulsdorf etc. [...]. The tower will have a rural, rural character and, due to its shape, which is rare today, will mean a special feature, a point of attraction, a sight for Berlin. In an ideal way, old and new can be happily combined without stylistic untruths. "
Of the 35 village churches in Berlin drawn by Wohler in 1834, there are only four village churches with unboarded lattice towers and eleven where the half-timbering is covered by planking, including Tempelhof. So in 1954, in the interests of a certain conception of monument preservation, as it was understood by the decision-makers at the time, the historically handed down form was replaced by another, albeit rarer, historical form. Today's lattice tower has a pyramid roof . The listed Tempelhof village church is still used today by the Protestant parish of Alt-Tempelhof. Only former pastors have been buried in the cemetery since 1945 at the latest. A notable exception is the memorial stone for the Berlin and Brandenburg tsunami victims from 2004 near the apse of the village church.
Others
Fontane in Tempelhof
In Fontane's novella Schach von Wuthenow (1882), the fourth chapter "In Tempelhof" describes a country trip to a Tempelhof inn and an evening walk from there to the village church. In view of the local conditions, the described length of the path and the duration of the discussions are astonishing, which do not really fit into a distance of maximum 400 meters. Fontane then describes in the church the "just sinking ball of the sun, which stood behind the windows in the evening and doused the walls with a reddish sheen". It is “the sixth hour” in April. However, the windows of the church - as in all village churches - are on the southern “noon side”. On the west side of a village church there is only the portal or a tower. In a letter to Wilhelm Friedrich dated January 19, 1883, Fontane expressed himself about the partly undeserved praise for his “special talent for the representational”: “I have never been to the Tempelhof Church, and Wuthenow Castle does not exist at all, never has exists. ”Nevertheless, it is astonishing that the connoisseur Fontane, for the sake of describing a romantic sunset, did not take into account that in principle all medieval churches are“ oriented ”, ie facing east, so that they cannot have“ evening windows ”.
The "underground passage"
The legend of the "underground passage of the Knights Templar", starting from the village church, can be grasped by 1878 at the latest. Carl Brecht writes that the Royal Master Builder K. Marggraff reported that, following the “sparse documentary reports and the few local traces and traditions [!] [...], traces of the entrance walling [of the Komturhof] and of the one in the present Krughaus are still present decades ago the still existing substructure of the waiting tower, the now walled underground passage was accessible. "
The “underground corridor” is a frequent stereotype in the often problematic local history ideas about the village churches. As early as the 1920s and 1930s, on the occasion of the construction of the subway to Tempelhof, it was found that the cellar vault and a drainage channel of the old road to Mariendorf had been cut at the level of the Krughaus , but no underground passage to the village church. On the occasion of the reconstruction of the war-torn church and the previous archaeological investigation, the search for this passage was given new impetus, as a special file in the Tempelhof home archive shows. The excavator had to report in detail to the Tempelhof civil engineering department ; to his regret, he had not found an entrance to the underground passage in the church area. A large number of contemporary witnesses came forward, mostly citing other contemporary witnesses who had since died.
It turned out that there are three versions of the "underground corridor": the "classic" one from the church to the village pitcher with the former guard tower of the Vorwerk (to the northeast), a second from the church (to the southeast) to a barred entrance in the Theodor-Francke-Park, which closed an ice cellar , and a third from the church in the direction of Schönburgstrasse (west). The teacher Hoffmann and the sexton had entered the latter corridor around 1880, but soon had to turn back because of the stifling air after they could see the corridor being more than ten meters long. The teacher had written a brochure about this, of which he had sent deposit copies to the State Library and the National History Association. In 1952, the Tempelhof district office officially inquired about this with the two institutions; both reported no reports . A war loss is excluded because the inventory catalogs have been preserved, but no Tempelhof author Hoffmann is listed in them. It is obvious that the core of the rumor is that the essay by C. Brecht was published in 1878 in the writings of the Verein für die Geschichte der Stadt Berlin; But Brecht describes variant 1, without reference to the teacher and sexton.
literature
- Carl Brecht: The village of Tempelhof. In: Writings of the Association for the History of the City of Berlin, Berlin 1878, Issue XV, p. 3 ff.
- The Tempelhof village church. Yesterday Today Tomorrow. Published by the Association for the Restoration of the Old Village Church in Berlin-Tempelhof, Berlin 1951.
- Ernst Heinrich: The village church of Tempelhof. An examination of the building history. In: The Bear of Berlin . Vol. 4, 1954, pp. 45-88.
- Johannes Schultze : The age of the Tempelhof. In: The Bear of Berlin . Vol. 4, 1954, pp. 89-99.
- Kurt Pomplun : Berlins old village churches , Berlin 1962, 6th edition 1984, pp. 94–96.
- Matthias Hoffmann-Tauschwitz: Old Churches in Berlin. 33 visits to the oldest churches in the western part of the city . Berlin 1986, pp. 48-54.
- Renate and Ernst Oskar Petras (eds.): Old Berlin village churches. Heinrich Wohler's drawings (from 1834), Berlin 1988, pp. 72–73.
- Marcus Cante: Templar Order Church (1318 Johanniter Order Church, later Tempelhof village church). In: Marcus Cante u. a .: Berlin and its buildings. Part VI: Sacred buildings . Berlin 1997, p. 335.
- Marion Hoppe (Ed.): Berlin. The village church Alt-Tempelhof , Regensburg 2012, pp. 17–30.
Web links
- Evangelical parish Alt-Tempelhof and Michael
- berlin-magazin.info: Unknown gem: the Tempelhof village church , accessed on January 7, 2013
Individual evidence
- ↑ A similar, elevated outskirts to the village center, protected by a lake, can also be found at the Britz village church .
- ^ Heinrich (see literature ). Unusual finds were a burial in a contorted prone position, an elaborately crafted coat and the remains of a glass drop cup, probably a reliquary container.
- ↑ Sedes = Latin literally: 'seat' or 'church administrative seat'; here subdivision of an archdeaconate
- ↑ Mother church without its own rectory, which is located here in Britz.
- ↑ Petras, (see literature ) pp. 72–73
- ↑ Entry in the Berlin State Monument List
- ↑ Brecht, (see literature ) p. 6
- ↑ Article in the Heimatbote of February 3 and 10, 1939. Headline: “Hopes that were not fulfilled. Underground construction destroyed a legend. No trace of the famous 'underground passage' in Tempelhof. How may the rumor originate? "The text says (as early as 1939) with reference to other significant building work in Berlin in the 1930s:" This proves that such opportunities are also suitable for destroying local legends that have persisted over many centuries Example of the underground excavation on Berliner Straße in Tempelhof. "
Coordinates: 52 ° 27 '48.9 " N , 13 ° 22' 59.4" E
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