Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Peter and Paul (Erlangen-Bruck)

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The Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Peter and Paul, 2009

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Peter and Paul is the oldest church building in the Erlangen district of Bruck and the church of the Evangelical Lutheran parish of St. Peter and Paul there. The listed building is located in the historic town center between Fürther Straße and Regnitz .

The Catholic Church of St. Peter and Paul is located in the same district .

Romanesque predecessor building

The original parish for Bruck was probably the church in Poppenreuth , which was consecrated to the apostles Peter and Paul . In 1282 Emperor Rudolph enfeoffed the Nuremberg burgrave Friedrich III. with three villages owned by the empire, including "Brukk". Archaeological excavations in 1958 uncovered the foundations of a previous Romanesque building in the nave . The foundation is on average 1.50 m below the current floor level of the nave. The Romanesque nave with wall thicknesses of 1.30 to 1.50 meters was only slightly narrower than that of the Gothic church, but shorter to the west. According to the head of the excavation in 1958, this well-fortified choir tower church was probably already in the 12th century, and a long service life is attested, among other things, by three floors lying on top of each other (two clay screeds and a stone slab covering). The sacristy is historically dated to the 13th century. Traces of a wooden church, which according to modern speculations should have stood there before the 11th century, were not found during the excavations in the nave. The Romanesque foundations stand on sterile geological subsoil, in the nave, the basal layers of the sands of the Regnitz lowland were encountered.

Gothic building

Brucker Church, detail from the copper engraving by Christoph Melchior Roth, 1760
The Mount of Olives from 1499
Altarpiece: the risen Christ between two angels with the passion symbols cross and pillar of torture

The gothic , single-nave church was erected around 1400 on top of the previous building, but it became larger in all dimensions. The 68 meter high choir tower , which is also Bruck's landmark and coat of arms , is equipped with four black guard towers and thus a so-called five - button tower . These corner turrets were used as lookouts for the crowd guards and for defense in the event of a siege. The main tower is an eight-sided pointed helmet . The year 1475 under the arched frieze on the east side confirms the completion of the tower in its current form after it was damaged during the siege in the First Margrave War of 1449/50.

In 1527 Bruck joined the Reformation . Pastor Martin Krauss, a student of Martin Luther, came to Bruck. The Gothic works of art inside (a Madonna from 1390, a high altar with life-size figures of Petrus , Paulus and the Nuremberg city patron Laurentius from 1508 from the school of Veit Stoss , a crucifix and a figure of the risen Christ from around 1500) and on the outer wall (a mount of olives from 1499, similar to that of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg ) have been preserved. New works of art were added. In 1666 galleries were drawn in and painted with biblical scenes. In 1680 Samuel Hartmann built an ornate wooden pulpit that rests on a life-size Mose figure . The church interior was redesigned in baroque style in 1726 . The Erlangen artist family Leinberger, whose most important representative Christian Leinberger also painted the Neustädter Church in Erlangen , designed the ceiling in the newly built nave with artistic stucco and a painting depicting the Ascension of Christ .

organ

The organ was built in 1893 by Johannes Strebel from Nuremberg . The cone loading instrument with pneumatic play and register contractures and free-standing gaming table comprising a total of 20 registers on two manuals and pedal . The disposition is as follows:

I Manual C – f 3
1. Bourdon 16 ′
2. Principal 8th'
3. Tibia 8th'
4th Salicional 8th'
5. Gamba 8th'
6th Octav 4 ′
7th Hollow flute 4 ′
8th. Forest flute 2 ′
9. Mixture IV 2 2 ⁄ 3  ′
II Manual C – f 3
10. Lovely covered 8th'
11. Dolce 8th'
12. Aeoline 8th'
13. Violin principal 8th'
14th Transverse flute 4 ′
15th Bassoon & Clarinet 8th'
Pedal C – d 1
16. Violon 16 ′
17th Sub-bass 16 ′
18th Octave bass 8th'
19th cello 8th'
20th trombone 8th'

Defensive wall

Defensive wall, view from the southeast

The tradition as a fortified church is also attested by the up to 5.5 meter high, medieval defensive wall . It had this height on the sloping west side (valley edge of the Regnitz ), on the east side it was almost three meters high (about 2.70 meters above cemetery level). The cemetery was filled with soil from the base of the wall up to the level of the entrances. The old ring wall consisted - as in comparable cases in the Nuremberg area - outside of square sandstones, inside of mortared rubble stones . It was about three feet thick with both layers and thus offered protection from cannonballs and heavy artillery. From the west, the ensemble with church and wall is shown on a copper engraving by CM Roth "Bruck Landalmossamt" (1760). The eastern part of the defensive wall was demolished in 1848 together with the gatehouse. On the other three sides, the inner quarry stone wall was removed down to the ground level of the cemetery in 1895, at this height it has been preserved until today. The outer wall made of sandstone blocks now only stands in its original height on the west side, although it is largely covered from the outside by new buildings. In the upper part it was renovated and partially renewed.

Ossuary and chapel

The chapel in the north of the church was initially built in the 15th century as a single-storey ossuary ("Karner"). The ground floor chapel room is open to the public, while the church is not open to visitors on weekdays and is secured with an alarm system .

graveyard

The cemetery had been on the south and west sides of the church since the 13th century at the latest, within the defensive and enclosing wall. The bones of the late medieval burials were exhumed according to the custom of the time and stored on the southern flank between the walls of the Romanesque and Gothic nave. This original Karner was only rediscovered during the excavations in 1958. The bone deposit reached a depth of 1.25 meters under the church floor. Later, after an external ossuary was built around the middle of the 15th century, the bones were reburied there after a short time. This custom lasted at least until the Reformation , but possibly for a long time afterwards. A cemetery occupancy plan has been preserved from 1748, which shows the almost complete parceling of the Gottesackers south of the church. In the second half of the 18th century, new grave plots were created on the east side (at that time "Buckenhofer Platz", today in the area of ​​Fürther Straße), which were also completely occupied until 1824. Due to lack of space, the church cemetery was abandoned and a new cemetery was created about 200 meters east of the church. The bones from the ossuary were then transferred to the new cemetery. The parsonage belonging to the church is located at Friedhofstraße 2.

The old church cemetery is registered as a soil monument D-5-6431-0027 in the Bavarian monument list, since in addition to archaeological evidence of settlement there are still intact graves from the late Middle Ages and modern times dating from the 13th to 18th centuries. While the graves from the 18th century were buried three to four feet deep in the consecrated ground, the grave floor in the 15th century was probably seven feet (about two meters) deep, as known from comparable cemeteries in Nuremberg and Esslingen am Neckar .

literature

  • Dehio, Handbook of German Art Monuments. Volume I: Bavaria Franconia - the administrative districts of Upper Franconia, Middle Franconia and Lower Franconia. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-422-03051-4 .
  • Christoph Friederich, Bertold Freiherr von Haller, Andreas Jakob (Hrsg.): Erlanger Stadtlexikon . W. Tümmels Verlag, Nuremberg 2002, ISBN 3-921590-89-2 ( online ).
  • Joachim Hotz: From Franconia's art and history ... Middle Franconia. HO Schulze, Lichtenfels 1976, ISBN 3-87735-017-8 , p.?.
  • Alfred Schubert : Bruck bei Erlangen, a contribution to the art history of Franconia. Jacob, Erlangen 1915, without ISBN.
  • Georg Stolz, Michael Jeiter: Franconia… the region. Volume 7: Cities of Nuremberg, Fürth, Erlangen…. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-422-03012-3 , p.?.

Web links

Commons : Evangelical Lutheran St. Peter and Paul (Erlangen-Bruck)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fritz Fichtner : The Romanesque predecessor of the Bruck church. - Results of an emergency excavation on the occasion of the general renovation in 1958. In: Erlanger modules for Franconian homeland research. Volume 6: Festschrift for the 40th anniversary of the Heimatverein Erlangen and the surrounding area. 1959, pp. 39-68.
  2. ↑ Bavarian organ database online
  3. ↑ Christoph Melchior, Matthäus Roth: Prospecte of all Nürnbergischen Stædtlein, Markt-Flecken, and Pfarr-Dörffern, accurately signed by MG Lampferdtinger. Christoph Melchior Roth, iny. del et sculps. Nuremberg, 1760.
  4. ^ Evangelical Lutheran. Parish of St. Peter & Paul (ed.): Cemetery regulations of the Evangelical Lutheran parish of St. Peter and Paul Erlangen-Bruck. 2014.
  5. ↑ Bavarian list of monuments, extract from the list of the city of Erlangen
  6. ↑ Martin Illi: Where the dead went: funeral a. Churchyard in the pre-industrial city. Zurich, 1992, ISBN 3-905278-95-2 .

Coordinates: 49 ° 34'22.1 "  N , 10 ° 59'7.4"  E