Community center Plötzensee
The Evangelical Community Center Plötzensee is a church center in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg-Nord at Heckerdamm 226. It was inaugurated in 1970 as the second location of the Evangelical Church Community in Charlottenburg-Nord. Because of its proximity to the Plötzensee Memorial , the church service room of the community center was designed as a memorial church for the victims of National Socialism . The room experiences its special character through the Plötzensee dance of death by the Viennese artist Alfred Hrdlicka .
Construction and architecture
The community center was built between 1968 and 1970 for the residents of the Paul-Hertz-Siedlung development area . The design came from the architects Gerd Neumann, Dietmar Grötzebach and Günther Plessow. The building ensemble includes u. a. a church, daycare center, meeting rooms, youth club, apartments and offices.
The church space was designed as a memorial church from the start. Alfred Hrdlicka designed the Plötzensee dance of death for him . On 16 panels, Hrdlicka takes up the motif of the medieval dances of death and thus refers to the current threat to people and peoples through violence, power and arbitrariness.
In its architecture, the room takes up church reform ideas from the 1960s on the one hand: the benches are arranged in a square around the central altar , the congregation should experience itself as a community and be included in the worship service. On the other hand, it conveys the reference to the Plötzensee prisons: the windowless concrete dome is reminiscent of a cell. Light falls on the altar only from above.
Ecumenical memorial work
There is close ecumenical cooperation in memorial work with the neighboring Catholic memorial church Maria Regina Martyrum and the Carmelite convent Regina Martyrum there . In 1989, as part of the 23rd German Evangelical Church Congress (June 7-11, 1989) in the Evangelical Community Center Plötzensee, in cooperation with Pastor Roland Krusche, the memorial concert “Remembrance of Plötzensee” with a performance of Yiddish resistance songs and songs by the Sinti and Roma took place; The interpreter was the German-Czech Yiddish singer Anna Werliková with her Klezmer Music Ensemble. The largest ecumenical memorial event of the neighboring churches is the series of events " Ecumenical Plötzensee Days ". Since the summer of 2009 the Ecumenical Memorial Center Plötzensee "Christians and Resistance" has been built in the premises of the community center .
In July 2010, the Plötzensee community center was recognized by the Austrian Ministry of the Interior as a site for the memorial service .
literature
- Bringfried Naumann: The Plötzensee dance of death in the Protestant community center Plötzensee. 2nd edition 1993 (Verlag Schnell & Steiner, series: Der Kleine Kunstführer), ISBN 978-3-7954-5026-7 .
- Rüdiger von Voss and Gerhard Ringshausen (Hg): The sermons of Plötzensee. To the challenge of the modern martyr. Lukas Verlag: Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86732-064-1 (with a detailed description of the church and the Plötzensee dance of death in the Plötzensee community center).
- I. Mössinger / U. Saltin: The ecumenical memorial region Charlottenburg-Nord / Plötzensee: Alfred Hrdlicka's “Plötzenseer Totentanz”. In: Reiner Albert, Roland Hartung, Günther Saltin (eds.): Alfred Delp Yearbook Vol. 3/2009. Alfred Delp and the Art, LIT Verlag 2009, ISBN 978-3-643-10148-8 .
Web links
- Homepage of the Ev. Parish of Charlottenburg-Nord
- Plötzensee Ecumenical Memorial Center Christians and Resistance
- Lecture (PDF; 962 kB)
- Berlin Lexicon
Individual evidence
Coordinates: 52 ° 32 '22.5 " N , 13 ° 17' 59.9" E