French Church (Potsdam)
The Protestant French Church in Potsdam ( French Temple de Potsdam ) is a late work by the architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff . In the Edict of Potsdam (1685) , the Great Elector offered the Huguenots who had fled France a new home in Prussia . In 1752/53 the church was built for the gradually growing French Reformed community of Potsdam. Since the heavy destruction of the city in World War II , it has been the oldest surviving church in the historic city area.
Building history
Emergence
The church was built on the south-eastern edge of today's Bassinplatz , an area between the Dutch and French quarters . The terrain was swampy and had only been part of the urban area since 1733. Between 1737 and 1739 the Dutch builder Jan Bouman had it drained by creating a collecting basin, the Dutch Basin . Nonetheless, building the church on an unpredictable surface remained a technical challenge. Reliable building ground was only found at a depth of almost six meters, and the excavation pit had to be secured at great expense. A layer of limestone just below the surface of the earth should prevent moisture from rising into the building.
The design and planning of the church go back to Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, the busy architect of Frederick the Great . At the start of construction he was already seriously ill. Jan Bouman led the execution of the project. The thematic model for the building was the Pantheon in Rome , a central building with a dome and portico , the features of which Knobelsdorff had confidently varied in all proportions and details. The basic shape of the church is an oval , the internal dimensions are 19.83 m and 15.23 m; the brickwork is 1.65 m thick, faced with sandstone at the base and plastered over it. The relatively flat dome is walled to swing freely; it was judged by Karl Friedrich Schinkel , the famous architect of Prussian classicism , to be statically very daring even 80 years later. In the niches next to the entrance are two larger-than-life allegorical figures by the sculptor Friedrich Christian Glume : Caritas (love, charity) and Spes (hope). Above it are supraport-like reliefs of the parable of the interest dollar and the cleaning of the temple . In accordance with the French Reformed order of worship, the unadorned interior was oriented towards the center of the room; a wooden gallery made it look like an amphitheater . The color of the walls was a dusky pink, popular in the Baroque era , and that of the chairs was probably white. The windows were glazed colorless.
Changes (19th century)
In the 19th century, KF Schinkel was commissioned to redesign the interior. Repairs had become necessary in the meantime. Debris from plaster and stone had fallen from the dome into the church interior , during the Napoleonic occupation from 1806 to 1808 the interior served as a cavalry store and was largely devastated. Schinkel found the chairs rotten and worm-eaten, the windows partly boarded up, the brick floor dangerously uneven. During the renovation between 1832 and 1834, he treated Knobelsdorff's advance work with great respect. He refused the desired addition of a sacristy in order not to distort the structure. The simple overall impression of the interior was retained. However, he designed a pulpit wall and thereby gave the church interior a more frontal orientation. A second gallery more than doubled the number of available places. Light, gray-greenish tones determined the color impression.
Soon new damage occurred due to sponge infestation . In 1856/57 the church was closed and renovated, the dominant colors of the furnishings were now dark brown with black. In 1881 the church had to be closed again for repairs, this time for two years. After that, the appearance of the furnishings was again significantly changed. This modernization according to the taste of the Wilhelmine era brought among other things stucco cassettes and rosettes in blue, red and gold in the dome and colored glazing of the windows. The pulpit wall was supplemented by decorative elements and a cross.
Changes (20th / 21st century)
A number of the most recent changes were reversed in the 1920s. The color scheme of the pulpit wall, galleries and stalls approached Schinkel's version again. Lowering due to changes in the groundwater level forced new structural measures.
A bombing raid during the Second World War - on April 14, 1945 - almost destroyed the entire French Quarter. The French Church remained almost intact, only the windows had to be replaced - initially provisionally. However, there were consequential damage caused by the war. Water penetrated through cracks in the dome, plaster fell into the church, and the exterior plaster was also faulty. The makeshift windows were soon leaking. Necessary security measures were not taken because the small community could not finance them and state funds were not available from the GDR . In the mid-1960s, the church was closed due to dilapidation.
As a sign of the “generous cultural” preservation of this church in the cityscape, on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the Potsdam Edict of Tolerance in 1985, the safeguarding of the external appearance and the stop of further deterioration during this time began. The bricked and heavily torn dome was given a reinforced concrete shell and the exterior plaster was renovated. At that time there was no talk of interior renovation. With financial start-up help from a press foundation, privately raised donations and public funding, the French Church has been gradually restored since 1990, also inside. Finally, in 2003, the provisional windows from the post-war period were replaced and restoration work on the color scheme of the interior was completed.
Huguenot traditions in the French Church of Potsdam
In France the Protestants, called Huguenots , were tolerated at best. They were usually only allowed to build their Protestant houses of worship outside the city walls, and even there only without the typical church features bells and tower. To this day, the Reformed churches in France are called "temple" in contrast to the Catholic and the few Lutheran churches with the name "église". The French Church in Potsdam is built in the style of these "temples" in the French homeland.
Since the Potsdam Church was designed as a Reformed church from the beginning, the Reformed ideas are also reflected in the interior. Essential elements of the Reformed worship are the congregation, the Bible, a pulpit and the sacrament table. The baptismal pot and baptismal bowl replace the baptismal font and are placed on the communion table if necessary. Other characteristics that are usually found in churches, such as altars, candles, cross, crucifix or pictures, are missing, however, because they distract from the real thing or do not correspond to the second commandment ( ban on images ). The interior of the French Church therefore impresses with its elegant simplicity.
In this room, the service can be celebrated in its original form: The room is oriented towards the center. This center is empty; the emptiness is the special, the "sacred". The church gathers in a circle around this center. This expresses the equality of all parishioners, whether priests or lay people. The Lord's Supper table, on which the Bible is always lying, is also free so that everyone can gather around it. The pulpit has primarily a practical purpose: when the gallery is occupied, the preaching person can be heard and seen well by everyone.
History of the French Reformed Congregation
At the beginning of 1686, the first French Reformed religious refugees arrived in Potsdam following the Edict of Tolerance of the Great Elector . But only a few stayed in this then insignificant city. When Friedrich Wilhelm I had the French Quarter (approx. 50 houses) built for Huguenots from 1719 as part of the first city expansion, the number of French Reformed in Potsdam rose. On July 21, 1723 the French Reformed Congregation ("Eglise reformée de France") was founded. It even received its own constitution on October 19, 1731, so that as a French colony in Potsdam it formed an independent political, ecclesiastical and cultural community with its own judge and its own police officers and bailiffs. The community was joined not only by the French, but also by Reformed Palatinate, Swiss, Hungarian and Dutch people who had settled in Potsdam, among them the architects Pierre de Gayette and Jan Bouman . Education (own school) and social engagement played a major role.
The Napoleonic occupation, the Stein-Hardenberg reforms and the Prussian church union of 1817 brought far-reaching changes for the community. During the Napoleonic War of Liberation , the community proved to be true to German, right down to the Germanization of first and last names. The French occupiers, in turn, were surprised to find these peculiar compatriots in enemy territory, who also spoke ancient French. After the peace agreement, the Stein-Hardenberg reforms removed the former privileges and abolished the French colony. With the Prussian ecclesiastical union of 1817, the congregation was incorporated into the new uniate regional church .
With the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71, the community lost its prized school. In the following years, the French-speaking church services were discontinued, the interior was changed according to the ideas of the Wilhelmine era. Only after the First World War (re) formed a new self-confidence: the presbytery successfully resisted integration into the French Church in Berlin. During the time of National Socialism, the "Jewish characters", the tetragram , in the halo of the portico were defended , but the gilding of the letters had to be removed.
After the Second World War, half of the congregation had perished or scattered around the world, and the remaining parishioners were mostly old. The Holy Spirit congregation, which had lost its church in the bombing, took up quarters in the French Church, so that the French Reformed congregation increasingly became a guest in their own home. After the Holy Spirit congregation merged with the Nikolai congregation, the French Church was in a deplorable state and had to be closed in 1968 for security reasons. The French Reformed congregation now gathered in the also dilapidated parish hall on the edge of the Dutch Quarter .
The French Reformed Church today
In the mid-1980s there was movement in church life: a new pastor was hired with a half-time position; new, younger parishioners signed up; the number of worshipers increased; the parish hall was repaired. During the fall of the Wall, a one-world shop was built there , which attracted the attention of passers-by. Contacts to France could be made again.
In recent years the number of parishioners has increased further and is currently around 200 (as of 2006). There are more services (three a month). Other church activities include: confirmation classes, young church, themed church afternoons, Bible seminars, family camps, organ concerts, project choir, hospice service and the one-world shop. A team of volunteers also keeps the French Church open to visitors every day. In the years 2004–2006, the Hans Otto Theater also made repeated guest appearances in the French Church with a very positively received performance of Tolstoy's War and Peace .
The French Reformed Congregation belongs to the Reformed Church District of the Evangelical Church Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia and is a member of the Reformed Federation in Germany .
Organs
The organ builder Ernst Julius Marx built the first organ for the French Church in 1787. This instrument was badly damaged in 1806 while the church was being used as a magazine by the French. Alexander Schuke built a new organ in the church in 1930. However, this organ was also not preserved, as it was badly damaged in the 1970s when the church was broken into; the organ pipes were stolen. In their search for a replacement for the Schuke organ, the parish found an organ that matched the sound and design of the original Marx organ. It dates from 1783 and was built by the organ builder Johann Wilhelm Grüneberg for the Reformed Johanniskirche in Berlin-Spandau . From 1903 it stood in the village church in Bärenklau (the Spandau church was demolished in 1902). When moving to the smaller church in Bärenklau, several registers were removed. In 1917 the tin pipes were confiscated and melted down for war purposes. In 1928 Alexander Schuke repaired the organ and built in new prospect pipes made of zinc. In the village church, the organ, which had been unplayable for a long time, was examined and rediscovered in 1983 by Andreas Kitschke and the cantor Christlieb Albrecht , with the inscription glued into the manual valve box
"Anno 1783 ... organ built by organ builder Johann Wilhelm Grüneberg in Brandenburg on May 8th"
has been discovered.
During the investigation, the loss of some prospect pipes, parts of the carvings and some rows of pipes was noticed. The wood showed worm infestation. In 1990 the carvings on the prospectus were supplemented or repaired by the Thürmer company from Dresden .
Kitschke suggested bringing the instrument to the French Church in Potsdam. On the one hand, after a restoration, the sound of the organ would have been too powerful for the small village church, and on the other hand, the organ showed a great external and sonic similarity to the Marx organ.
In 1985 the parish was able to take over the project and start planning the restoration. In 1991 the organ was restored in the Schuke workshop near the French Church based on the organ building files found in Spandau. At Easter 2000 the organ sounded again for the first time in a service, with six registers. From July 22nd of the same year, it was completely restored and played in public and consecrated on September 29th.
The baroque Grüneberg organ with 13 registers on manual and pedal is the largest of the surviving organs by Johann Wilhelm Grüneberg.
Disposition
The disposition of the Grüneberg organ:
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
- Pairing : -None-
- Playing aids : Cymbel suns
photos
View of the French Church of Potsdam (1785)
The French Church in Potsdam (around 1795)
Potsdam - French Church (before 1944)
Figure to the left of the Spes portal (2006)
Figure on the right of the portal Caritas (2006)
literature
- Ingrid Bartmann-Kompa u. a .: Architectural and art monuments in Potsdam. Henschel, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-362-00497-0 , p. 66
- Ute Kamps: "... this is how we want to build mosques and churches." Friderizian church building in Potsdam. In: Förderkreis Alte Kirchen Berlin-Brandenburg eV: Open Churches 2012. Brandenburg churches invite you , ISBN 978-3-928918-44-2 , pp. 6–8 (online at altekirchen.de )
Web links
- Entry in the monument database of the State of Brandenburg
- Homepage of the French Reformed Congregation in Potsdam
- View of the French Church of Potsdam brandenburg.museum-digital.de
- The Grüneberg organ in Potsdam
Coordinates: 52 ° 24 ′ 2 ″ N , 13 ° 3 ′ 46 ″ E