Trinitatiskirche (Mannheim)

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Trinity Church

The Trinitatiskirche is a Protestant church building in downtown Mannheim that is no longer used for church services. It was built between 1956 and 1959 according to the plans of Helmut Striffler and received worldwide attention. The American architecture critic Kidder Smith described it as “the most beautiful sacred building in Europe”.

history

Lutheran

In 1556, Elector Ottheinrich introduced the Reformation in the Electoral Palatinate . In the following years, with almost every new ruler, the faith alternated between Reformed and Lutheran . During the Thirty Years' War , the Palatinate was re-Catholicized before the pre-war status and thus the Reformed faith was established after the peace treaty. For Mannheim, however, the privileges granted in 1652 allowed Lutherans to be tolerated, although they had to go to Rheingönheim for worship . In 1664 the 42 Lutheran citizens asked the elector to be allowed to appoint a pastor at his own expense, which was approved in 1673. Two years later, the Lutheran congregation applied to be allowed to build its own church. However, this was opposed by the plans of Elector Karl Ludwig for a church union and so only the joint use of the reformed church service hall in the Friedrichsburg and from 1680 the newly built Eintrachtskirche was allowed. Shortly afterwards, Mannheim was completely destroyed in the Palatinate War of Succession .

Old Trinitatiskirche, looking east, in the background the tower of the old town hall

First Trinity Church

After the electors from the Palatinate-Neuburg line sought a renewed re-Catholicization of the Electoral Palatinate from 1685, the churches in the Palatinate were divided between the Reformed and the Catholics in a ratio of five to two with the Palatinate Church Division in 1705. The Lutherans received nothing and were referred to the Reformed. In Mannheim, the Lutheran congregation therefore decided to build its own church. City director Johann Leonhard Lippe laid the foundation stone for the Trinity Church on September 30, 1706, on behalf of the Elector, which was inaugurated on October 1, 1709. The name is derived from the Latin word trinitas for " Trinity " ( God "Father" , God "Son" and God "Holy Spirit" ).

Since some officers of the Mannheim garrison were of the Lutheran faith, the Trinity Church was given the unofficial status of a garrison church. Officers of the Isselbach regiment donated a bell and the magnificent portal. The precious ornamental altar was created by Peter van Douven in 1725 . The church stood across from today's Trinitatiskirche, with the tower in the south and the pulpit in the north. The floor plan was rectangular with a 5/8 end at both ends. The number of parishioners increased so much that the Church had to expand. For this reason, the church was expanded with an asymmetrical east wing between 1737 and 1739, so that it now had almost 1,700 seats and that with a floor area of ​​around 700 square meters, which was slightly smaller than the current church. This was only possible through the two galleries.

Old Trinity Church, looking west

The Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm I visited the Trinity Church with his son, who later became Friedrich the Great , on August 6, 1730, shortly after page Keith had told him about the 18-year-old Crown Prince's attempt to escape the day before in Steinfurt . The church's three-manual silent organ was procured in 1777. In December of the same year, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart heard Abbé Vogler play the organ.

In the winter of 1783/84 (February 27, 1784) as well as in the summer of 1789 (July 30, 1789) the lower town was flooded by the Neckar and one could take the boat to the Trinitatis- und Konkordienkirche . In 1789 the water was half a shoe high above the altar of the Trinity Church. In 1805 the church was renovated inside and in 1826 outside. Further renovations followed in 1856 and 1887. In 1821 the Reformed and Lutherans in Mannheim, as in all of Baden, were united in the " United Evangelical Protestant Church in the Grand Duchy of Baden ".

In 1927 Erwin Eckert , who belonged to the Religious Socialists , became pastor at the Trinity Church. His services were very popular and regularly crowded. In 1931 he was expelled from the SPD , in November he was relieved of all his offices in the League of Religious Socialists, and his dismissal from church service followed in December of the same year. One day after his expulsion from the SPD, Eckert joined the KPD .

During the Second World War , the Trinity Church, which, along with the old town hall and the Catholic St. Sebastian Church on the market square, was one of the oldest buildings in the city, was hit so badly in a major attack on the night of September 5th to 6th, 1943 that only the outer walls remained. These too collapsed in a final attack on Mannheim on March 1, 1945.

Rear view of the new Trinity Church
Helmut Striffler in front of the construction plan, 2009

New Trinity Church

After the end of the Second World War, a wooden emergency church was erected on the rubble square. For this purpose the Ecumenical Council of Churches bought Swiss military barracks and had them modified for their own purposes.

When rebuilding after the war, there was no discussion of a reconstruction that was true to the original. For a long time it was disputed whether the Trinity Church should be a historic or a modern sacred building. In the beginning there was a tendency towards the first solution. The architect Christian Schrade , who had already built the Christ Church before the First World War , made designs for a historicist church building, which, however, was not approved. Instead, the young architect Helmut Striffler , who worked as an employee of Egon Eiermann on the pioneering Matthäuskirche in Pforzheim , was commissioned to build a completely new church building made of exposed concrete with glass. The foundation stone was laid on September 30, 1956, exactly 250 years after the foundation stone was laid in 1706. However, the inauguration took place on March 1, 1959, not October 1, as would have been the 250-year cycle. The Trinity Church received worldwide attention from architects and was described in American journals as "the most modern and most beautiful church in Europe". Since 1995 it has been listed as a cultural monument of particular importance in the monuments book of the state of Baden-Württemberg.

Interior (altar side)

The members of the Protestant community, who did not appreciate the concrete church very much and who lacked a homely atmosphere, were of a different opinion than the architecture critics. A decline in membership, financial difficulties and a decline in church tax revenue meant that the church remained closed in winter due to high heating costs, and finally all services were relocated to the parish hall. From 2005 it was examined how the church could be used for other purposes. The plans to give the church space as a rehearsal room to the ballet of the Nationaltheater Mannheim or as a concert hall to the music college were not realized. The demolition of the church has already been discussed, which the architect fiercely opposed. At the beginning of 2009, the board of the parish decided to largely abandon the Trinity Church and to continue the parish as a staff congregation , which was established on January 1, 2010. The church was given to the general parish and can be rented for events.

description

architecture

Portal of the Trinity Church

The axis of the new Trinity Church could be rotated by 90 degrees by buying up neighboring rubble plots in the G4 square and thus tasted . The floor plan is an elongated hexagon with a width between 19 meters in the entrance and altar area and 21.50 meters in the middle and a total length of 38 meters. The height is 10.50 meters outside and 15 meters at the ridge of the gently sloping gable roof .

The pillars and roof trusses of the reinforced concrete skeleton are left visible. The construction allowed a wide space without columns. The stalls can accommodate 500 people. Since ceiling lamps would have disturbed the spatial effect, Striffler chose vertical steles with fluorescent tubes. They are placed in such a way that they appear as rudiments of a three-aisled church and are located in the places where columns were originally intended, but which were not necessary due to the concrete construction.

Windows and columns of light
Sanctuary
window

The architect Helmut Striffler also designed the altar table, the pulpit and the font. The bronze crucifix on the altar was created by the sculptor Emil Cimiotti . When securing the building site, old fortress walls and the crypt of the only two Wittelsbachers who had remained loyal to the Lutheran faith around 1780, Count Palatine Johann von Zweibrücken-Birkenfeld-Gelnhausen (1698-1780) and his eldest son Palatine Karl Johann (1745) were found -1789). They were buried in two zinc coffins in the basement of the tower.

The architect wrote on the inauguration of the church:

“All material appears unclad in its natural texture. The succinct contrasts of stone, glass, wood and metal dominate the building and give it archaic dignity. Small ingredient is completely missing. That may help us to step out of the artificial atmosphere of everyday life. "

- Helmut Striffler

window

The colored glass concrete stones were cast in Chartres by the Loire company. The artist Emil Kiess from Hüfingen provided the drafts .

The colors have the following meanings:

Green: human, earthly life, this world, creature
Brown, gray or diffuse colors: chaos, the dark, evil, the sinfulness of the world
White: God, his light, his world
Red: blood, forgiveness, grace and goodness of God
Blue: water
Luminous, iridescent blue: God's glory

The left side wall includes the creation story according to Genesis 1,1 to 2,4.

The right side wall quotes events from the life of Jesus :

  1. To the right of the altar the conception is shown first ( Gospel according to Luke 1:28).
  2. The second field deals with the birth of Jesus (Gospel according to Luke 2).
  3. The third field of the glass bricks addresses the baptism of Jesus ( Gospel according to Mark 1:10).
  4. The fourth field just before the middle shows a large cup of communion .
  5. It is surrounded by red spots that indicate the blood of Jesus (Gospel according to Mark 14:24).
  6. After Good Friday , Easter Sunday follows .
  7. The seventh field is about Pentecost .
  8. The eighth field contains bright blue and red, but no solid shapes.

The altar wall is dominated by three symbols that allude to the name of the church Trinitas (= Trinity ). These symbols are surrounded by many bright red dots that represent love, grace, kindness and kindness.

Organ loft

organ

The Steinmeyer - organ was inaugurated 1,961th The original plan was to set up a slide organ with three manuals and a pedal with 50 registers and 3592 pipes in two sections . For cost reasons, the second phase of construction was not carried out until 1975 in a modified form.

Bells

The bells of the new Trinity Church already have an eventful history. Since the new, free-standing tower was 55 meters higher and also more stable than the old tower, the parish decided to buy a large bell. In 1958, the Karlsruhe bell and art foundry cast five bells in the tone sequence c 1 –es 1 –f 1 –g 1 –b 1 . In 1980 the former church elder donated a big bell. When checking the statics, however, it was found that the two large bells rocked the tower enormously, so that they were sold to the Luther Church together with the g 1 bell. In the same year, the Heidelberg bell foundry cast three new bells as replacements in the tones b 0 , a flat 1 and c 2 , which combine with the old bells to form a very interesting bell ensemble. The interval of a fifth lies between the two large bells .

No. volume Casting year foundry Ø (mm) kg
1 b 0 1980 Heidelberg bell foundry 1660 2520
2 f 1 1958 Karlsruhe bell and art foundry 1140 1165
3 as 1 1980 Heidelberg bell foundry 976 812
4th b 1 1958 Karlsruhe bell and art foundry 880 691
5 c 2 1980 Heidelberg bell foundry 778 458

A bell from the old Trinity Church also survived the wars. After the First World War , the bell donated by Mannheim officers in 1709 with the strike note d 2 no longer fit into the disposition of the new bells and was therefore given to the newly built Melanchthon Church.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kidder Smith : New Church Buildings in Europe . Stuttgart, 1964.
  2. ↑ J. Philipp Walther: Mannheims memorials from its creation to the newest time , Mannheim, 1855, p. 39; (Digital scan)
  3. ↑ Peter Koch, Vaiva Saltyte: Experience Mannheim . Weinheim 2005. ISBN 3-936468-04-4 , p. 51.
  4. ↑ Mannheimer Morgen August 3, 2005  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.morgenweb.de  
  5. ↑ Mannheimer Morgen February 27, 2009  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.morgenweb.de  
  6. ↑ Letter to the Friends of the GGE , June 2010 No. 38, p. 18. (PDF; 753 kB)
  7. ↑ Mannheimer Morgen January 9, 2010  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.morgenweb.de  
  8. ↑ Trinitatiskirche Mannheim, G4 . P. 4. (PDF; 657 kB)

Web links

Commons : Trinitatiskirche  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 49 ° 29 '25.9 "  N , 8 ° 27' 52.8"  E