Main Church of St. Jacobi (Hamburg)

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St. Jacobi

The Sankt Jacobi Church is one of the five main Evangelical Lutheran churches in Hamburg . Despite many changes in the course of history and massive destruction during World War II , the church is one of the few surviving medieval buildings in the city center. It is a protected cultural asset under the Hague Convention .

location

The main church St. Jacobi is located in the center of Hamburg on Steinstrasse . This was one of the main streets of early Hamburg; today it is predominantly shaped by the office buildings of the 20th century.

history

Depiction from 1675
View from 1830

St. Jacobi emerged from a chapel on the Way of St. James . That is why the church was dedicated to the apostle James . When it was first mentioned in 1255, St. Jacobi was still outside the secured city east of the Heidenwall . Only after the expansion of the city wall in 1260 was it included in the Hamburg city fortifications.

The main part of the church goes back to a new building in the 14th century: Between 1350 and around 1400 a three-aisled hall church was built in the Gothic style, similar to the neighboring church of St. Petri . In 1438 a sacristy was added to the northeast, today Hamburg's only testimony to Gothic secular architecture. At the end of the 15th century, St. Jacobi was extended by a fourth nave on the south side. In the Middle Ages, the tower of the church consisted of five floors, but had no spire, but ended with two parallel gable roofs. It was only at the beginning of the early modern period between 1587 and 1589 that a spire was created, the late Gothic design of which was borrowed from the nearby St. Gertruden Chapel .

Another change to the building took place in the middle of the 18th century: Static problems at the western end of the church made it necessary to secure the foundations and reinforce the masonry; this also changed the appearance of the western front. The architect Johannes Nicolaus Kuhn († November 13, 1744) provided the plans for this .

In 1769, at the suggestion of Johann Albert Heinrich Reimarus , St. Jacobi was provided with the first lightning rod in Germany, which was carried out by Mathias Andreas Mettlerkamp.

At the beginning of the 19th century, St. Jacobi, like many churches, served Napoleonic troops as a horse stable. During the French era , the late Gothic spire was removed in 1810 and replaced by a low, pyramid-shaped emergency roof. From 1827 to 1828 a neo-Gothic spire was placed on the stump of the tower, which had been reduced by one storey due to its dilapidation, which existed until the destruction of St. Jacobi in 1944. Extensive changes to the church took place between 1859 and 1869. The copper roof was replaced by a slate covering and a neo-Gothic entrance hall was built on the south side of the church building. The interior was renewed at the end of the 19th century.

The old town Nicolaikirche in Bielefeld

The church was destroyed during World War II. It burned out and the tower crashed through the vaults into the interior. The historic interior had previously been evacuated. After the war, St. Jacobi was rebuilt based on the medieval model until 1963; only the tower with a height of 125 m was designed by the Hamburg architects Hopp & Jäger in a modern way, as they had done with its tower a year earlier during the reconstruction of the old town of Nicolaikirche in Bielefeld.

Steinstrasse 124

Archway at Steinstraße 124 around 1880 with the evangelists Matthew and Markus

A gate led through the house at Steinstrasse 124 in the Jacobikirchhof, which was converted with half-timbered houses. This was decorated in 1678 by Christian Precht (probably 1635–1695) with carved figures of the four evangelists (each with a book and their symbol ) and a standing figure of the Apostle James. After the demolition of the house in 1881, the candle arches with the evangelists were stored and installed as architectural fragments in the exhibition rooms during the construction of the Museum of Hamburg History between 1914 and 1922 . The Jacobus statue is placed in the church.

Furnishing

St. Jacobi has four medieval altars : the St. Trinity altar in the main choir (around 1518), the St. Petri altar in the first south aisle (1508) and the St. Luke altar from Hamburg's Mariendom in the 2nd floor South aisle by Hinrik Bornemann († between 1499 and 1510) and an altar of largely unknown origin, which last stood in the Eilbeck Easter Church and was brought to St. Jacobi after the Bulgarian Orthodox Church took over it. The mansion, which originally served as a library , also deserves attention . From 1543 it was the meeting room of the church lords and in 1710 it was given new fittings. The ceiling paintings with civic virtues indicate the importance of the parish administration for the city government and, like the landscape paintings on the walls, come from Johann Moritz Riesenberger the Younger (1673 / 7–7 May 1740). Coats of arms on the wall have named pastors, parish lords and juries since the 16th century. The stained glass on the choir windows was carried out by Charles Crodel from 1959 to 1963 , who also created the colored glass windows of the Matthäuskirche in Winterhude and St. Marien in Fuhlsbüttel. The painting The Rich Man and Death was painted in 1622 by David Kindt , who also painted the main pastor of St. Jacobi Severin Schlueter in 1648 . On the wall of the north aisle there is a city view of Hamburg by Joachim Luhn from 1681.

  • St. Trinity Altar

  • St. Luke Altar

  • St. Peter's Altar

  • Former altar of the Eilbeck Easter Church still at the old location

  • The Rich Man and the Death by David Kindt , 1622

  • City view of Hamburg by Joachim Luhn , 1681

There are seven church bells in the tower with the striking sequence a 0 –c 1 –d 1 –f 1 –g 1 –b 1 –c 2 . They were cast in 1959 by the Rincker bell and art foundry .

Arp Schnitger organ

Bell scratch drawings

The big bell, cast in 1397 and melted down during World War I , had rare, art-historically significant carved bell drawings , which are honored in a work by the art historian Ingrid Schulze in a separate chapter.

Organs

→ Main article: Organ of the main church Sankt Jacobi (Hamburg)

The famous Arp Schnitger organ from 1693 on the west gallery, with its 60 registers and approx. 4,000 pipes, is the largest surviving Baroque organ in Northern Europe. From 1989 to 1993 it was completely restored.

At the beginning of the 18th century, Johann Sebastian Bach is said to have applied for the position for the first organist of the St. Jacobi Church, but he was rejected by the church administration for financial reasons. Bach then went to Leipzig.

There is a second large organ in the aisle of the church, built in 1960 and 1968 by Emanuel Kemper. It is three-manual and has 66 registers (after the renovation in 2007/2008), among them the register “Wooden Laughter”, a xylophone from a cinema organ.

Community cemeteries

Family graves Merck and Ruperti in the former Jacobi cemetery in Eilbek

In the Middle Ages, the dead were buried within and directly next to the church, but over time the cemeteries of the Jacobi congregation moved further and further outside the city gates. In the 14th century, the first burial place was laid out on Spitalerstraße and later moved in front of the Spitalertor. After the expansion of the Hamburg ramparts , a new cemetery was laid out in front of the stone gate at the end of the 18th century , which was used until 1848 and later had to give way to the construction of Hamburg's main train station . After this square became too small, a new cemetery was laid out again in 1848 “on Peterskamp” in what is now Eilbek , which was used until 1934 and converted into today 's Jacobipark after the Second World War . Numerous bones were reburied in the Ohlsdorf cemetery and several historical tombs were rebuilt there as museums. Only a few tombs and tombs have been preserved in today's Jacobipark.

Today there is a communal grave site of the Jacobi congregation in the Ohlsdorf cemetery, where congregation members can be buried.

See also

literature

  • Stefan Kleineschulte: St. Jacobi in Hamburg - more than a church from the Middle Ages . In: Middle Ages in Hamburg: art sponsors, castles, churches, artists and works of art . Edited by Volker Plagemann. Dölling and Galitz, Hamburg 2000.
  • Jesse et al. a. 1926, Guide to the Museum of Hamburg History, p. 64
  • Melhop 1908, Alt-Hamburgische Bauweise, pp. 300, 324
  • Voigt 1880, The Lübschen stalls on Steinstrasse in Hamburg, p. 125 ff.

Web links

Commons : St. Jacobi, Hamburg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ DHW Schultz & Sohn GmbH - History 1. In: dhw-feuerschutz.de. Retrieved January 19, 2015 .
  2. ↑ Karin Eckhardt: Christian Precht - A Hamburg sculptor in the second half of the 17th century. In: Contributions to the History of Hamburg, Volume 32 . Hamburg 1987, p. 168.
  3. ↑ New altar for the main church St. Jacobi . Nordkirche.de, November 27, 2019, accessed on the same day.
  4. ^ Rudolf Vierhaus : German biographical encyclopedia (DBE). Volume 8, ISBN 3-598-25030-4 , p. 412 ( limited preview in Google book search)
  5. ↑ Ingrid Schulze (from page 67 and 84) in her book Scratch Drawings by Layman's Hand - Drawings by Medieval Sculptors and Painters? Figural bell scratch drawings from the late 13th century to around 1500 in central and northern Germany. Leipzig 2006, ISBN 978-3-939404-95-8 .
  6. ↑ Description with disposition on the homepage of the parish of St. Jacobi http://www.jacobus.de/neu/deutsch/index_3_7.html . Retrieved September 27, 2016
  7. ↑ Peter Schulze: The prominent dead from the St. Jacobi cemetery in Hamburg-Eilbek. From: Ohlsdorf. Journal of Mourning Culture No. 107, IV, 2009. Retrieved February 10, 2014.
  8. ^ Community grave site St. Jacobi. In: jacobus.de. Retrieved January 19, 2015 .

Coordinates: 53 ° 33 ′ 1 ″  N , 10 ° 0 ′ 2 ″  E