Monastery Stift zum Heiligengrabe
The Klosterstiftskirche the Holy Sepulcher is a late 13th century founded, originally from the Cistercian inhabited monastery in the Holy Sepulcher in Brandenburg Ostprignitz-Ruppin . The monastery complex is considered to be the best preserved in Brandenburg and has been classified as a monument of national importance since 1998 .
history
The monastery was founded in 1287 by Margrave Otto IV and two years later, at his instigation, twelve nuns from the Cistercian monastery in Neuendorf ( Altmark ) moved into it. The existence of a holy grave was first mentioned in 1317 ( Cenobium ad sanctum sepulchrum in Thegow, monasterium sanctimonialium in Thegow, cenobium tu the holy grave ). Hardly any well-documented documents are available from the 14th and 15th centuries. An interest book from 1513, which can be viewed in the Brandenburg State Main Archives in Potsdam, shows that around 180 people belonged to the monastery at the beginning of the 16th century. This included around 70 Cistercian women, headed by an abbess .
As is customary in Cistercian settlements, pioneering work was also done in Heiligengrabe by the monastery, in this case mainly in the reclamation of the wetland through which numerous streams ran . Around 1500 the monastery estate comprised 65,000 acres of land, mainly in an eight kilometer wide strip between Wittstock and Pritzwalk on the sides, the Dosse in the north and the Jäglitz in the south. Apart from the own economy, which secured the monastery’s basic needs for grain, meat and fish, tithes in kind and money as well as rent from 17 villages were received.
Founding legend
The founding history of the monastery is linked to a legend hostile to Jews . This reports of a host sacrilege , which was accused of a Jew according to a common medieval pattern . He is said to have stolen a host from the Techow Church , then buried it under a gallows nearby (the location of the Holy Grave Chapel, formerly also called the Blood Chapel) and then executed it as a punishment. Legend has it that a miraculous place was created at the place where the host was buried. This is the reason for the foundation of the monastery. The legend is first documented in sources for the year 1516 as a print in Latin. In 1521 it was published by Ludwig Dietz in Rostock in Low German, illustrated with 15 woodcuts. There are no references or even sources that could prove the existence of the legend before the 16th century.
In 1532, the abbess Anna von Rohr had a cycle of legends painted with panel paintings based on the 15 woodcuts. The simple production method ( tempera paints on oak planks, simple, two-dimensional representation of the people) suggests a local artist without national significance. Seven of these panels are still preserved today and are on display in the monastery museum. The panels were created for the Holy Grave Chapel, which was newly built in the late Gothic style at the beginning of the 16th century and inaugurated in 1512. With the new construction of the chapel, the simultaneous expansion of the abbey, the legend of the blood host and the alleged miracle activity, the monastery should develop into a place of pilgrimage . The mainspring of this action was the competition with important pilgrimage sites not far from Heiligengrabe such as Alt Krüssow and Bad Wilsnack .
The monastery Stift zum Heiligengrabe gives the following statement today: The legend about the alleged sacrifice of the host does not come from the founding years of the monastery, it is rather an invention of the early 16th century. No sources can be named for a pilgrimage tradition that dates back to the 13th century. With the spread of the legend, the monastery pursued economic goals. The then rather insignificant monastery should be upgraded to a frequented place of pilgrimage. Conflicts of faith in the (pre) Reformation period were just as important. With the support of the Havelberg bishops, the monastery fought vehemently against the Reformation until 1546. It can therefore be assumed that the abbess Anna von Rohr wanted to use the legend to make a commitment to the Catholic faith and thus against Martin Luther , an opponent of pilgrimage.
reformation
In 1539 the Reformation was introduced in Brandenburg by Elector Joachim II . The nuns working in Heiligengrabe under the direction of Abbess Anna von Quitzow and Prioress Elisabeth von Alvensleben, however, refused to convert and initially left the monastery in 1548, but returned the following year. The expansion of the monastery was ended. From 1552, the church appointed a monastery captain to take care of economic development.
After the Thirty Years' War , the evangelical women's monastery was no longer managed by an abbess, but by a dominatrix . Due to arson during the war, the monastery property was abandoned after 1636 until the end of 1648 and was then revived by eight nuns under the leadership of Domina Anna von Rathenow. The use of the monastery now changed to the effect that increasingly the unserved daughters of wealthy aristocratic families were taken in. They were able to buy into the monastery offices and received a comprehensive education in the monastery for that time. In 1645, Hans Erdmann von Bert (i) kow, the eighth head of the monastery, came to Heiligengrabe. He also made his contribution to the reconstruction of the monastery. With a donation of all of Luther's works in 1668, he laid the foundation for the monastery library; ten volumes are still available (as of 2015). Von Bert (i) kow found his grave in the collegiate church behind the altar.
In 1722 the foundation stone was laid for residential buildings on the future Damenplatz, which were intended for the wealthy canonesses.
However, secular rule, in particular Friedrich Wilhelm I , increasingly influenced the organization of monastic life and its staffing. The management positions and the entitlements to monastery posts were also determined by the rulers. With the elevation of the monastery to a women's monastery and the re-titling of the director Juliane Auguste Henriette von Winterfeldt to abbess in 1740 by King Friedrich II , this extremely eventful phase of the monastery development ended.
19th century
In 1811 the monastery lost a large part of its possessions and its influence. The Stein-Hardenberg reforms ended serfdom in Prussia and reduced the ownership of the monastery to all of the villages that had belonged up to that point to three remaining manors .
The tasks of the monastery expanded, however, and required functional facilities. The abbey governor's house was built in 1838 and the Holy Sepulcher Chapel, which had been used as a granary since the Reformation, was renovated in 1840. In 1847 Abbess Luise von Schierstedt first founded an educational institution for “girls from impoverished noble families”, an orphanage followed. In 1848 the Lutheran pastor Hermann Ferdinand Uhden became a canon preacher, who campaigned for the rights of Lutherans within the Union from Heiligengrabe.
After King Friedrich Wilhelm IV transferred responsibility for the Stift zum Heiligengrabe monastery to the Old Prussian Evangelical Church Council in 1853 , spiritual aspects and traditions came to the fore again. Social activities such as feeding the poor , caring for orphans, the elderly and the sick were given a permanent place in the monastery activities .
20th century - until 1945
In 1904, Kaiser Wilhelm II initiated the refurbishment of the Holy Sepulcher Chapel. In the previous years, against internal resistance, he pushed through the appointment of Abbess Adolphine von Rohr , who from 1899 led the monastery into the 20th century. It increasingly promoted the social orientation of the monastery activities, but also in 1909 the establishment of a local history museum for the Prignitz in the southern wing of the enclosure , which opened up the monastery life to the outside world due to its audience. The work of the Heimatmuseum in the 1920s is the reason for the Prignitz's most important paleontological find: the Xenusion auerswaldae , which is named after the Heiligengrab museum director Annemarie von Auerswald and is now on display in the Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin) . At the end of the Second World War , the museum was closed. Albert Guthke , who worked as an assistant at the Heiligengrabe Local History Museum from 1936 to 1941, was able to recondition parts of the museum holdings in 1946/47 and transfer them to the Pritzwalk Local History Museum , which he founded in 1954 . Further exhibits were distributed to the surrounding, newly established district museums in the region.
In 1933, female school-leavers were able to take the Abitur examination in Heiligengrabe . However, the National Socialist seizure of power quickly put problems in the way of the further development of this school branch. The abbess Elisabeth von Saldern , in office since 1924, and the Christian educational practice in Heiligengrabe came into conflict with the supporters of the new rulers inside and outside the monastery organization. In addition, the occupation of school places with primarily noble schoolgirls was described as "reactionary". The teaching content had to be adapted. However, through strong personal commitment and her contacts to high social and government circles, the abbess succeeded in avoiding a closure of the school and a complete secularization of the teaching content.
After the death of Elisabeth von Saldern in 1938, Armgard von Alvensleben took over the office of abbess in 1939. In the following years she also succeeded in preventing the school from being integrated into the National Socialist state educational system.
A prominent student in the 1930s was Friedelind Wagner .
Towards the end of the Second World War, more and more schoolgirls left the monastery to go to their families. At the end of April 1945, the abbess and the last eight pupils left the monastery independently of one another and went to West Germany.
20th century - after 1945
After one year of use by the Soviet army, in 1946 , deaconesses of the Peace Care Center , who had been expelled from Upper Silesia , moved into the abandoned monastery. In the following years her work focused on caring for orphans, caring for disabled people and caring for older sisters of the order . There was also a well-known parament workshop .
In 1952, the village pastor, the former collegiate student Ingeborg-Maria Freiin von Werthern , was introduced to the office as abbess, which she held for 43 years. In the 1960s to 1990s, several houses were added to improve the living and care situation, including the previous building of a hotel that is now connected to the monastery. After 1998 the restoration and renovation of the entire monastery complex began, and in 2001 a museum was reopened in the monastery governor's house. In 2016, the abbesses were awarded the German Prize for Monument Protection ( Silver Hemisphere ) by the German National Committee for Monument Protection for their 20 years of securing and restoring the partially endangered monastery ensemble .
Heiligengrabe today
In 1996 a new convent was founded with two new canonesses , which Friederike Rupprecht headed as abbess from 2001 to 2015. In January 2016, Erika Schweizer took over the management of the monastery.
The monastery is now enjoying popularity again through events, conferences and concerts, so that the viability of the still small monastery community can probably be secured with an expansion of staff. The monastery governor's house is developing into a museum on the history of the monastery and the state and on the spiritual self-image of the place and thus ties in with the museum tradition in the monastery. The exhibition “Preussens FrauenZimmer”, which opened there in 2001, also marked the beginning of a series of other special exhibitions.
In 2007, the “Evangelical Community School in Stift zum Heiligengrabe Abbey - All-day high school for the 7th – 10th grade” was established by an external sponsoring association Class ”was founded, which was expanded in 2014 to include a primary school section and since then has been using the monastery governor's house as a school building as the“ community school in Stift zum Heiligengrabe ”.
List of Abbesses
The monastery buildings
The largest and most important building complex is the three-winged enclosure, closed in the south by the monastery church, enclosing the cloister and the cross garden.
church
The church, built without a tower in the Cistercian style, dates from the end of the 13th century. It is a six-bay hall building with ribbed vaults , in the east the nave-wide 5/8 choir with lancet windows , on its walls several grave slabs from the 17th and 18th centuries. Century. In the 15th century, workers partially changed the windows in the sanctuary .
Two-storey windows on the south side illuminate the nave. The buttresses on this side contain several grave slabs. The majority of the church consists of brick masonry , supplemented with field stone sections. Tracery , friezes and red and black glazed bricks form the decoration for Gothic forms such as stepped gables in the west and pointed arch portal . In the area of the five western bays there was originally a wooden nuns' gallery from the construction period, presumably with direct access to the western cloister wing with bedrooms, refectory and kitchen; since the 19th century there has been a western gallery extending over two bays.
Fires in 1636 ( Thirty Years War ) and 1719 forced renovations. For example, after the fire in the 18th century, the monastery removed the nuns' gallery and built an organ gallery instead. The roof and other parts of the building were restored in 1890, 1904 and in the 1950s. Inside, a magnificent two- wing carved altar (on loan from the Brandenburg Cathedral Museum) contrasts with a simple pulpit and baptismal font . The three-dimensional representation of Mary in the middle shrine of the altar and the apostle representations on the wings were probably made around 1420/30 . In 1914 the monastery removed the roof tower from the 18th century and redesigned the stepped gable on the west facade. The builders leaned on the design of the chapel and included the Jerusalem cross. Six years later, they erected the free-standing bell tower.
On the west gallery is the organ front from 1725 with acanthus carving by David Baumann. Below is a room with six of the seven preserved of 16 original panels from 1532 with depictions of the founding legend. The organ is a work by David Baumann from 1726 with 14 stops on two manuals and a pedal . It was restored by Schuke Orgelbau in 1956 and 1960 , with new reed stops being installed.
church
entrance
organ
Mary Altar
Exam
In addition to the west wing of the enclosure, the north wing was probably originally used to accommodate aristocratic and clerical guests and their immediate retinue, while the east wing served as a commercial wing for storage, handling and production purposes.
East and north wings
West wing
Imperial tower in the courtyard
Cloister
Heiliggrabkapelle (Blood Chapel)
About 30 meters west of the enclosure, in the imaginary continuation of the nave , is the Holy Sepulcher Chapel, consecrated in 1512, a single-nave, four-bay, star-vaulted brick hall, mixed with hewn fieldstone in the walls. It represents the actual place of pilgrimage in the monastery complex, according to legend it was built above an execution site ( Galgenberg ).
Pointed arch portals with four-part windows above them form eastern and western entrances. The gable of the chapel , which served as a template for the gable of the village church in Wulfersdorf , is particularly striking . There is a continuous tracery cornice above the base of the wall. The five-storey western stepped gable with tracery-like ornamental friezes, broken up by articulated slender pillars, the spaces in between are faced in white, are considered a model for several similar buildings in Prignitz, namely Alt-Krüssow, Falkenhagen and Wülfersdorf.
The interior after a neo-Gothic redesign with paintings on the east wall depicts the founding of the monastery and the Reformation period. Choir stalls and organ complete the church furnishings. The space is structured by wall-high pointed arch niches marking the yoke boundaries.
The remains of a previous building from the 13th century were exposed when underfloor heating was installed in 1986. A brick vault open to the west also came to light, which is interpreted as the original holy grave .
West view
altar
dig
Choir
Construction discussion
It is controversial whether the church that exists today can be traced back to the end of the 13th century. Possibly also took place in 14./15. Century a new building, in any case, extensive renovations have been carried out.
The small exposed brick vault in the Holy Sepulcher Chapel is also interpreted as the grave of the blood host.
The art historian and building archaeologist Dirk Schumann uses new dendrochronological investigations on the roof of the Holy Sepulcher Chapel to question the architectural role model function, at least for the church in Alt-Krüssow. Without doubting the consecration date of 1512, he points out that the wood dates point to an earlier end of the construction work in Alt-Krüssow and make it possible that the construction in Heiligengrabe was not completed until several years later.
Since 2002, the buildings of the enclosure and the adjoining baroque development of the so-called Damenplatz have been examined by a working group consisting of the art historian Yngve Jan Holland and the architect Andreas Potthoff in collaboration with the art historian Dirk Schumann, both in preparation and during the building history.
literature
- Sarah Romeyke (ed.): Prussia's daughters. The collegiate children of Heiligengrabe 1847–1945 (= Heiligengrabe cultural and museum location . Vol. 5). Lukas, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86732-193-8 .
- Friederike Rupprecht (Ed.): Reading times. The library in the monastery Stift zum Heiligengrabe from 1600 to 1900. Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-86732-110-5 .
- Sarah Romeyke: From nuns' choir to women's square. 700 years of the Stift zum Heiligengrabe monastery . Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86732-058-0 .
- Ursula Röper (Ed.): Longing for Jerusalem. Paths to the Holy Sepulcher . Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86732-057-3 .
- Brandenburg State Office for Monument Preservation and State Archaeological Museum (Ed.): The monastery Stift zum Heiligengrabe. Inventory research and preservation of monuments (= workbooks of the Brandenburg State Office . Vol. 16). Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86732-006-1 .
- Werner von Kieckebusch : Chronicle of the monastery of the Holy Grave from the Reformation to the middle of the 20th century (= studies on the history, art and culture of the Cistercians . Vol. 28). Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86732-040-5 .
- Friederike Rupprecht (Ed.): About bleeding hosts, pious pilgrims and unruly nuns. Holy grave between the late Middle Ages and the Reformation . Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-936872-59-7 .
- Simone Oelker, Astrid Reuter (Ed.): Lifetime Achievements. Women in the Stift zum Heiligengrabe monastery between 1847 and 1945 (= booklet accompanying the exhibition of life's works. Women in the Stift zum Heiligengrabe monastery between 1847 and 1945). Monuments Publications of the German Foundation for Monument Protection, Bonn 2002, ISBN 978-3-935208-19-2 .
- Georg Dehio (Gre.): Handbook of German art monuments . Rework through the Dehio Association. Bd. Brandenburg, arr. by Gerhard Vinken et al. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich / Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-422-03054-9 .
- Tisa von der Schulenburg : The emperor's female cadets. School time in Heiligengrabe - between the Empire and the Revolution. Herder publishing house, Freiburg i. Br. 1983, ISBN 3-451-08057-5 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Information on the historical study of the monastery and its buildings
- ↑ Friederike Rupprecht (Ed.): About bleeding hosts, pious pilgrims and unruly nuns. Heiligengrabe between the late Middle Ages and the Reformation , Berlin 2005.
- ↑ Information board : Monastery captain Hans Erdmann von Bert (i) kow , set up southwest of the church, inspection in March 2015.
- ^ Friedelind Wagner: Night over Bayreuth: the story of Richard Wagner's granddaughter / Friedelind Wagner. With an afterthought by Eva Weissweiler. [Translated from the English by Lola Humm] . Ullstein, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-548-30432-X .
- ↑ Announcement of the 2016 award winners as a press release by the German National Committee for Monument Protection on July 19, 2016
- ↑ Berliner Zeitung, number 297 (December 21, 2015), p. 17.
- ↑ New abbess at Heiligengrabe Monastery , accessed on January 14, 2016.
- ^ List of all schools in the Brandenburg school portrait
- ↑ Information board : Collegiate Church , attached to the south side of the nave, inspection in March 2015.
- ↑ Information about the organ on orgbase.nl. Retrieved December 21, 2019 .
- ↑ Medieval village churches in Brandenburg ( Memento from January 4, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
Coordinates: 53 ° 8 '29.4 " N , 12 ° 21' 4.4" E