Pauluskirche (Wuppertal)
The Pauluskirche in the Wuppertal district of Unterbarmen , the westernmost district of the old town of Barmen , today the district of Barmen of the city of Wuppertal , is the second church built for the United Evangelical community of Unterbarmen.
The west of the first united congregation in Wuppertal, founded in 1822, was initially supplied by a prayer room, which consisted of a converted horse stable on land acquired in 1874 for the 5th pastorate of the congregation on what was then Haspelerstraße (today Friedrich-Engels-Allee ). In 1875 plans were made to build a larger prayer room at the rear of the property on the Wupper . This part was connected to Haspelerstraße by the construction of today's Pauluskirchstraße , and in 1880 the presbytery of the parish decided to build a church. The Barmer town builder Carl Winchenbach presented a draft that was enlarged by the site manager, the architect Gerhard August Fischer , and executed in a somewhat more elaborate manner for a construction cost of around 100,000 marks. The construction of the street and the pastorate behind the church cost a further 50,000 marks, and the parishioners contributed around 85,000 marks to the construction as donations. The foundation stone was laid on August 2, 1881, and the inauguration of the church was celebrated on the fiftieth anniversary of the church planting, October 24, 1882.
The Pauluskirche is a work of historicism and mainly uses late Romanesque designs. The building, walled with dark bricks, is a single-nave hall church with a tower in the south. A special feature are the two apses protruding in the exterior: the one under the tower, behind which the altar was originally located, and to the north another one, in which there is a meeting room and above it a large gallery. From the outside, the building thus gives the impression of a double-choir structure, as in high Romanesque churches (e.g. St. Apostles in Cologne), but without these elements being functionally incorporated into the church as choirs.
The 47 meter high, slim, square tower with a pointed octagonal spire on the side facing the street seems to be modeled on the usual Bergisch preaching churches in Wuppertal, all of which have a central tower above the entrance facade. However, on this side of the Pauluskirche was the altar and above it in the middle the pulpit, so the church was facing south. Four polygonal staircases protruding from the side façades on the sides of the two apses led to the northern gallery above a confirmation and assembly hall and an original organ gallery in the tower above the altar. The four entrances to the church building also led through these stairwells, the main entrance was on the tower or altar side. The 22.8 × 14.2 m large and up to 11.3 m high church room itself was covered with a simple wooden ceiling and had space for 800 people. High windows illuminated the five bays of the single-nave building.
During the time of National Socialism , the church got into a dispute between the Confessing Church and German Christians . After all pastors and the presbytery of the community had expressed their solidarity with the Barmer Declaration of the eastern neighboring community, the German Christians claimed the Pauluskirche for themselves in 1936. After the presbytery had refused this request, the German Christians forcibly gained access to the church and held their first "thanksgiving service" in the building on June 28, 1936. The subsequent barricade of the church by the other side was broken through with crowbars, from then on the building was a sermon place for the German Christians thanks to the support of the police until the surrender in 1945.
The Pauluskirche was the only evangelical church of mercy to survive the bombing of the Second World War unscathed. In the course of the post-war development, the community, which had grown to 12 parishes, was divided into four new communities in 1963; the Pauluskirche became the parish church of the community Unterbarmen-West. In 1966, when a new organ was installed, the orientation of the church was reversed, the altar moved in front of the new organ on the north gallery. The development of the settlement structure in the vicinity of the church, in which residential areas gave way to more and more service and commercial areas, visibly reduced the number of believers in the sub-community, so that the church became too big for the ever-smaller community. From 1991 the building was rented to the Bergische Universität Wuppertal as a lecture hall, in 1995 the association "Freundeskreis Pauluskirche Unterbarmen eV" was founded, which has maintained the church ever since and is partly financed by a book market that takes place regularly in the church. Once a month there is a service of the meanwhile reunited Unterbarmer congregation in the building, the further use extends to lectures of the university, concerts and exhibitions. The Pauluskirche has been a listed building since 1989.
literature
- History of the United Protestant Congregation Unterbarmen from 1822 to 1922 , compiled by the pastors Thümmel, Schreiner and van den Bruck, Barmen 1922
- United Evangelical Community Unterbarmen-Mitte [Hrsg.]: Community life in Unterbarmen. A self- survey in the year of the church anniversaries , Wuppertal 1982, ISBN 3-88578-006-2
- Sigrid Lekebusch: Unterbarmer Community History 1964-1997 , Wuppertal 1997, ISBN 3-00-001429-2
- Werner Franzen: Places of worship in change: Protestant church building in the Rhineland 1860-1914 , dissertation, Duisburg 2002 ( title page for the document duett-07082002-104417 ( Memento from December 11, 2005 in the Internet Archive ))
- Sigrid Lekebusch, Florian Speer : Churches and places of worship in Barmen , churches and places of worship in Wuppertal Volume 2 (= contributions to the history and local history of the Wuppertal, volume 43), Wuppertal 2008, ISBN 978-3-87707-721-4 .
Web links
- Entry in the Wuppertal monument list
- Information on wupperguide.de
Coordinates: 51 ° 15 '36.6 " N , 7 ° 10' 1.4" E