Peterskirche (Frankfurt am Main)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
South side of the Peterskirche ( Stephanstraße )

The Peterskirche is a Protestant church in the inner city of Frankfurt am Main . The building in the neo-renaissance style was built from 1891 to 1894 according to plans by the Berlin architects Hans Grisebach and August Dinklage on the site of the historic Peterskirchhof , where most of the city's dead were buried until 1828. It replaced a small Gothic building that existed from 1381 to 1891.

The Peterskirche is one of the eight endowment churches that have been the property of the city of Frankfurt since 1803 and that the city is obliged to maintain on an ongoing basis. From 2004 to 2007 the church was converted into the youth culture church of St. Peter .

Building history

The Gothic Chapel 1393

In 1333, Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian allowed the city to expand , tripling the area of ​​the medieval old town . To protect the resulting Neustadt one was in the 14th century new city walls built. The expansion of the city was so generous that the Neustadt was comparatively sparsely populated until the 19th century. In the northeast of the Neustadt near Friedberger Tor, a residential area was created around Alte Gasse and Schäfergasse relatively soon , in which mainly gardeners and farmers settled.

At the intersection of these streets, the Frankfurt councilor Peter Apotheker, who died in 1381, donated a small chapel in his will, as can be seen from a note from his executor dated 1393. The nameless chapel between Biberbrunnen and Friedberger Pforte should have been built shortly before it was mentioned, as it was not yet consecrated in 1393.

The late Gothic St. Peter's Church 1419–1895

Peterskirche 1628
Peterskirche before the demolition in 1891

As early as 1417 to 1419 the chapel was extensively rebuilt and expanded by the patricians Johann Ockstadt and Jakob Hombrecht . A small late Gothic hall church was created with a 5/8 choir and a small, later enlarged roof turret with a Welschen dome . The three- bay net vault of the nave was considered one of the most beautiful in Frankfurt.

Later on, the church received two small chapel extensions on the north side, one of which served as the hereditary burial of the Glauburg (family) patrician family .

At that time, parish rights lay exclusively with the imperial monastery of St. Bartholomew . This meant that the residents of Neustadt and Sachsenhausen only received inadequate pastoral care , as the gates of the Staufen wall between the old town and Neustadt and the Main Bridge remained closed at night. Since 1432, the council therefore, against the will of the collegiate priests, raised the Dreikönigskapelle and the Peterskapelle to parish churches. After the council's interventions with the Archbishop of Mainz were unsuccessful, he negotiated with the papal envoy Tommaso Parentucelli on the occasion of the Frankfurt Reichstag in 1442 and 1446 . After he was elected Pope Nicholas V in 1447 , the Holy See in Rome sent a papal legate, Cardinal Nikolaus von Kues , who in 1452 elevated the two chapels to subsidiary churches of St. Bartholomew. With the exception of baptism, all sacraments could now be administered. The first chaplain of St. Peter's Church was Magister Johannes Lupi , whose tomb from 1468 - a painted plaque made of Main sandstone - is now kept in the Historical Museum .

Reformed preachers had been active in Frankfurt since 1522. In 1525 the council hired the two preachers Dionysius Melander and Johann Bernhard called Algesheimer. The two quickly got into a conflict with the old religious pastor Peter Meyer and the pastor of St. Peter's Church, Johann Rau . When the people of Neustadt asked for a new pastor on March 21, 1531, the council prohibited the Catholic mass in St. In the following year Matthias Limberger from Cronberg became the first Protestant pastor of the Peterskirche. It remained Protestant even after the Augsburg interim of 1548, when the city had to return the Bartholomäuskirche to the Mainz Archbishopric. In 1536 the patrician Hamman von Holzhausen , who played a leading role in the introduction of the Reformation in Frankfurt, was buried in the church.

The Peterskirche remained the only church in this part of the new town. In 1769 100 residents of the III. Quartiers submitted a request to the city cadastral office to extend and renovate the church. It said that the pulpit could no longer be climbed, the organ would no longer make any sound, the window panes looked more like horn than glass, the ceilings and walls seemed covered with soot, the galleries were so dilapidated that they would collapse every moment threatened that the pews and pews were so worn that one could no longer sit on them, that the whole church was in a state of disrepair. The old St. Peter's Church was then thoroughly renovated by 1771. It received a new roof with a ridge turret and new windows, the galleries new chairs and new parapets. Philipp Ernst Wegmann built a new organ with 15 registers , for the sculptor Johann David Schnorr (1718-1784) a prospectus in Rococo created style. The new pulpit also came from Schnorr's studio.

In November 1813, towards the end of the short-lived Grand Duchy of Frankfurt , the church was rededicated to a Fouragemagazin , but already in the spring of 1814, after the restoration of the Free City of Frankfurt , on the initiative of the municipality, it was taken back into service, which for this purpose a collection of I shot 1200 guilders. In 1855 the church got a canal heating system , windows and doors were repaired. In 1874, EF Walcker & Cie. a new two-manual organ with 18 stops and a neo-Gothic prospectus.

After the city became Prussian in 1866, the population grew so much that the church became too small. Since 1830, the Frankfurt churches have been subject to the so-called endowment , that is, the city was responsible for their maintenance. A design by the town planning director Rügemer from 1887 envisaged an enlargement of the church by adding two vaulted yokes to the west, including a new organ gallery and a church tower. However, the city authorities decided on a spacious new building that could accommodate up to 1200 believers and was to be built elsewhere, in the Peterskirchhof.

On August 20, 1889, the city of Frankfurt decided to demolish the old church, which was important in terms of art history. The Prussian Ministry of Culture vetoed it, but gave in soon afterwards. On April 26, 1895, the last service took place in the old St. Peter's Church. After moving to the neighboring new building, it served as a replacement for the Weißfrauenkirche until October 1895 during renovations. From December 1895 to January 1896 the church was demolished. Only parts of the decoration were transferred to the new building or given to the Historical Museum .

  • Interior before 1891

  • pulpit

  • Side chapel with epitaphs from the Glauburg family

  • altar

The eclectic new building 1891–1945

The church building from 1894

From 1891 to 1894 the new building was built on Bleichstrasse, on a hill a little northwest of the old Peterskirche on the grounds of the Peterskirchhof. Immediately north of today's church was the Frankfurt city wall from the 14th to the early 19th century , the course of which roughly followed today's Bleichstrasse. The old Peterskirchhof is a few meters lower than the Peterskirche.

The new building was based on the plans of the Berlin architects Hans Grisebach and August Dinklage, who built a hall church in the style of eclecticism , a combination of different historical styles. The portal was designed in the neo-Romanesque style. Hans Grisebach was solely responsible for the interior design. The pulpit was in the neo-renaissance style, the interior was spanned by a neo-Gothic vault. The 68 m high tower of the church was the tallest building in the new town when it was built.

  • The eclectic sacred building from 1894

  • Main entrance

  • Pulpit
    (design by Hans Grisebach)

  • Interior view
    (design by Hans Grisebach)

Reconstruction in 1961/1965

View from the Nextower

On March 22, 1944, the church was badly damaged in a bomb attack and was no longer usable. It was not until 1961 to 1965 that it was rebuilt as the last of the inner city churches by the architects Theo Kellner and Wilhelm Massing . The re-inauguration took place on June 6, 1965.

The interior of the church was kept very simple during the reconstruction. The main decoration is the colored glazing by Charles Crodel , who had previously designed the windows of several other Frankfurt churches.

  • Stained glass window by Charles Crodel

  • Stained glass window in the chapel

End of the function as a sacred building in 2002

The Peterskirche was until 2002 the church of the Evangelical Lutheran Petersgemeinde. After a merger with the neighboring Epiphany congregation in the Holzhausenviertel , the congregation relocated its services to the more conveniently located Epiphany church which is better suited for congregational work .

Conversion to the youth culture church of St. Peter in 2004

The event hall with colored glass windows by Charles Crodel
The chapel

In June 2004, the renovation of St. Peter's Church began according to plans by the architects Johann Eisele and Bettina Staniek into a youth and event church under the name of youth-culture-church sankt peter . The Peterskirche was redesigned into an event center, in which cultural events, pastoral care, church services, workshops and gastronomy find their place equally. An event room with up to 1000 seats was created in the former nave, while seminar rooms, ancillary rooms and a cafeteria with 60 seats were set up on three floors in the east wing. A 400 square meter glass wall separates the new adjoining rooms from the main nave.

The planned construction costs were originally around 4.6 million euros, which were financed equally by the sponsors: from the city of Frankfurt as the owner of the Dotation Church , the Evangelical Regional Association and the Evangelical Regional Church , while the operating costs are only to be raised by the two church sponsors, who have founded a non-profit GmbH for this purpose .

Due to static weaknesses that can be traced back to the building materials used in the reconstruction in the sixties, a construction freeze had to be imposed for several months. Work could not start again until May 2005. Since the construction freeze and the additional safety measures required increased the construction costs to 5.5 million euros, there were also delays in completion. The youth culture church was consecrated on December 2, 2007, two years later than originally planned.

Furnishing

The Peterskirchhof

Crucifixion group by Hans Backoffen in the Peterskirchhof
Peterskirchhof south wall

In 1508, against the resistance of the collegiate chapter of St. Bartholomew , the council achieved the abolition of the old cathedral cemetery. A new cemetery, the Peterskirchhof, was set up in the Neustadt west of the Peterskapelle . In 1519 the council forbade the city's grave diggers from digging graves on this side of the Main outside the Peterskirchhof. In 1530, funerals in churches were also banned.

With the introduction of the Reformation, all Protestant dead in the Old Town and New Town were buried in the Peterskirchhof. For the less than 100 remaining Catholics (mainly members of the three collegiate churches and the monasteries) the old cathedral cemetery and the burial grounds in the churches were sufficient, while the Jews had their own cemetery on Judengasse , the Frankfurt ghetto .

The Peterskirchhof had to be expanded several times in the following period. During the heavy plague years from 1634 to 1636 there was no longer enough space for burials. In 1634 3512 people died, in 1635 3421 and 1636 even 6943 in Frankfurt. The city population has never been higher than 10,000 to 13,000 people since the Middle Ages, so that the high mortality can only be explained by the people from the surrounding area who had fled to the city from the horrors of the Thirty Years' War . The Pestilenzhaus , a quarantine hospital for those suffering from epidemics, was located east of St. Peter's Church on the Klapperfeld , which takes its name from the rattles with which plague sufferers had to warn other people about approaching since the Middle Ages. The pestilence house was built between 1512 and 1516 as a supplement and extension of the Kleiner Römer house , which was acquired by the Hospital Zum Heiligen Geist in 1492 and which was also located opposite on Klapperfeld. The spiritual care, including the burial, was the responsibility of St. Peter. The area was expanded and built on several times until 1679 for maintenance and quarantine purposes.

In 1746 the cemetery was expanded again. It now reached up to the city wall. Despite the expansion, there was still insufficient space, so that many graves were used several times. From 1811 the situation worsened because the city's Catholics, whose number had risen again since the 18th century due to Italian immigrants, had to be buried in the Peterskirchhof. The complaints about the inadequate hygienic conditions increased. On June 30, 1828, the daughter of a citizen Elisabeth Mauer was buried as the last dead person in the old cemetery. Since July 1st, the new main cemetery planned by city gardener Sebastian Rinz has been in use at the gates of the city.

The abandoned Peterskirchhof should actually be given a rest period of 100 years. After the annexation by Prussia , however, the area was increasingly trimmed by new buildings, including the openings in Stephanstrasse and Bleichstrasse and the new St. Peter's Church and the Liebfrauenschule. The Second World War left further destruction , including the important late Gothic crucifixion group created by Hans Backoffen in 1511 . Most recently, the southern part of the cemetery was built over in 1974 for the construction of the diamond exchange. In total, around two thirds of the original area was lost. The remaining area had been very neglected since the 1970s and a meeting point for a drug scene.

A designed corner in the retaining wall of the Peterskirche has been the Frankfurt AIDS Memorial since 1994 . A restoration project began in the 1999 Goethe year. With the support of sponsors, the remaining tombs are to be secured and the cemetery is gradually to be converted into an open-air museum.

Peterskirchhof, grave of Goethe's mother in the schoolyard of the Liebfrauenschule
Grave of Goethe's father
AIDS Memorial

Among the dead who had found their final resting place in the Peterskirchhof are to be mentioned

Bells

The old Peterskirche had three bells , presumably melted down in 1894 for the new church. The two larger bells with the chimes g 1 and b 1 weighed 12 and 7 quintals respectively and were cast by Johann Georg and Johannes Schneidewind in Frankfurt in 1792. The third bell, cast by Benedikt and Johann Georg Schneidewind in 1745, rang in dis 2 . It originally came from the Liebfrauenkirche and was exchanged in 1865 for the previous smallest bell in the Peterskirche.

The new building received a peal from four bells that were poured into Sinn by the Rincker foundry . The bells were of little musical value and were melted down except for one in 1917. In 1924 the church got a new bell, but it was confiscated again in 1942. During the reconstruction in 1964, the church received its current ringing from four bells, which also come from the Rincker company. The bells are coordinated with the Frankfurt city peal. The total weight of the bells is 5013 kg.

No. Surname Nominal
(16th note) 		Weight
(kg) 		Diameter
(mm)
1 Good news c sharp 1 −5 1907 1468
2 joy e 1 −4 1374 1315
3 peace f sharp 1 −2 1009 1178
4th freedom g sharp 1 −4 723 1050

See also

literature

  • Friedrich Bothe : History of the city of Frankfurt am Main . Verlag Wolfgang Weidlich, Frankfurt 1977, ISBN 3-8035-8920-7
  • Konrad Bund (ed.): Frankfurter Glockenbuch . Waldemar Kramer Verlag, Frankfurt 1986, ISBN 3-7829-0211-0
  • Frankfurt Historical Commission (ed.): Frankfurt am Main - The history of the city in nine contributions. (=  Publications of the Frankfurt Historical Commission . Volume XVII ). Jan Thorbecke, Sigmaringen 1991, ISBN 3-7995-4158-6 .
  • Michael Matthäus: Hamman von Holzhausen (1467–1536) - A Frankfurt patrician in the age of the Reformation . Verlag Waldemar Kramer, Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-7829-0528-8
  • Hans Pehl: Churches and chapels in old Frankfurt . Edited and reissued by Hans-Otto Schembs . Verlag Josef Knecht, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-7820-0508-2
  • Joachim Proescholdt: Your sky is like a carpet. Glass paintings by Charles Crodel in Frankfurt am Main. Verlag Waldemar Kramer, Frankfurt 1988, pp. 47-49, illus. P. 122, p. 126, p. 150, ISBN 3-7829-0362-5
  • Wolf-Christian Setzepfandt : Architecture Guide Frankfurt am Main / Architectural Guide . 3. Edition. Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-496-01236-6 , p. 9 (German, English).
  • Björn Wissenbach, The Peterskirchhof: a historical gem in the city of Frankfurt . Frankfurt am Main 2004. Historisch-Archäologische Gesellschaft e. V., 2004

Web links

Commons : Peterskirche (Frankfurt am Main)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Commons : Peterskirchhof (Frankfurt)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Carl Wolff, Rudolf Jung: Die Baudenkmäler von Frankfurt am Main - Volume 1, Church buildings . Self-published / Völcker, Frankfurt am Main 1896, p. 151
  2. ↑ Wolff, Jung: Baudenkmäler - Volume 1 , p. 155f.
  3. ↑ Wolff, Jung: Baudenkmäler - Volume 1 , p. 160
  4. ↑ http://geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hall/2923/crodel/#95 ( Memento from March 5, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ^ Werner Moritz: The pestilence houses. In: Werner Moritz / Frankfurter Verein für Geschichte und Landeskunde (ed.): The civil welfare institutions of the imperial city of Frankfurt am Main in the late Middle Ages. Studies on Frankfurt History. Volume 14, Frankfurt 1981, pp. 92-100.
  6. ↑ Wolff, Jung: Baudenkmäler - Volume 1 , p. 187

Coordinates: 50 ° 7 ′ 2.8 ″  N , 8 ° 41 ′ 1.6 ″  E