South Church (Esslingen am Neckar)
The Protestant southern church in the Pliensauvorstadt in Esslingen am Neckar , built in 1925-26 according to plans by Martin Elsaesser , is a church from the Expressionist era . It is considered to be one of the most interesting buildings of the 20th century in Esslingen am Neckar.
history
prehistory
With the development towards an industrial city and the increasing number of inhabitants, the settlement of the areas "over the bridge" south of the Neckar began , which until now had mainly been used for gardening and viticulture. The development consisted of Wilhelminian style villas of factory owners and multi-storey workers' houses. In 1880 the first “small child care” was set up in the Pliensauvorstadt, which quickly became very popular. In the domicile of this facility, called “Steck's Säle”, the first service was celebrated on Pentecost 1901. Another meeting room for Protestant residents had been located at Uhlandstrasse 14 since 1892. In 1909, the opening of a provisional pastoral office was celebrated there, and in 1919 a proper parish was established. The first pastor of the community was Otto Riethmüller . At that time a church building association already existed in the community of several thousand people.
In 1914, a building plot was purchased on Spitalsteige, but the outbreak of the First World War initially prevented the construction project from continuing. In 1919 Martin Elsaesser created two designs for a large and a small national church. The large version would have held 3000 people and would have been a war memorial church at the same time, the small version that was then carried out offered space for 927 visitors.
Church building
Construction of the church began on May 28, 1925. In addition to financial difficulties due to inflation , the nature of the soil - sandstone on a layer of marl - and the steeply sloping terrain posed problems for the church builders. Due to the necessary securing of the foundation, the construction costs did not amount to 140,000 to 160,000, as originally planned, but to 610,970 Reichsmarks . Martin Elsaesser, who took over the management of the building construction department in Frankfurt am Main in 1925 , had to hand over the building supervision and after long disputes waived his architect fee. For financial reasons, his original plans had to be changed slightly. The church became eight feet lower, the roof was tiled instead of copper, and the meeting house was not built at all. While the height of the building could not be changed later, the plans for the roofing and the parish hall were finally implemented in the 1980s.
The southern church was consecrated on November 14, 1926. Otto Riethmüller became the first pastor of the southern parish. The symbol of his theological understanding was the cross on the globe, which adorns the altar of the south church, but also Riethmüller's tombstone in the Cannstatter Uff cemetery .
The Southern Church in the Third Reich
Otto Riethmüller's successor, Pastor Paul Schmidt, looked after the southern parish from 1928 to 1959. He belonged to the Evangelical Confessional Community in Württemberg, which he also led for a time. Pastor Schmidt and his wife, as members of the Württemberg parsonage chain, hid Jewish fellow citizens in a hidden room in the south church during the Nazi regime.
layout
Functional separation
The church is divided into a sermon and a celebration church. Elsaesser declared in 1924 that sacred acts in the narrower sense only take up a large room in exceptional cases and should therefore be celebrated in a smaller room that is more conducive to concentration. The celebration church of the south church is circular, while the sermon church has a rectangular floor plan. Karl Friedrich Schinkel had already had similar plans for the church on Spittelmarkt in Berlin in 1819 .
Exterior
The Esslinger Südkirche is a sacred building of Expressionism and shows not only round and curved shapes but also jagged, upward-pointing elements that are reminiscent of the Gothic tradition. The exterior of the church is also reminiscent of Romanesque churches in France or Italy. The building is characterized by brick masonry.
From the outside, the division into sermon and celebration church cannot be recognized if one disregards the small rectangular windows that belong to the aisle-like corridor that surrounds the celebration church. In general, the window design is the only visible indication of the subdivision of the building from the outside. On the ground floor, which only has windows on the valley side, there are large arched windows that belong to the parish and confirmation hall. The narrow arched windows belong to the confirmation room, the wide ones to the community hall. The tall, narrow windows of the Sermon Church, arranged in groups of two, stand out clearly from the almost square ones in the side corridor. The central nave also has another row of larger, rectangular windows above.
A four-story tower on a square floor plan rises at the southeast corner between the sermon and celebration church. Buttresses between the windows and on the tower are elements that were used in the Gothic era. The Gothic elements are repeated in the parsonage of the south church, the z. B. has ogival staircase windows.
Due to the hillside location of the building, the parish rooms are on the lower floor and the celebration church is lower than the sermon church. The church has galleries on the west and slope sides.
The main portal of the south church is on the north side. It is crowned by the relief "Troubled and laden" by Dorkas Reinacher-Härlin .
Sermon Church
The sermon church has a wooden beam ceiling and is kept in a functional style. On the south side it is extended by a side aisle with rising tiers. This side aisle has niches with barrel vaults that are reminiscent of late Gothic and Baroque church buildings. The walls of the central nave are unplastered and show red brick with gray cement joints, which create interesting shadows in the bright room. The walls of the aisle, on the other hand, are plastered and decorated with stencil painting.
Celebration church
The celebration church is much lower than the sermon church and housed under the organ gallery of the sermon church. At the transition between the two rooms there is an altar table that can be used on both sides and is decorated with a cross made of fluorescent tubes and two spherical crosses . The walls of the celebration church are plastered and decorated with stencil painting like those of the side aisle of the sermon church, but show warmer colors. The colorful glass windows of the ambulatory let only little light fall into the celebration church. The radiant vault on the ceiling underlines the cave-like character of the semi-dark room. The two galleries of the church allow a separate installation of the choir and performances with alternating chants.
Furnishing
Art Deco style lamps (designed at the Cologne School of Applied Arts), a crucifixion group by Maria Eulenbruch made of terracotta and three pulpit-bearing angels by Dorkas Reinacher-Härlin decorate the church. The pulpit bears the text of the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount on terracotta tiles.
Since the 50th anniversary of the church, there has been a mosaic in the foyer by Hans Gottfried von Stockhausen , which shows Jesus as the good shepherd.
literature
- Norbert Bongartz: The south church in Esslingen. Reconstruction of the original colors inside the church . In: Preservation of monuments in Baden-Württemberg , 8th year 1979, issue 1, p. 41 ( PDF ).
- Elisabeth Spitzbart, Jörg Schilling: Martin Elsaesser. Church buildings, parish and parish houses. Tübingen, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-8030-0778-0 .
- Elisabeth Spitzbart-Maier: The south church in Esslingen by Martin Elsaesser . In: Esslinger Studies , Volume 29/1990, pp. 281-305.
- Elisabeth Spitzbart-Maier: The church buildings of Martin Elsaesser and their requirements in Protestant church building theory and liturgy discussion . Stuttgart 1989.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Knoll / Velden-Hohrath 2006, p. 16
- ↑ quoted from: Andreas Knoll, Frauke Velden-Hohrath and others: Die Südkirche in Esslingen. (= DKV-Kunstführer , No. 638. ') Munich / Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-422-02041-2 , p. 18.
- ^ Horst Schwebel: Liturgy as builder. Changes in Protestant church building between 1900 and 1950. In: Jean Wolfgang Stock (Ed.): European church building 1900–1950. Berlin et al. 2006, p. 150.
- ↑ http://www.kirchbau.de/4/4ju.htm
Coordinates: 48 ° 43 '58.1 " N , 9 ° 17' 46.2" E