Castle Church (Koenigsberg)

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Eastern courtyard side of the castle church with an old helmet
inner space

The castle church of Königsberg was the coronation church built in brick Gothic in Königsberg Castle .

description

The church, 83 meters long and 18 meters wide, took up the entire west side of the castle. From the outside it was secured by two mighty round defense towers ( Kaiser-Wilhelm-Platz corner Gesekusplatz and Gesekusplatz corner Schlossstrasse). The church tower, which was also the castle tower, stood in the south-west side of the castle and had received a new helmet from Friedrich August Stüler in 1866 . His bells played the chorale at 11 o'clock . Oh, stay with your grace and at 9 o'clock. Now all forests rest .

Interior with Caspari organ

The Muscovite Hall was located above the castle church . You entered the church from the castle courtyard through the eastern long side. The pulpit altar from 1706 was housed in a choir niche to the left of the entrance. The altar, pulpit, gallery and royal box were in the baroque style . The pulpit altar - consecrated to the Trinity - was designed by Eosander von Göthe in 1706 or 1710 and was one of the "earliest in East Prussia". On the entablature there were two reclining female figures - faith on the left, hope on the right. On the cartouche was a verse from the book of Isaiah (58.1 LUT ). An angel held the Prussian royal crown above it.

Inside, the originally single-nave church was supported in the middle by four slender columns after the renovation in 1806, which divided the church space in two and ended in a filigree neo-Gothic cross-ribbed vault. On the western, southern and northern sides, galleries were built for expansion. The organ - Johann Josua Mosengel signed the cost estimate of April 5, 1730 - was built between 1731 and the spring of 1734 by his successor Georg Sigismund Caspari (1693–1741). The remarkable case was flat and stretched almost the entire width of the church, it consisted of two identical parts, which were connected to each other by a low middle section with a cartridge with musical instruments. On the walls, pillars and gallery parapets there were memorial plaques for the soldiers of East Prussia who fell in 1813 and the coats of arms of the knights of the Black Eagle Order . Since it had also been a garrison church since 1816, the panels contained the names of battles and troops. The four round pictures (1. “Announcement of the birth of Jesus”, 2. “Birth of Jesus”, 3. “Ecce homo” (Christ with a crown of thorns) and 4. “Christ appears to Magdalena as a gardener”) by Anton Möller , 1563, were also worth seeing –1611 (famous as the “Painter of Danzig”) above the outer doors and above those of the large central room inside the “Royal Lodge”.

history

Elevation of Prussia to a kingdom - anointing of Frederick I (1701)

Duke Albrecht Friedrich of Prussia had the Königsberg Palace expanded as the residence of the sovereign sovereignty that was dependent on Poland. After the death of Duke Albrecht, a new west wing with a castle church was built under Duke Georg Friedrich , which was named after its master builder Blasius Berwart . The designs for the castle church (also called Berwartsbau ) were also provided by Berwart, who came to Königsberg from Stuttgart in 1578/79 and who had worked on the old castle in Stuttgart under Aberlin Tretsch until 1562 . According to Berwart's plans for a transverse church , the Königsberg stone setting master Michael, the master carpenter Hans Wißmar from Frankfurt / Main and the Elbingen city master builder Timotheus Just completed the sacred building in 1593. Similar to the Stuttgart Palace, mighty round towers were built at the outer corners of the palace church. The buttresses on the castle church should point outwards to emphasize that this was a sacred building. The castle church was built on the model of the Szczecin castle church , consecrated in 1585 . The castle church received Renaissance gables, which were created in the style of the German Renaissance influenced by the Dutchman Hans Vredeman de Vries in Antwerp . There were the north and south gables of the castle church as well as seven towards the suburb of Steindamm and three towards the castle courtyard. Master builder Blasius Berwart processed the experiences of Wilhelm Zacharias, the master builder of the Szczecin Church. In autumn 1586 the shell of the castle church was completed. Inside it was a single-aisled room covered with a wooden ceiling with rich stucco work and paintings. The plasterer Hans Windrauch created the stucco ceilings from 1586. Windrauch had previously worked at Frederiksborg Palace, built in 1560, for King Frederik II of Denmark and at Kronborg Palace , "one of the most important Renaissance castles in Northern Europe". Wooden galleries surrounded the sacred space and supported the wide-span wooden ceiling; The altar, pulpit and organ were installed vertically one above the other on the eastern long wall in front of the sacristy risalits.

There are some earlier chapels, but these were only conversions in existing castles or smaller church rooms in new castle wings, such as the Dresden Castle Chapel and Augustusburger Castle Church . In “Königberg, on the other hand, it was a large new church building that was clearly recognizable as such from the outside.” The Königsberg Castle Church was a new Protestant church that played an important role in architectural history: it was a “large new church building. Mainly for this last reason, the Königsberg Castle Church can actually - as Grashoff claims - be described as the first new Protestant church! "

In 1593 the construction of the church ceiling was damaged. In 1597 the church was even closed because of the risk of collapse. The wood of the castle church had been installed wet and had started to work. The wooden beams that carried the stucco work were rotting. At the suggestion of Hans Wismar, the wooden, wide-span church ceiling was completely removed by the builder Blasius Berwart. In 1600 four large octagonal pillars were built in the basement of the castle church. In contrast to the earlier single-nave wooden ceiling, two-nave star vaults were created. Small Renaissance decorations in the style of Cornelius Floris were created at the intersection of the star vaults, the gusset of which the court painter Daniel Rose painted with figurative, biblical representations and other ornaments. In 1606 four statues, allegories of faith, hope, love and justice by the sculptor Alexander Krause, were placed in the castle church. In 1607 the renovation was finished.

The castle church was the first regional church. Albrecht had the country converted to the Lutheran faith and so this church in the ducal residence symbolized the Lutheran idea of ​​the unity of throne and altar. Therefore the body of the Great Elector was laid out here and the funeral ceremony for Queen Luise was held.

Friedrich I founded the Order of the Black Eagle there on January 17, 1701 . The following day he had himself anointed by two bishops in the castle church and was crowned the first king in Prussia in the castle's throne room. The coronation celebrations devoured 2½ times the annual budget; see King Frederick III. For this reason, the more economical successors only allowed themselves to be paid homage to the enthronement. Only when disputes arose as a result of the Prussian constitution of 1850 as to whether the enthronement had to take place by hereditary homage or by taking the oath prescribed by the constitution, Wilhelm I decided to crown himself again in Königsberg. During this coronation meeting on October 18, 1861, however, he only hinted at the unbearable constitution in his oath: “ By God's grace, Prussia's kings have been wearing the crown for 160 years. After the throne is surrounded by contemporary furnishings, I mount it as king. But remembering that the crown comes only from God, I have proclaimed through the coronation in a sacred place that I humbly received it from my free hands. “Interestingly, Menzel did not depict the coronation but the oath of the new king in his painting. In the same way, the king was depicted as a statue on Kaiser-Wilhelm-Platz in Königsberg. The crown casings that were specially made for the ceremony have been missing since 1945.

The castle church was destroyed with the castle in the Second World War by the air raids on Königsberg and the battle for Königsberg . The ruins were blown up in 1968 under Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev .

literature

  • Robert Albinus: Königsberg Lexicon. City and surroundings. Flechsig, Würzburg 2002, ISBN 3-88189-441-1 .
  • Wulf D. Wagner , Heinrich Lange: The Königsberg castle. A history of building and culture, vol. 1: From the foundation to the government of Friedrich Wilhelm I (1255–1740) , Schnell and Steiner, Regensburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-7954-1936-3 .
  • Wulf D. Wagner, Heinrich Lange: The Königsberg castle. A building and cultural history. Vol. 2: From Frederick the Great to the Demolition (1740–1967 / 68). The fate of his collections after 1945. Schnell and Steiner, Regensburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-7954-1953-0 .

Web links

Commons : Castle Church (Kaliningrad)  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Boetticher, p. 84.
  2. ↑ cf. Georg Dehio; Ernst Gall; Bernhard Schmid: Handbook of German art monuments. Teutonic Order of Prussia. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich / Berlin 1952, p. 369.
  3. ^ Herbert Meinhard Mühlpfordt: Königsberg sculptures and their masters 1255-1945 , Holzner, Würzburg 1970, p. 226.
  4. ↑ Werner Renkewitz, Jan Janca, Hermann Fischer : History of the art of organ building in East and West Prussia. Volume II, 1: Mosengel, Caspari, Casparini . Pape Verlag, Berlin 2008, pp. 263-269.
  5. ↑ cf. Wulf D. Wagner: The Königsberg Castle - A short building history from the end of the order to the accession of Friedrich Wilhelm I (1525-1713) . In: Bernhart Jähnig (Ed.): 750 years of Königsberg. Contributions to the history of a residence town for a time . Elwert, Marburg 2008, OCLC 281162800 , p. 385-416 , here p. 396 .
  6. ^ Herbert Meinhard Mühlpfordt: Immortal Königsberg Castle . The Berwartsbau. P. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2004, OCLC 56686151 , p. 113-134 .
  7. ↑ a b cf. Mühlpfordt (2004), p. 115.
  8. ↑ cf. Wagner, pp. 385-416, here p. 400.
  9. ↑ a b c cf. Mühlpfordt (2004), p. 117.
  10. ↑ a b c cf. Wagner, p. 400
  11. ↑ cf. Wagner, pp. 385-416, here pp. 400-401. However, this assessment is now contradicted by the research results on the early southern German transverse churches from 1562, which were not rebuilt or rebuilt as chapels only for the castle rulers, but in the spirit of the Reformation as parish churches, which, incidentally, was also done for the castle chapel in Neuburg an der Donau in 1543 and the Torgau Castle Chapel is valid in 1544.
  12. ↑ cf. Wagner, pp. 385-416, here p. 403.

Coordinates: 54 ° 42 ′ 36.8 "  N , 20 ° 30 ′ 38.8"  E