St. Johann (Bremen)

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St. Johann, decorative gable with blind arcades and mosaic masonry

St. Johann is a Roman Catholic provost church in Bremen . It was built in the 14th century as a monastery church of the Franciscan order and has been a listed building since 1973.

History and architecture

View of the choir - 2006
View into the choir - 2017

On the site of today's church in the eastern old town, in the Schnoor district , the Franciscan Order built the St. John's Monastery and basilica in 1258 . The monastery grew rapidly and the church soon became too small, so that around 1380 a three-aisled vaulted hall church took its place. The money for this came mainly from the many soul mass foundations after the plague epidemic in Europe, in which seven thousand people from Bremen died.

During the Reformation the monastery was closed in 1528 and Bremen's first hospital and madhouse was built in the monastery in 1538 with the consent of the monks. Church and monastery served different purposes; the monastery church was used as a hospital church and occasionally served Reformed congregations when their churches were being renovated or repaired. From 1684 onwards, religious services for Huguenots and later Belgian religious refugees took place in the church. The monastery was Bremen's hospital until the middle of the 17th century. It then assumed the function of a retirement home, in which Prövener (von Präbende ) lived: They were citizens who had bought permanent housing rights.

From 1802 only the choir was used for worship services. The nave was to be converted into a warehouse. This no longer happened due to the Napoleonic occupation of Bremen. The Catholic community, which was recognized again in 1806, acquired the church in 1816 on the advice of the council, which was consecrated again as a Catholic church on October 17, 1823 after restoration work. With the rubble of the monastery, which was demolished in 1834 for hygienic reasons, the street level around the church was raised by two meters to avoid flooding; in the church the floor was raised by three meters. The result was a spacious cellar, which was rented out for debt repayment and which has contained a crypt since 1992, which is used for school and student services and prayer and meditation circles. In the anteroom of the crypt, foundation piles from the 13th century are on display. The main room of the church appears comparatively low due to the elevation of the floor. The renovation of 1822/23 can be seen mainly on the outside by the walled-up choir windows below.

St. Johann is the only surviving monastery church in the city. Only the Katharinenpassage in the city center bears witness to the former Dominican monastery with the church of St. Katharinen , the St. Pauls monastery outside the city gates was destroyed in the Schmalkaldic War in 1546 .

The church building is an extremely striking representative of the brick Gothic . All three naves are covered by a single large gable roof. This design gives the west gable its unusual shape and size. It is divided into three storeys, which in turn are subdivided by pairs of pointed arches. The base of the pointed arch panels is lined with ornamental walls, the pointed arch fields are plastered. A circular screen with a hexagram is fitted into the top of the gable , which has no other than decorative purpose. It has only been there since 1878, when the roof was renewed, the gable was redesigned and decorated with a stone cross.

A tower did not reject the building in accordance with the rules of the order of the Franciscan originally, but the church has a roof turret with an existing three bells ringing . The bells were delivered in 1964 by the bell founder Otto from Bremen-Hemelingen. The chimes of the bells are: d ′ ′ - e ′ ′ - f sharp ′ ′. The bells have the following diameters: 678 mm, 604 mm and 538 mm.

The baptismal font was created in 1845 in neo-Gothic style by the sculptor Georg Andreas Steinhäuser. It shows how a person to be baptized is accepted into the community of Christians through baptism, while the snake sneaks away as a symbol of evil.

The church windows were created between 1955 and 1957 by the artist Walter Klocke . Significant saints such as the patron saint John the Baptist as well as Peter , Paulus , Franziskus , Gertrud von Helfta and Elisabeth von Thuringia , but also saints from the Bremen area, namely Willehad , Ansgar , Rimbert and Emma von Lesum are depicted .

In 1965, a series of two-storey red-stone-faced houses were built on the monastery grounds for the St. Johannis Provostry at Hohen Strasse 2-3 / Franziskanerstrasse 7, based on plans by Bernhard Wessel . The buildings have been a listed building since 1973 .

As part of a thorough renovation, a new ensemble of altar, ambo and tabernacle was installed in 1994. The sculptor Johannes Niemeier from Rietberg created this from Savonnières limestone .

From April 2016, the church was closed to worshipers for renovation work and was reopened by Osnabrück Bishop Franz-Josef Bode on October 29th. During this time, a new sacristy was built, the brick facades were renovated, the church interior was redesigned in color and equipped with the latest lighting and sound technology.

organ

View towards the organ - 2017

The organ of St. Johann was built in 1965 by the organ building company Franz Breil (Dorsten). In 1994, Siegfried Sauer (Höxter) reworked it with a renewal of the key system, the installation of a new console and the exchange of several registers. After the church renovation was completed in 2016/2017, Sauer & Heinemann Orgelbau (Höxter) carried out extensive work (general cleaning, re-intonation, installation of a new typesetting system, register exchange in the first manual). The instrument has 47 registers on three manuals and a pedal. The action mechanism is mechanical, the register circuit is electrical.

I. Main work C – a 3
1. Dumped 16 ′
2. Principal 8th'
3. Open flute 8th'
4th Dumped 8th'
5. octave 4 ′
6th Pointed flute 4 ′
7th Fifth 2 2 ⁄ 3  ′
8th. octave 2 ′
9. Cornett III (2017)
10. Mixture VI 2 ′
11. Trumpet 16 ′
12. Trumpet 8th'
II. Positive C-a 3
13. Dulziana 8 ′ (1994)
14th Reed flute 8th'
15th Principal 4 ′
16. Flute 4 ′
17th octave 2 ′
18th Schwiegel 2 ′ (1994)
19th Sif flute 1 1 ⁄ 3  ′
20th Sesquialtera II 2 2 ⁄ 3  ′
21st Sharp IV 1 ′
22nd Dulcian 16 ′
23. Krummhorn 8th'
Tremulant
III. Swell C – a 3
24. Gemshorn 8th'
25th Wooden dacked 8th'
26th String flute 8 ′ (pending)
27. Principal 4 ′
28. Flute 4 ′
29 Nasat 2 2 ⁄ 3  ′
30th Forest flute 2 ′
31. third 1 3 ⁄ 5  ′
32. Oktavlein 1'
33. Mixture IV-V 1 1 ⁄ 3  ′
34. Trumpet 8th'
35. Rohrschalmey 8th'
36. Hautbois 4 ′
Tremulant
Pedal C – f 1
37. Principal 16 ′
38. Sub-bass 16 ′
39. Fifth bass 10 2 ⁄ 3  ′
40. Octave bass 8th'
41. Thought bass 8th'
42. Chorale bass 4 ′
43. Night horn 2 ′
44. Backset V 2 2 ⁄ 3  ′
45. trombone 16 ′
46. Trumpet 8th'
47. Clairon 4 ′

Propstei St. Johannis

On 15 February 1953, the St. John's church was due to its importance as a central Catholic Church in Bremen from Osnabrück Archbishop Hermann Wilhelm Berning to Propsteikirche appointed and their pastor to pastor .

The parish of St. Johann and the parish of St. Elisabeth in Hastedt were merged on January 1, 2007 to form the St. Johann parish . The new congregation had 10,500 Catholics from more than a hundred nations. It has its office at Hohe Str. 2 to 7. The day care center St. Johann, Kolpingstraße 2, the St. Johannis school elementary school, Tiefer 12, the St. Johannis school secondary level I and II, Dechanatstraße 9, and the Birgittenkloster u. a. are institutions in the municipality.

Hermann Lange was chaplain or pastor at the church from 1911 to 1931 .

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Church of St. Johann in the monument database of the LfD
  2. ↑ a b leaflet of the Catholic Propsteigemeinde St. Johann, Bremen o. J.
  3. ↑ a b c Catholic Propsteikirche St. Johann Bremen , Church Guide, accessed on December 21, 2019
  4. ^ Gerhard Reinhold: Otto bells. Family and company history of the Otto bell foundry dynasty . Self-published, Essen 2019, ISBN 978-3-00-063109-2 , p. 588, here in particular p. 559 .
  5. ↑ Gerhard Reinhold: Church bells - Christian world cultural heritage, illustrated using the example of the bell founder Otto, Hemelingen / Bremen . Nijmegen / NL 2019, p. 556, here in particular p. 513 , urn : nbn: nl: ui: 22-2066 / 204770 (doctoral thesis at Radboud University Nijmegen).
  6. ↑ Propstei St. Johann in the monument database of the LfD
  7. ^ First service in the renovated St. Johann Provost Church with Bishop Bode , Catholic Community Association in Bremen, October 29, 2016.
  8. ↑ Information on the work on the organ in 2016/2017 on the website of Sauer & Heinemann, Höxter.
  9. ^ In: Church leaders of the Propsteikirche St. Johann Bremen .

Web links

Commons : St. Johann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 53 ° 4 ′ 25 ″  N , 8 ° 48 ′ 30 ″  E