St. Johann Baptist (Wuppertal)
The church of St. Johann Baptist in today's Wuppertal district of Oberbarmen is the second church built for the Catholic Christians in Barmen .
history
The Catholics who moved to Oberbarmen since the beginning of industrialization were initially looked after by the parish of St. Antonius . New buildings of the church of the patron saint of Barmer in the years 1825–1829 and 1869–1883 took into account the rapidly growing population in the 19th century. Nevertheless, the need for a further parish and church for Oberbarmen became clear, and in 1883 a church building association for the East of Barmen was formed around a Catholic school in Wichlinghausen , which by 1887 had collected the necessary donations for the acquisition of a property on the Krühbusch, for example in the middle between the town centers of Wupperfeld , Wichlinghausen and Rittershausen . Gerhard August Fischer was commissioned to plan the new church; construction began in 1888 and was opened on November 20, 1890. The church was consecrated to John the Baptist , the namesake of Cologne's auxiliary bishop Johannes Baudri , who donated around 15,000 marks for the building. The interior was fitted out within about seven years. a. three wooden neo-Gothic table altars, the vaults, the organ and the original four bells.
construction
St. Johann Baptist is a three-aisled hall church of historicism , the architecture of which uses a mixture of Gothic and Romanesque style elements. The building is oriented to the east. A two-tower facade is in front of the church. The two four-story towers were originally crowned with pointed octagonal helmets that reached 52.90 m in height. Between them lies an entrance risalit with a pointed gable, which led through a double portal, which has now been destroyed, into a rectangular anteroom between the two towers. The gable roof of the nave is crossed by a second, which suggests a single-nave transept , but the length of which does not exceed the width of the three naves. To the east, the nave closes with a hip , from which the smaller, rectangular choir protrudes, with a pointed gable similar to the west facade and the gables at the ends of the transverse block, which is flanked by two round, octagonal stair turrets on the upper floor. The eastern facade is characterized by a tracery - Rosette divided and two neo-Gothic windows, a Gothic blind arcade in the center framed originally the altarpiece.
The exterior construction corresponds to the light interior of the church: the vestibule between the towers is followed by three cross -arched yokes , with the side aisles being about half the width of the central nave. A fourth yoke is slightly longer than the width of the central nave, which suggests a crossing with a transept. Behind it is a short half-length yoke, which is followed by an almost square choir. The choir was originally surrounded by a colonnade with pointed arcades. Above this, a ledge structured the church completely horizontally; In the choir, the side facades were structured by rosettes and column arcades to match the size of the altar wall; in the rest of the church there is a narrow circumferential gallery above, on which half-columns in contrasting colors carry the large pointed arch ribs that frame the high windows of the yokes.
The shape of the church was changed several times: in 1941 the wooden altars were removed, the arcades in the chancel were walled up and a marble-clad altar block was built, crowned by a sandstone sculpture of the crucifixion. Today this group of figures is located south of the choir outside the church. On March 13, 1945, a bomb attack destroyed the building to the ground. For the reconstruction, which was completed in 1950, the towers were given flat tent roofs . A redesign of the interior after the Second Vatican Council from 1965 to 1968 replaced the windows in the choir wall with a plain white wall, the high altar was replaced with an altar table that was moved into the center of the choir. In addition, the entrance to the vestibule in the west facade was designed as a simple, flat, rectangular opening. New church windows should illuminate the room brighter and more friendly. During a restoration between 1990 and 1992, the interior was brought closer to the original shape of the time it was built, so the choir windows were restored and designed by the artist Clemens Hillebrand in 1993 , the original pointed arches of the ambulatory were rebuilt as blind arcades and the ribs of the vault were restored to their original state designed.
Today the church has 342 seats. The church has been a listed building since 1993 .
organ
The organ was built in 1997 as the first instrument planned for the church itself after the Second World War by the organ builder Siegfried Sauer (Höxter). The instrument has 31 registers (2051 pipes ) on three manuals and a pedal . The key actions and normal couplings are mechanical (optionally electrical), the stop actions and other couplings are electrical.
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Couple
- Normal coupling: II / I, III / I, III / II, I / P, II / P, III / P
- Sub-octave coupling: III / I, III / III
- Super octave coupling: III / P
Bells
After the confiscation of the two older bells for weapons production during the world wars, the bells form the church's third bell. In 1927, the Otto bell foundry from Hemelingen / Bremen cast a four-part ring of bronze bells for St. Johann Baptist. At that time the bell weighed almost 11 tons and had the disposition: a 0 - c '- h' –e '. Only the "small" e 'bell, consecrated to St. Francis, with a diameter of 1256 mm and a weight of 1370 kg, survived the wars. In 1982 the foundry Petit & Gebr. Edelbrock delivered a Marienglocke in c 'and the Agnesglocke in d'. The church today has a three-part bronze bell ringing.
literature
- Sigrid Lekebusch, Florian Speer (eds.): Churches and places of worship in Barmen , Wuppertal 2008, ISBN 978-3-87707-721-4
Individual evidence
- ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from September 13, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (with image of the windows), archived copy ( memento of the original from May 15, 2003 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (with description of the motifs).
- ↑ More information on the organ ( Memento of the original from March 25, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ 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 pp. 61, 445, 462, 530, 577 .
- ↑ 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 453, 475, 537 , urn : nbn: nl: ui: 22-2066 / 204770 (dissertation at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen).
Web links
- Entry in the Wuppertal monument list
- Internet presence of the parish with a virtual tour
Coordinates: 51 ° 16 ′ 35.5 ″ N , 7 ° 13 ′ 16.9 ″ E