Ursuline convent Fritzlar

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The monastery complex today: In the center of the picture the Katharinenkirche, on the right the monastery building, on the left the original monastery school completed in 1735

The Ursuline convent Fritzlar ("Convent of the Ursulines Fritzlar") in the north Hessian town of Fritzlar existed from 1711 to 2003, with two political interruptions (1877–1887 and 1941–1945). From 1712 to 1989 the sisters of the convent still run it today existing Fritzlar Ursuline School .

prehistory

Fritzlar - From the Topographia Hassiae by Matthäus Merian the Younger 1655. On the left below the cathedral in the walled Neustadt the Katharinenkirche and on the left the convent of the Augustinians, which in 1711 became the Ursuline convent.

In 1145 Provost Bruno von Weißenstein donated a hospital for the poor on the slope below the cathedral . By 1254 at the latest, this foundation had become an Augustinian convent that ran the hospital. At the turn of the 13th to the 14th century, the monastery built the Katharinenkirche, which is still preserved today . Economic difficulties and the effects of the Reformation led to the dissolution of the monastery in 1538. The monastery buildings slowly fell into disrepair, and the Katharinenkirche, although still used as a place of worship, fell into disrepair. In the years 1713–1719, today's monastery building of the Ursulines was built on the site of this monastery .

Foundation and beginnings

In 1700 Martha Hitz from Fritzlar contacted the Ursulines in Duderstadt to persuade them to establish a convent and a girls' school in Fritzlar. Ten years later, with the consent of the Archbishop of Mainz, Lothar Franz von Schönborn , the people of Duderstadt acquired the former Augustinian monastery for 5000 thalers. The house in Duderstadt, however, could not hand over any nuns who could have devoted themselves to educating girls in Fritzlar , the central task of the order. Only in the following year, at the request of the Archbishop of Mainz, did the first three nuns from the Metz convent, founded in 1649 , including the first superior of the Fritzlar convent, Augustina Condessa d'Aspremont († September 26, 1734). They brought three French Ursuline pensioners with them and on July 11, 1711 they founded the new convent in Fritzlar.

The beginning was very difficult, not least because of the language problems and the general distrust of the population towards foreigners. One of the three founders therefore soon returned to Metz. The nuns initially lived in rented rooms in the “Englischer Hof” inn. There they began on June 19, 1712 with the lessons of those who had come from France and the first three German pensioners; all three were daughters of foreign noble families. It was only when priests from the Minorite monastery agreed to conduct services for free in 1715 that there was more acceptance and support among the city's population, and in 1718 the elementary school for girls in the city began. In order to ensure the economic supply of the convent and boarding school, the convent bought back the former monastery property of the Augustinian nuns on Mühlengraben below Fritzlarer Neustadt from the municipal "Hospital zum Heiligen Geist", which had taken over the property when the Augustinian monastery was dissolved in 1538.

The monastery building

The monastery building (right) and the Katharinenkirche (left)

On August 5, 1713, the foundation stone was laid for the planned new monastery building in today's Neustädter Strasse, with a school and boarding school for girls. The master builder of Landgrave Karl von Hessen-Kassel , Giovanni Francesco Guerniero , offered to work out the building plans and presented the plans to Pope Clement XI on a trip to Rome . before, who then became a patron of the monastery. The Fulda prince Abbot Adalbert von Schleifras , whose niece lived in the monastery boarding school, sent his master builder Meinwolf to carry out the construction. Landgrave Karl gave money and visited the nuns. His son Friedrich , later King of Sweden , also visited them and sent hunting booty. The Counts of Waldeck donated money, grain, wood and food.

On May 8, 1719, the monastery building was completed and occupied. The building adjoined the Katharinenkirche to the west and was slightly tilted so that the sisters could enter the church directly from their living area. The cells and halls were on the south side of the elongated four-storey building and looked into the cloister garden and far over the Eder lowlands , while the corridors with their small windows with barred windows on the two lower floors ran on the north side facing the street and town. The building, which was designed without much architectural decoration, has a wide central projectile on the south side. (The main building was extended to the west in 1824 and expanded again in 1895.) Landgrave Karl General Garden Inspector Wunsdorf was in charge of planning the French cloister garden, with terraces , arcades , cascades and fountains .

The Katharinenkirche was renovated to the extent that in 1726 it was consecrated as a monastery church by the Erfurt auxiliary bishop Christoph Ignatius Gudenus . The simple Gothic building has a single nave and a roof turret from 1717. The stone sculpture of St. Catherine inside the church dates from the first half of the 18th century.

The Convention

According to the statutes of the Ursulines, the convent was a religious order under papal law, was autonomous and was subordinate to the Pope . In addition to the superior, who was elected by secret ballot by the convent sisters, there was an assistant, a conductress (responsible for economic matters), a novice master and a headmistress. The nuns with higher education were the choir sisters and teachers, wore the black veil, prayed in Latin , and were addressed with "Mère", later "Mater". The lay sisters worked in housekeeping and agriculture, wore the white veil, prayed in German, and were addressed as “sœur”, later “sister”. Novices brought a “trousseau” with them when they entered the monastery, which could be money, furniture or other material goods. Professional training appropriate to the order of the Ursulines, the education of girls, was credited as dowry. After their postulate of up to two years and the subsequent novitiate , usually also two years , the new sisters, if they did not want to leave the monastery after all, made their "perpetual vows" .

School operation

Both the boarding school and the school for local girls enjoyed increasing popularity. In 1724 there were already 16 schoolgirls, mostly daughters of the regional nobility, living in the boarding school. And the rush of schoolgirls from the city was such that a new half-timbered schoolhouse was built for external schoolgirls from 1731–1735 northeast of the monastery church . The Archbishop of Mainz, Franz Ludwig , contributed a considerable amount to the construction.

Seven Years War and Napoleonic occupation

The multiple changing occupations by enemy troops and the severe devastation of the city during the Seven Years' War did not leave the monastery unaffected, but there was also help in critical situations. So three French officers paid out of their own pocket the contribution of 500 thalers imposed on the monastery , and when a Prussian-English army plundered the area around the town, its commander ordered the monastery fields to be spared. When the city was bombarded in 1761 by Prince Karl Wilhelm von Braunschweig's army , the monastery buildings were not damaged. After the end of the war in 1763, however, only six nuns lived in the convent, and their need was great due to the lack of deliveries in kind by the tenants of the convent fields.

During the occupation of the city by Napoleonic troops in 1797, high war contributions were again demanded from the monastery.

1803-1877

With the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss 1803 the transfer of sovereignty in Fritzlar from Kurmainz to Kurhessen took place , but the monastery was not secularized , probably because of its educational importance and in contrast to St. Petri-Stift and the Franciscan monastery . Augustine Bardt († July 10, 1856), who was elected superior in 1812 and filled this position until 1856, led the monastery, boarding school and school to a new bloom. The school operation was expanded to include two boarding and two external classes, and the number of sisters grew so much that no secular assistants were needed and the monastery building had to be extended to the west in 1824. Classes were given six mornings from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. and four afternoons from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. In 1859 the Katharinenkirche was renovated and consecrated, and in the same year the new Marienkapelle, which served the boarding students, was consecrated.

Exile 1877–1887

When Bismarck's Kulturkampf began to emerge after 1871 , the sisters had to think about their future and that of the monastery. The monastery property was entrusted to a trustworthy tenant as early as 1874. After the Prussian monastery law came into force in 1875, the official decree was issued on June 28, 1876 , which ordered the closure of the boarding school and school on April 1, 1877 and the expulsion of the sisters from the Kingdom of Prussia . After a petition from the city of Fritzlar against the implementation of this decree had been rejected on February 15, 1877, the nuns accepted an invitation from the Sisters' House in Arras to move into a house in Béthune in northern France which they owned and had made available to the Fritzlar Sisters . A fake sale of the monastery buildings that was quickly carried out was declared void by the government. The school was closed on March 8, 1877. On April 4, 1877, 24 sisters and seven boarding school students left the city by horse and cart accompanied by residents of Fritzlar to travel from Wabern by train via Aachen to Arras and ten days later to move to Béthune. The group was accompanied by Georg Ignaz Komp , later Bishop of Fulda . The monastery buildings were confiscated, some of them rented and at times used as a district office. The organ in the Katharinenkirche, built by the organ builder Adam Joseph Oestreich (1799-1843) from 1832–1834 , was sold to Großenenglis , where it remained until 1973, and then spent 22 years in storage with an organ builder. It has been in the ev. Village church of Kleinenglis since 1995 .

Return and new beginning

The Fulda Bishop Georg von Kopp , who has been in office since December 1881, visited the sisters several times in their exile in Béthune. In April 1887 they were allowed to return. On September 15, Bishop von Kopp instructed the sisters to return home, and on September 29, 1887, 12 surviving choir sisters and 5 lay sisters returned to Fritzlar, where they were greeted with great sympathy by the population. A large part of the monastery was still rented and only one floor was initially available. Only after the lease with the last tenant expired on September 16, 1889, the nuns were able to take possession of the entire monastery again. After that the convent flourished again. As early as 1890 a new organ was installed in the Katharinenkirche by Balthasar Schlimbach . The steady increase in membership required an extension to the monastery building as early as 1895. In 1907 32 sisters lived in the monastery. In 1915 there were 17 postulants and novices, and due to a lack of space, many interested women had to be turned away during these years.

On November 23, 1888, the school was officially recognized by the Prussian government. This was followed by a steady expansion of teaching operations, both in terms of the number of students and in terms of the range of training courses. In October 1889, the sisters were given permission to teach girls under 10 years of age. Shortly before the turn of the century, they opened an industrial school for the city's female youth. From 1903 the school was a so-called "Higher Girls School" ; State recognition as such took place in 1908. In December 1912, state recognition as a lyceum took place . On February 1, 1915, a total of 102 female students aged 7 to 18 were enrolled. The majority were Catholic, but there were also 10 Protestant and 9 Jewish students. 46 were boarding school children, 56 from Fritzlar and the surrounding area.

1918-1941

Shortly after the end of the war, the convent received a request from ( Hanau -) Großauheim to set up a branch there and take over the higher girls' school there. In 1919, several Fritzlar Ursulines moved to Großauheim and took over the school there. However, the undertaking had to be abandoned in 1922 due to pressing financial difficulties. The school was taken over by the poor school sisters from Brakel . The hyperinflation of 1922 and 1923 had almost catastrophic consequences for the monastery, and the crisis could only be overcome with the help of the merchant Edmund Dietrich.

In 1926 the situation had improved a lot again and the convent acquired the municipal property (residential building with farm buildings, vegetable and fruit gardens) belonging to the Barons von Buttlar within the western city wall. The property, now named after the local saint of Fritzlar, St. Wigbert , was converted into a school and boarding house, and in April 1927 a housekeeping school , a one-year rural girls' vocational school and a kindergarten began.

The rush to the convent itself was still considerable, and in the early 1930s numerous applicants had to be turned away due to a lack of space. In 1935, at the 400th anniversary of the order, 25 teaching sisters and 25 lay sisters lived in the monastery.

time of the nationalsocialism

In 1933 a conference of the Ursuline superiors took place in Fritzlar, and for the 400th anniversary of the Ursulines in 1935, the Katharinenkirche was renovated again. But very soon the difficulties for the convent and school caused by the new regime began. The primary school had to be closed as early as 1934 on the orders of the NS mayor. In 1936 the monastery had to surrender 100 acres (about 25 hectares ) of excellent farmland in the Ederaue for the construction of the new military airfield , which severely damaged the economic base of the monastery and school. From 1938 onwards, no new students could be admitted to the first grade of the secondary school. The women's and household school and the St. Wigbert kindergarten were closed by order of the authorities, and the entire St. Wigbert property was forcibly rented to the Wehrmacht . In March 1939 the chief president in Kassel informed the convention that there was no longer any need to continue the secondary school. In September, after the beginning of the Second World War , parts of the monastery rooms were requisitioned and used as a "returnees" home by the NSV for refugees from the Saar-Moselle area. In March 1940 the lyceum was closed and the 2nd floor of the monastery was confiscated for the purpose of setting up a reserve hospital for the Fritzlar air base . This made it necessary to send the last of the boarding school students home.

In May 1940 the granaries in the basement of the monastery were inspected by a commission from Berlin on the pretext of their possible use as air raid shelters. The sacks of grain delivered by the tenant of the monastery were stored there. At Christmas 1940 officials from the Berlin grain supply office appeared and had the grain transported away. The nuns were described as pests of the people because they remained self-sufficient regardless of the new legal situation. From February 23, 1941, the Gestapo and the Fritzlar police carried out an intensive search of the monastery and interrogations of the nuns. All business books and accounting records were confiscated. On July 3, 1941, the Gestapo ordered the nuns to leave the monastery, which was closed with immediate effect, and the town of Fritzlar within 24 hours and only with their personal belongings. Any attempt to take away monastery property will be prosecuted as theft. The monastery was confiscated for "offenses against the laws of the war economy" (acceptance of the lease in the form of goods instead of money) - with the exception of the church. The Gestapo removed the archive, school files and the cash register. The oil paintings and the inventory of the monastery and school library were brought to Kassel and have since disappeared. The remaining sisters each received 10 RM travel money from the monastery treasury and scattered to all the winds, to relatives, acquaintances or other religious orders.

The branch in Lima

As early as 1935 the then superior and a second sister had traveled to Lima ( Peru ), followed in 1936 by another small group, because from there the request for the establishment of a girls' school had come and this could be a possibility for the convention in view of the increasing reprisals to secure a future on the part of the Nazi regime. The Bishop of Osnabrück , Wilhelm Berning , had advised. School operations began on April 1, 1936 in a rented residential building. At that time there were six sisters, one postulant and 84 pupils from kindergarten to fourth grade. In November 1937, the Fritzlar Ursulines received permission to move to Lima, and a third group went there in 1938 with some boarding school students. Another group arrived there in August 1939, and the foundation stone was laid for a new convent and school building, which was inaugurated on June 8, 1941. The last group of nuns from Fritzlar came in 1940. With that, about half of the Fritzlar convent, mostly the younger members, had gone to Lima. In 1940 the new school had around 600 pupils, and by the end of August 1940 20 new sisters had already entered. On October 21, 1945 the foundation stone for the new monastery church "Nuestra Senora de la Paz" was laid, and this was consecrated in February 1949 by Archbishop Juan Gualberto Guevara of Lima. On November 20, 1949, with the consent of Bishop Johann Baptist Dietz von Fulda , the Lima branch was dissolved and made independent by the mother convent in Fritzlar. This was confirmed on February 3, 1950, with effect from February 11, by the Archbishop of Lima, Guevara.

New beginning after 1945

On May 12, 1945, the former Fritzlar superior, M. Caritas Knickenberg (she went to Lima for good in 1951), after a visit from a Fritzlar citizens' delegation to her in Volkmarsen, came back to Fritzlar and began to call back other sisters who had remained in Germany. However, both the St. Ursula Monastery and the St. Wigbert property were still partially used or rented as military hospitals. In August a few rooms in St. Wigbert became vacant and the first three sisters moved in there. After the hospital there was closed, the monastery building was almost immediately occupied again with patients from the areas given to the Soviet Army by the Americans. In the cloister , the sisters' living quarters, the American occupation authorities set up a hospital for typhus patients , who were cared for by the first six sisters who returned home. The last returnee of the convent came back to Fritzlar in May 1946.

St. Wigbert was returned to the convent in October 1945, St. Ursula in February 1946. The move into the cleared part of the monastery took place on March 19, 1946 in a large procession from the cathedral. However, the monastery had been completely looted and the tenants in the school building refused to move out until 1950. In the cloister garden there was a fire extinguishing pond and a rubble and earth wall that had been piled up with its excavation , which had to be removed. The garden was used by the population as a garbage dump. The three air raid shelters in the orchard collapsed soon after the end of the war, leaving deep pits behind. All the furniture and appliances and even the radiators were gone, except for the hospital beds. The migration of most of the younger sisters to Lima during the war made itself felt in the reconstruction, but they were not dispensable from the burgeoning convent in Peru. Ursulines from other German houses (such as Mannheim , Offenbach , Duderstadt and Erfurt ) and so-called “refugee sisters” (e.g. from Schweidnitz , Liebenthal and Ratibor ) came to help. In 1952 two sisters from Lima were called back to help with the reconstruction. To the more stringent cloister regulations of Pope Pius XII. In 1952, a partially underground Klaustralweg was built from St. Ursula through three monastic gardens and two underpasses of public paths and roads to St. Wigbert.

School operations were resumed on November 2, 1945 with three classes. The Fritzlar students brought their own chairs with them, and they wrote on the cut edges of the newspaper. State recognition as a grammar school for girls came in May 1946. In 1947, permission to open the Untersekunda (10th grade) followed. In 1946 there were again 164 pupils in the secondary school, 50 in the housekeeping school, 40 in the kindergarten and 60 boarding school pupils in St. Ursula and St. Wigbert.

As with many German Ursuline convents, the rush for school facilities in Fritzlar grew, while at the same time the convention increasingly suffered from a lack of young people, an aging population and economic difficulties. The monastery property, directly below the monastery on the north bank of the Mühlengraben, urgently needed renovation. There was a dispute with the tenant because of his neglect of the building stock; he was fired in 1955 and a new one started operations in 1956. Necessary renovation work on the monastery and church and extensions to the school (1954 renovation of the 1st floor of the monastery building, 1959/60 construction of a new school gymnasium, 1960 renovation and 1963 renovation of St. Catherine's Church) required expenses that placed a heavy burden on the convent. In 1954 only 12 choir sisters, 12 lay sisters, one novice and one postulant lived in the convent; Fritzlar was the smallest Ursuline convent in Germany. The last novice entered in 1955, but left in 1958 after her novitiate ended. Negotiations therefore began as early as 1955 on a possible merger with the house in Duderstadt. In 1961 only 17 nuns lived in Fritzlar. As early as 1952, reasons for costs led to considerations to abolish the newly introduced upper secondary school, which resulted in considerable conflicts with parents. The first Abitur examination after the war took place in 1955, but the dispute over the upper school escalated. In 1956, the Chapter of the Convention decided in secret ballot to abolish the upper level. The preliminary final high school diploma was held in 1957.

In the second half of the 1960s, there was a rethinking of the school orientation, due to changing social needs and legal requirements. Supervised learning afternoons were introduced as early as 1967. In order to cope with the growth in the number of pupils, the increasing structural requirements for contemporary schools and the tripartite expansion of the school, which was completed in September 1977 under the leadership of long-time (1961–1992) headmistress Angelika Kill and the support of the diocese of Fulda and coeducational all-day school with main , secondary and high school branches, considerable building work was undertaken from 1960 onwards, starting with the construction of a gymnasium (1971 construction of the new St. Angela schoolhouse, 1973–1975 construction of the St. Ursula schoolhouse). The St. Wigbert complex also underwent a major redesign, both structurally and in school. In 1973, a large adjacent garden was bought there and, after appropriate additions and renovations, a technical school for social pedagogy was opened, in which the previous housekeeping school was merged. Another extension was completed in 1982. On the other hand, no new students were accepted into the boarding school from 1970, and in 1975 the large monastery garden had to be given over to the monastery property in 1975, as the few and increasingly overaged sisters could no longer cope with the work themselves. The vocational school was closed in 1985.

End of the Convention

The foreseeable extinction of the convent and the increasingly oppressive financial situation finally led to the takeover of the entire monastery property, including the agricultural and school sponsorship, on August 1, 1989 by the diocese of Fulda . The remaining seven sisters, most of whom were very old, received rent-free right to live for life. In 1992 the last sisters retired. In 1999 only five sisters still live in St. Ursula.

On December 13, 2003, following the approval of the application for dissolution by Pope John Paul II , the rights and duties of the superior were transferred to the president of the Federation of German-speaking Ursulines . Fritzlar thus ceased to exist as an independent convent. The two oldest sisters, including Sr. Lioba Kaever († December 20, 2008), who was elected last superior in 1990, moved to the convent in Würzburg , the other two stayed in Fritzlar for the time being. At the end of 2006 three of the former Fritzlar sisters were still living, two in Fritzlar and one in Würzburg. Fritzlar's last Ursuline, Sr. Maria Magdalena, died on April 7, 2013.

Remarks

  1. The other two were Magdalene Marquise de Valombre and Françoise de St. Bernard von Löwenstein. After the death of the first superior, Sister Augustina, on September 26, 1734, the second of the founders who remained in Fritzlar, Magdalene de Valombre, succeeded her as superior. She directed the convent until her death in 1758. Françoise de St. Bernard, however, soon returned to Metz.
  2. After the First World War and until recently it was operated as the "Hotel Kaiserpfalz" and is now partly a hotel and partly a retirement home.
  3. He is also called Guernieri and Garniery in literature. His daughter was a pensioner at the convent school.
  4. ↑ In 1966 a new uniform costume with a white veil was introduced, and all choir and lay sisters were now called sisters and prayed together in German.
  5. This technical college, which was officially recognized in 1976, was closed again in 2005.

Individual evidence

  1. Gottfried Rehm : The organ builder family Oestreich . In: Restoration documentation: The Johann-Markus-Oestreich-Organ (I / 10, 1799) in the Evangelical Church of Fraurombach . January 6, 2014, p. 4–10 ( online at orgelbau-schmidt.de as a PDF file; 386 KB).
  2. ^ The organ portrait (52): The Oestreich organ in the Ev. Parish church, Kleinenglis
  3. ^ New Advent: Catholic Encyclopedia
  4. Froneck-Kramer, pp. 45-46.
  5. The history of the school , on st-josef-schule.de, accessed on May 3, 2019
  6. ^ Ursuline monastery in Würzburg

literature

  • Andrea Froneck-Kramer: Animus; the spirit, the mind, the courage, the heart. History of the Fritzlar Ursuline Monastery from 1711–2006. Euregioverlag, Kassel 2007, ISBN 978-3-933617-28-6 .
  • Clemens Lohmann: Cathedral and imperial city Fritzlar: Guide through history and architecture. 2nd edition. Magistrat der Stadt Fritzlar, Fritzlar 2005, ISBN 3-925665-03-X , pp. 47–48.

Web links

Commons : Ursulinenkloster Fritzlar  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 51 ° 7 '47.1 "  N , 9 ° 16'22.8"  E