Weißfrauenkirche
The Weißfrauenkirche was a Protestant church in the old town of Frankfurt am Main . It burned down after a bombing raid on March 22, 1944 . Their remains were removed during the reconstruction in 1952 in favor of the opening of the Berliner Strasse . In 1955/56 a new Weißfrauenkirche was built west of the city center in the Bahnhofsviertel , which was rededicated as a Diakoniekirche in 2002/04 .
history
The Weißfrauenkloster was founded in 1228 as a foundation of Frankfurt citizens and on June 10, 1228 by Pope Gregory IX. accepted. The order of the white women, officially called " Magdalenerinnen " or "Reuerinnen" ( poenitentes ), was founded in Worms in 1224 . His task was initially to keep repentant street whores , from around 1250 also to care for unmarried members of the bourgeois families. The white women lived according to the rule of St. Augustine and the order of the nuns of St. Sixtus . They wore simple white clothes, slept clothed and girded on straw and a woolen cloth, and were never allowed to go idle.
The monastery burned down as early as 1248 and had to be renewed. In July 1342 the Magdalen flood occurred , the highest level of the Main ever measured . The entire old town was then under water. In the Weißfrauenkirche, too, the water is said to have stood seven shoes high, as evidenced by a Latin inscription that could be seen in the church until it was destroyed in the Second World War. The indicated water level corresponds to a level of approx. 7.85 meters, which is about one meter higher than the second highest ever registered flood of 1682 and about 2.40 meters higher than the last major flood of the Main in 1995. Every year since 1342, on Magdalenentag , On July 22nd, until the beginning of the Reformation, a penitential procession led by the city council took place from the Main to the monastery church, which had been consecrated to Saints Mary and Magdalena since 1316 .
Between 1468 and 1470 the church was renovated in the Gothic style . Due to numerous foundations, it was particularly richly furnished with a particularly large number of altars and votive offerings. Several patricians were buried in the Weißfrauenkirche . The Holzhausen family owned a burial place and their own small chapel in the church, just like in the Peterskirche in Neustadt .
The Reformation was introduced in Frankfurt in 1530 . Like other monasteries in Frankfurt, the Weißfrauenkloster subsequently experienced a rapid decline. In 1540 the last nuns left the monastery. In 1542 a Protestant preacher was appointed for the first time.
The council took over the administration of the former monastery from then on and determined the income to “care for local needy virgins and widows of the Lutheran creed”.
Between 1554 and 1562, over 2000 reformed religious refugees from Flanders and Wallonia immigrated to Frankfurt, mainly textile workers. Most of them were on the run from religious persecution, but economic reasons also led to emigration.
Many of them acquired Frankfurt citizenship. They took the citizen's oath in French and were assigned the White Lady Church for their worship. English religious refugees before Maria Stuart were also admitted to the Weißfrauenkirche.
(drawing by Peter Becker )
In 1562, however, the city council, which had meanwhile fully turned to the Lutheran creed, prohibited the Reformed worship service in Frankfurt. As a result, many of the immigrants left the city again. From 1593 the Weißfrauenkirche served as a preaching place for the Dutch congregation of the Augsburg Confession as well as Lutherans immigrated from France. Their catchment area included u. a. the preferred residential areas around the Großer Hirschgraben . Until 1788 the two preachers working at the Weißfrauenkirche, including members of the Ritter family in direct succession for several generations, preached in French and German.
(drawing by Carl Theodor Reiffenstein )
In 1813 the pastor and reformer Anton Kirchner founded the Weißfrauenschule in the former monastery rooms , the first secondary school in Frankfurt , which was specially designed for the education of the sons of craftsmen families. In 1819 the administration of the Weißfrauenstift was merged with that of the Katharinenstift under the name "United female pension institutions for St. Katharinen und den Weißfrauen" ( St. Katharinen- und Weißfrauenstift ). The institution still exists under this name today. In 1857 the church was extensively renovated.
In 1912, the monastery buildings were demolished after the adjacent properties of the White Deer and the Cronstettenstift had been removed for the Kaiserstrasse and Bethmannstrasse buildings in 1872 . The Hotel Frankfurter Hof was built on this site in 1875 .
Although the church was relatively small and had only a small catchment area, it remained an important spiritual center in the old town until World War II. The clergy who worked here included a. Hermann Dechent , the Frankfurt church historian, and Johannes Kübel , last consistorial councilor of the Frankfurt regional church and co-founder of the parish emergency union .
On March 22, 1944 , the church burned down after a bomb attack that destroyed the entire western inner city of Frankfurt with its medieval city center . The falling roof structure destroyed all of the vaults underneath, as well as almost all of the furnishings, as they had not been secured as in other Frankfurt churches. Nevertheless, the substance of the building was relatively little damaged at the end of the war. Contemporary photos show the preservation of the outer walls up to the roof truss and almost all architectural parts such as B. the tracery or portals. Other churches in the city that were soon rebuilt, especially the Church of Our Lady and St. Catherine's Church, were far more destroyed and practically had to be completely rebuilt.
Since the church belonged to the endowment churches , the city was fundamentally obliged to rebuild it. This was initially planned, so that in 1947 and 1948 work began on securing the ruins . But it soon turned out that, due to the structural change, far fewer people would live in the old town in future than before the war. The entire old town therefore formed only one Protestant congregation, the Paulsgemeinde , which received the Old Nikolaikirche as a parish church.
That is why the Protestant Church signed a contract with the city in 1952, in which it waived the reconstruction of the Weißfrauenkirche. The ruins were removed from March to June 1953 when Berliner Strasse was built. The previous endowment was canceled, instead the Protestant church was assigned the Dominican monastery and the associated Heiliggeistkirche.
In 1956 the architect Werner W. Neumann built a new Weißfrauenkirche west of the city center in Gutleutstrasse in the Bahnhofsviertel , at that time a middle-class residential area with around 10,000 Protestant Christians. The Darmstadt sculptor Helmut Lander designed the new windows of the church on the upper floor . Due to the sharp decline in the number of parishioners, the congregation merged with the Gutleut community in 1997 to form the Evangelical Congregation at the main station , which was previously in the Gutleutkirche . After the 2002 merger with the Matthäusgemeinde to form the Hope Church, the Weißfrauenkirche was no longer used as a parish church. At the beginning of 2004 it was handed over to the Diakonisches Werk by the Evangelical Hope Church and is now used as a Diakoniekirche.
Architecture and equipment
The Weißfrauenkirche was a single-nave hall church with a short 5/8 choir . Compared to other Frankfurt churches, especially the nearby Karmeliterkirche , the Weißfrauenkirche was extremely small and simple. To the west of the church was originally the residential wing of the sisters with the cloister , in which the school for white women was later set up. Between the cloister and the Frankfurt city wall in the west was the farm yard of the monastery, to which an extensive garden was connected to the north in the direction of Grosse Gallusgasse .
The church had two portals, one in the west and one in the south from the renovation in 1857. Inside, the church was richly decorated with frescoes dating from around 1468, which were completely destroyed in 1944. They showed three resurrection stories that the New Testament tells of Jesus , according to Matt. 9 (daughter of Jairus ), Luk. 7 ( youth from Naïn ) and Joh. 11 ( Lazarus ), plus the Last Judgment and a resurrection of Jesus created by Jörg Luft in 1478/1479 . The seven tracery windows on the south wall and the small oval window above the west portal were decorated with stained glass by the artist Otto Linnemann .
The church had five altars, all of which were donated by wealthy patricians. In addition to the high altar , the All Saints Altar , there was a Marien Altar , a Magdalene Altar , a St. Nicholas Altar and an altar to the Holy Cross in the Holzhausenkapelle.
The richly carved wooden altar stalls , the pulpit and the organ gallery were created in 1857 by the Frankfurt sculptor Johannes Dielmann , who also created the Schiller monument in 1864. The organ from 1857 was the work of the organ builder Eberhard Friedrich Walcker , who in the same year also created a large work for the Katharinenkirche .
Only a few epitaphs that were on the church walls remained, the neo-Gothic group of angels by the sculptor August von Nordheim from the south portal and an oil painting of the crucifixion of Jesus by an unknown master from the Middle Rhine region around 1500.
During the demolition work in 1953, excavations took place in and around the church under the supervision of the Historical Museum . A total of around 70 graves were found. The grave of Landgravine Margaret of Thuringia (1237–1270) could not be found. The daughter of Emperor Frederick II fled from her tyrannical husband Albrecht the Degenerate to the White Women's Monastery in June 1270 and died there on August 8, 1270.
literature
- Karin Berkemann : Post-war churches in Frankfurt am Main (1945-76) (monument topography Federal Republic of Germany; cultural monuments in Hesse), Stuttgart 2013 [add. Diss., Neuendettelsau, 2012]
- Fried Lübbecke : The face of the city. According to Frankfurt's plans by Faber, Merian and Delkeskamp. 1552-1864. Frankfurt am Main 1952, Waldemar Kramer publishing house
- Konstantin Hartte, demolition and loss of the Weißfrauenkirche . In: Frankfurter Kirchliches Jahrbuch , 1954.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ See e.g. B. Hartwig Beseler, Niels Gutschow: War fates of German architecture. Loss, damage, rebuilding. Volume II: Süd, Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1988, p. 807
Imperial Cathedral of St. Bartholomew | Old Nikolaikirche | Leonhardskirche | Carmelite Monastery | Paulskirche | Dominican monastery | Church of Our Lady | Katharinenkirche | Peterskirche | Dreikönigskirche | Teutonic Order Church
Former churches: All Saints Chapel | Antoniterkirche | Barefoot Church | German Reformed Church | French Reformed Church | Holy Spirit Church | Johanniterkirche | Weißfrauenkirche
Coordinates: 50 ° 6 ′ 36 ″ N , 8 ° 40 ′ 39 ″ E