Wiesbaden program
The Wiesbaden program describes demands on Protestant church construction that the Wiesbaden pastor Emil Veesenmeyer published in the Nassau church newspaper Das Evangelische Gemeindeblatt from Dillenburg from 1890 onwards . In this and in other articles, Veesenmeyer sharply opposed the Eisenach regulation , in which the German church government had stipulated in 1861 that a new Protestant church should follow the Romanesque or Gothic model. In issue no. 43 of May 30, 1891, the Deutsche Bauzeitung published its publisher, Karl Emil Otto Fritsch, in an article about the “Third Evangelical Church for Wiesbaden” that made this concept known throughout the German-speaking area. The principles of the Wiesbaden program were implemented in many church buildings in Germany and Switzerland, especially in the period before the First World War . Above all, it corresponded to the demand of the Reformed Churches that the focus should not be on a specific formal language, but on the living community and the sermon .
The Wiesbaden Veesenmeyers program was accepted by the Wiesbaden congregation as the main idea for the construction of this third Protestant church in Wiesbaden, for which Johannes Otzen , Berlin, was won as the architect . This first church according to the Wiesbaden program has become known as the Wiesbaden Ring Church .
Content of the Wiesbaden program
An outstanding feature of churches built according to the Wiesbaden program is the unity of pulpit , altar and organ with pulpit and altar in the central axis of the interior, in which the organ and the choir stage should also be located. In contrast to this, the Eisenach regulation called for the pulpit to be attached to a lateral pillar, as in medieval churches, and the organ in the west above the entrance. The Eisenach regulation thus corresponded to the desire for continuity and a romantic enthusiasm for a glorified Middle Ages in the sense of the ideas of Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen , who had asked the church to imitate the old model.
The Wiesbaden program set itself apart from such a pattern, which was only suitable for a Roman Catholic processional church, and remembered alternative Protestant developments such as the baroque Dresden Frauenkirche . Veesenmeyer demanded a unified space that corresponded to Luther's dictum of the priesthood of all believers ; therefore there should be neither a choir nor a nave. He referred to similar recommendations by Leonhard Christoph Sturm from 1717.
When formulating the Wiesbaden program, Emil Veesenmeyer began with the question of the interior of the church. The new building of the huge Hamburg Nikolaikirche (1846–1863) only offered a small community of a little over 800 people, some of which were unreasonably far from the altar and pulpit. Veesenmeyer, on the other hand, demanded that "in the appearance of the building the inner essence of the same must be expressed", and that one should "be guided by its peculiar purpose and the way it is used" when creating it. This makes it one of the forerunners of modernism, the architectural principle of which the American architect Louis Sullivan summed up a few years later as follows : " Form follows function ".
While the Eisenach Regulativ promoted the fixation on a medieval architectural style, the Wiesbaden program freed from style definitions: "The question of style has lost its previous fundamental importance, has become a question of personal feeling, local conditions and ultimately costs." Veesenmeyer also pointed out in agreement to the work of the art historian Cornelius Gurlitt , who called for a re-evaluation of the baroque and thus promoted a trend from medieval to neo-baroque style.
Veesenmeyer's Wiesbaden program gained importance after Fritsch's publication in the Deutsche Bauzeitung. In the literature there is often the assumption that the Wiesbaden program arose from the collaboration between Veesenmeyer and the Berlin architect Johannes Otzen . Veesenmeyer had published his principles for Protestant church building, which were set up in the Wiesbaden program , in continuations in the Evangelical Community Gazette Dillenburg since 1889; “They only became important when I succeeded in hiring the church council of our town in 1891 [d. H. Wiesbaden] to move to accept this program for the new building of the third Protestant church. ”Johannes Otzen, who had already built the Wiesbaden mountain church , where Veesenmeyer was pastor, could be won over for this first building according to the Wiesbaden program . The first pastor of the Wiesbaden Ringkirche , Lothar Friedrich, wrote in 1894: "Professor Otzen overcame his initial reservations about such a project and soon went into the so-called Wiesbaden program with enthusiasm."
Veesenmeyer was able to present it in 1894 at the first congress for Protestant church building in Berlin, which was organized by the Berlin Architects' Association . The discussions there did not lead to a majority legitimation of the Wiesbaden program or even to a vote with the Eisenach regulatory framework. In spite of this, Veesenmeyer de facto invalidated the binding nature of the regulatory with his work. The Basel architect Paul Reber had made the demands of the Wiesbaden program his own since it was published in 1891. The Swiss monument protector Urs Baur says that it was almost "a fifth gospel" for church building in Switzerland. It made it possible for architects like Friedrich Pützer to incorporate new stylistic elements in church building with Art Nouveau artists. Modernism also partly followed the Wiesbaden spatial concept, for example in Otto Bartning's standard rooms.
Theses of the Wiesbaden program
(Compare the recommendations of the Eisenacher Regulative , the number of which is given in brackets.)
- The church should in general bear the character of a meeting house of the celebrating community, not that of a church in the Catholic sense. (1)
- The unity of the community and the principle of the common priesthood should be expressed through the unity of space. A division of the latter into several ships and a separation between ship and choir may not take place. (2)
- The celebration of the Lord's Supper should not take place in a separate room, but in the middle of the community. The altar to be provided with a walk must therefore be given a corresponding position, at least symbolically. All lines of sight should lead to it. (3)
- The pulpit, as the place where Christ is presented to the community as spiritual food, is to be treated at least as equivalent to the altar. It is to keep its place behind the latter and to be organically connected with the organ and singer stage to be arranged in the face of the community. (4 and 5)
Church buildings according to the Wiesbaden program (selection)
Asterisk = destroyed or significantly changed
See also
Web links
- https://www.monumente-online.de/de/ Ausgabe /2017/1/Kirchenbau/ protestantischer-Kirchenbau.php , accessed on September 30, 2019
- Common Paths - Common Spaces Lecture at the Hessian-Thuringian Monument Preservation Conference 1996
literature
- Emil Veesenmeyer: The church building of Protestantism and the so-called Wiesbaden program. Evangelisches Gemeindeblatt, Dillenburg 1895, in eight episodes from issue number 15. (Quotations from Veesenmeyer come from this text.)
- Festschrift Evangelische Hauptkirche zu Rheydt 1902–2002. ISBN 3-00-010531-X . In it the articles
- Peter Seyfried: Johannes Otzens opus ultimum.
- Holger Brülls: The modernity of backward-looking building.
- Gerlinde Gehrig: Friedrich Pützer and reform church building in Darmstadt . In: Archive for Hessian History and Archeology. New series , Vol. 73, 2015, pp. 349-380.
- Anne Heinig: The crisis of historicism in German sacred decoration in the late 19th century. Regensburg 2004.
- Urs Baur: Neo-Gothic in its old glory - on the restoration of the Bühl church in 1983-1984 . In: Kantonal-Zürcher Denkmalpflege , 10th report, 2nd part. City of Zurich, Zurich 1984, pp. 96–100.
- Ralf-Andreas Gmelin: The Cathedral of the Little People, Church Leaders and Building History Wiesbaden, 3rd edition, 2008.
- Peter Genz: The Wiesbaden program. Johannes Otzen and the history of a type of church building between 1891 and 1930. Kiel 2011, ISBN 978-3-86935-056-1 .