St. Marien: Principal Evangelical Lutheran Church of Zwickau
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.4
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Electorate of Saxony, German, Holy Roman Empire, Margraviate of Meissen
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page10 sections
History
St. Marien is an Evangelical Lutheran church in Zwickau, Germany. It began around 1180 as a Romanesque hall church and was rebuilt between 1453 and the mid-sixteenth century as a three-aisled Late Gothic hall church. The building is the principal city church of the Evangelical Lutheran Nicolai Parish of Zwickau and the principal church of the local superintendent’s district.
Medieval church and Reformation
The rebuilding took place over a long period, with some of the work carried out under the direction of the stonemason Peter Heierliß. St. Marien became a setting for the religious conflicts of the early sixteenth century. Hieronymus Dungersheim, a German Catholic theologian and prominent opponent of Protestant teaching, was active at the church from 1501. Lutheran preaching was taking place there by 1517, while Thomas Müntzer preached in Zwickau in 1520 and 1521. The church became Protestant during the Reformation, the sixteenth-century movement that challenged established Western Catholic institutions and led to the formation of Protestant churches. Its first pastor took office in 1521, and in 1529 St. Marien became the seat of one of the early Protestant superintendencies, administrative districts overseen by a senior Protestant church official.
Martin Luther stayed in Zwickau from 27 April to 3 May 1522 and preached several times in the city. St. Marien is associated with this episode, although the surviving historical account does not assign every sermon to the church itself.
The ceremonial title and wartime damage
On 2 June 1935, during Zwickau’s delayed 800th-anniversary celebrations, Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller granted St. Marien the title Dom. In German usage, this word can mean a cathedral, but it does not by itself establish that a church is the seat of a bishop. Zwickau was never a bishop’s seat, which made the title controversial after the Second World War. The ceremony coincided with the Schumann Festival, held for the 125th birthday of composer Robert Schumann, and with the town council’s further loss of its democratic character. The local population nevertheless retained the title.
On 19 March 1945, an aerial mine exploded in the southern Domhof during an air raid on central Zwickau. The blast particularly affected the church’s south side. It destroyed the spiral staircase beside the nave and damaged exterior architecture, sculptures, roof covering, stained-glass windows, the interior gallery and balustrade, and memorial monuments in the south aisle. Emergency roof repairs and temporary glazing followed in 1945. The Late Gothic exterior and the staircase were reconstructed between 1951 and 1956, with further work carried out later. An Evangelical church-building programme between 1973 and 1975 made additional renovation possible in East Germany.
Conservation and ground movement
From 1885 to 1891, Leipzig building councillor Oskar Mothes directed a Historicist restoration. Historicism was a nineteenth-century approach that revived and recombined earlier architectural styles. The work introduced or restored Gothic-style elements and shaped the appearance of the church seen today. In the early twenty-first century, the building faced continuing risks from sandstone decay and ground movement caused by coal mining. Mining drainage caused the strata beneath Zwickau to subside, lowering the church by more than 3.50 metres toward the Hauptmarkt. After abandoned mine workings flooded, the earlier movement reversed and the church began to rise again. Heavy tie anchors were installed between the interior piers, and a laser plumb system was used to monitor the building’s position.
In autumn 2016, conservation of the foundations began after investigations connected the church’s leaning and the risk of structural separation with decaying sandstone foundations. The foundations were exposed and replaced with reinforced concrete, while large timber supports stabilized the exterior walls.
Organs and bells through the centuries
A church organ is first recorded at St. Marien in 1383. Nikolaus Hamicke of Merseburg built a new instrument in 1480, followed by organs by Blasius Lehmann of Bautzen in 1543 and Joachim Zschugk of Plauen in 1612. Johann Ludwig Krebs worked at the church from 1737 to 1744 and sought an organ by Gottfried Silbermann, but financial difficulties ended the plan. Carl Gottlieb Jehmlich built an organ in 1842, and it was enlarged in 1858 and 1876.
Emil and Bruno Jehmlich built a three-manual organ in 1891 after the interior renewal, reusing pipework from the earlier instrument. It began with 75 stops, expanded to 82 in 1899 and 1900, and was enlarged again in 1930 under the plans of organist Paul Friedrich Ernst Gerhardt. With 97 stops, it was then the largest organ in central Germany. Its late-Romantic tonal design later fell out of favour as neo-Baroque principles became dominant, and proposals for renewal after 1945 were abandoned. The instrument was demolished in 1966.
Hermann Eule of Bautzen built the present main organ between 1966 and 1969. It was the largest new organ built during the East German period. Originally equipped with 77 stops on four manuals and pedal, it used slider chests, mechanical key action, and pneumatic stop action. A new console and electric stop action were installed in 2000 and 2001. Technical problems, unsuitable materials, and mould led to extensive alterations and renewals between 2008 and 2012. The instrument now has 81 stops and two transmissions. Eule also built a separate choir organ in 1979.
A bell peal is recorded from 1328, but it was destroyed in the city fire of 1403. A large bell cast in 1424 weighed 59 Zentner, approximately 2,950 kilograms. It cracked during storm ringing on 12 July 1512, reportedly because of an oversized clapper made by the Cologne smith Hans Ficke. Oswald Hilliger and his sons Martin and Andreas recast it on 27 September 1513, also casting a smaller bell called Anna and the Salva Bell in the same year.
Lightning destroyed the tower and its bells on 17 April 1650. Two replacement bells were cast that August and installed in the 25-metre-high bell chamber in August 1658. The present large clock bell, or Seiger Bell, was cast in 1683. It is fixed in the second lantern and struck by the clock mechanism rather than rung. A bronze bell cast by G. A. Jauck of Leipzig in 1890 was surrendered for melting in 1943 during the Second World War, while a smaller Jauck clock bell from 1900 had been surrendered in 1913.
Remains
Church layout and tower
St. Marien is a three-aisled Late Gothic hall church, a form in which the nave and aisles are approximately equal in height and create a unified interior space. Its tower rises approximately 87 to 88 metres and contains a built-in belfry. The current tower cap is Baroque, the European style that flourished mainly from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It dates from 1672 and replaced the tower top damaged by lightning. The upper structure was rebuilt between 1671 and 1677 according to plans by Joachim Marquardt, a master carpenter from Plauen. The design is associated with the Marquardt workshop, which produced a comparable tower at St. Peter’s Church in Riga; Joachim’s brother Peter Marquardt created the Baroque tower structure of St. Catherine’s Church in Hamburg.
The 1885 to 1891 restoration replaced the Baroque roof turret over the nave with a Gothic one and rebuilt the buttresses. Sculptures were added beneath the buttress pinnacles, including prophets on the choir, apostles on the south side, and Reformers on the north side. Saxon sculptors carved them from French oolitic limestone of the Savonnières type. Leo Münch, associated with the Cologne cathedral workshop, made the wise and foolish virgins at the portal of the southern tower vestibule. Some of the arrangement may follow a theological programme associated with Christian Friedrich Meyer, a former superintendent of Zwickau.
The visible exterior sandstone is Carboniferous Zwickau sandstone from the areas around Cainsdorf, Planitz, and Bockwa. Its organic and carbonaceous residues make it locally porous, and air pollution, particularly during the twentieth century, attacked it in layers. Stone from the old regional outcrops is considered impracticable as a replacement at proportionate cost. Opposite the main portal stand the Priests’ Houses, regarded as probably the oldest surviving urban residential buildings in eastern Germany.
Interior furnishings and memorials
The interior includes a Pietà, or Vesperbild, by Peter Breuer. This devotional image of the Virgin Mary mourning over the dead Christ has been displayed at St. Marien since 1502 and is regarded as Breuer’s principal work. Michael Heuffner’s Holy Sepulchre dates from 1507.
The six-winged Wandelaltar, a multi-panel altarpiece with hinged wings that can be opened or closed, was made around 1479 by the Nuremberg master Michael Wolgemut. Its central shrine contains the Virgin Mary and four female saints. Painted wings present scenes from the Christmas cycle and the Passion cycle in two registers, while the predella shows the four Evangelists. The predella probably represents a post-Reformation alteration of an earlier group of Church Fathers.
Paul Speck made the pulpit and baptismal font around 1538. A net-rib vault, whose intersecting ribs form a net-like pattern, dates approximately from 1536 to 1565. Other surviving features include a double spiral staircase, Baroque Protestant confessionals from around 1632, and sculptures and epitaphs from different periods. An epitaph is a memorial monument or inscription commemorating a deceased person. In the right aisle stands the tomb monument of military commander Carol Bose, who died in 1657. The Römer Chapel to the left of the portal contains the prayer seat made for his widow, Rosina Bose, in 1659. The church also holds the graves of Schneeberg silver-mine owner Martin Römer, who died in 1483, and his brother Nicol Römer, who died in 1493.
Organs
The present main organ has four manuals and pedal, 81 stops, two transmissions, slider chests, mechanical key action, and pneumatic stop action. Its equipment includes multiple manual and pedal couplers, 40 fixed combinations, 4,000 setter combinations, 16 individual reed-stop cutoffs, and a crescendo roller. The separate choir organ built by Eule in 1979 has one manual, four stops, and mechanical slider chests. Its stops are Gedackt 8’, Rohrflöte 4’, Principal 2’, and Zimbel III, with a compass from C to G3.
Bells
The bell collection includes two bells cast in 1650, a bell from 1957 bearing the inscription “Grant us peace graciously,” a bell with an Ave Maria inscription and a frieze, and the 1683 clock bell cast by Andreas Herold. The two 1650 bells carry Zwickau, Electoral Saxon, and Bose heraldic emblems. The 1683 bell bears paired busts of the Elector and Martin Luther together with the founder’s arms.
The Römer Bell, cast in 1475 at the expense of Zwickau patrician Martin Römer, is the oldest bell in Zwickau and one of the oldest in Saxony. It survived the city fires because it hung in the roof turret until 1985. The St. Osanna Bell, cast in 1482, also survives. It measures 1,693 millimetres in diameter and weighs 56 Zentner, approximately 2,800 kilograms, and is now in Zwickau’s Katharinenkirche. Franz Schilling & Sons of Apolda cast the church’s present third-largest bell in 1957. Together, the surviving bells form one of the oldest and most valuable peals in Saxony.
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