St. Lambertus: The Roman Catholic Parish Church of Erkelenz, Germany
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.4
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Modern
- Civilizations
- Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page19 sections
History
St. Lambertus is a Roman Catholic parish church in Erkelenz, Germany, dedicated to Saint Lambertus, the seventh-century bishop of Maastricht revered as a Christian saint. Its origins lie in a Frankish hall church, followed by an eleventh-century Romanesque church and a Gothic building consecrated in 1418. The present nave is a postwar Neo-Romanesque reconstruction, while the medieval tower remains a defining part of the church.
Frankish and medieval churches
The earliest church was an east-west-oriented Frankish hall church. It had a rectangular nave and a rectangular choir at the eastern end. An earlier building, possibly a chapel, may have stood beneath part of this structure. The church was later enlarged into a Romanesque longitudinal building with two aisles, an apse enclosing the earlier choir, and smaller annexes. An external square tower was added on the west during the eleventh century.
Erkelenz was conquered and partly destroyed in 1371, and the Romanesque nave was probably damaged during the conflict. A Gothic church was then built on the same site while retaining the Romanesque tower. It was consecrated in 1418 and enlarged in 1482 with a choir ambulatory, a passage running around the outside of the choir. The tower collapsed in 1457, and a replacement was begun farther west on 30 June 1458. Inscriptions beside the portal and inside the tower hall preserve both events.
St. Lambertus served as a burial place from the Middle Ages until a cemetery was established outside the town in 1825. The churchyard surrounded the building, and prominent citizens were also buried beneath the floor. A charnel house on the north side held bones removed from older graves.
Destruction in the Second World War
A major town fire in 1540 destroyed the Gothic church’s roof, although the nave continued in use until the final months of the Second World War. In December 1944, an air raid struck the tower, which contained a high observation post and temporarily housed a Wehrmacht signals unit. The Wehrmacht was the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. An air raid in January 1945 heavily damaged the choir.
As German forces retreated, pioneer units intended to demolish the richly furnished church and its monumental tower for military reasons. Rektor Edmund Knorr, Erkelenz’s local commander during the final days of the war, prevented the planned demolition. On 23 February 1945, however, the fourth and heaviest air raid on Erkelenz devastated the church. The nave interior was completely destroyed, the western side of the tower was opened across two storeys, and Allied artillery fire caused further damage. The 102nd US Division captured Erkelenz on 26 February.
The medieval triumph cross survived while hanging in the open choir. It fell soon after the town was captured, but the rubble cushioned its fall and the cross remained undamaged.
Postwar reconstruction
More than one hundred volunteers began clearing the ruins in January 1946. The badly damaged tower was in danger of collapse, so three concrete floors were inserted that year. Further repairs to its masonry and galleries continued from 1952 to 1964. Plans to rebuild the Gothic nave or incorporate its fragments into a new church were abandoned. The surviving choir ambulatory and south wall were demolished in 1947 to make room for a Neo-Romanesque nave designed by the Aachen architect Peter Salm.
The crypt was completed at Christmas 1948, and the first Mass was celebrated in the choir at Christmas 1950. The rebuilt church was consecrated on 8 August 1954. After restoration, the tower was inaugurated in 1958 as a memorial to those killed in the border region. A bronze plaque on its northwest side, made by the Cologne professor Josef Jaekel, records the wartime destruction and restoration. Its relief shows the archangel Michael fighting the dragon beside the damaged Lambertus Tower.
Parish, organ, and bell history
The church’s organ history reaches back to the fifteenth century. A Klais organ with 44 stops, three manuals, and pedals stood in St. Lambertus from 1907 until its destruction in 1945. A R. Seifert organ followed in 1949, and an Oberlinger instrument replaced it in 1979. The Oberlinger organ was dismantled and sold in 2012 to Saint Nicholas parish in La Roche-en-Ardenne, Belgium.
A choir organ built by Johannes Klais in 1911 and 1912 for St. Martinus in Borschemich was transferred to St. Lambertus after open-cast lignite mining destroyed its original church. It was inaugurated at Erkelenz in 2013. A new main organ, built by Martin Scholz of Mönchengladbach, was completed in 2022 and blessed by Pastor Werner Rombach on 7 August of that year.
St. Lambertus became the parish church of the newly formed Christ the King Parish of Erkelenz after a merger on 1 January 2015. Five bronze bells hang in the tower. One is a medieval bell by Jan v. Trier; the others were supplied by the Otto foundry of Hemelingen near Bremen in 1914, 1927, 1955, and 1957. The 1917 b0 bell survived the wartime melting of the pre-1939 Otto bells, while the 1955 and 1957 bells replaced the lost 1927 peal. The installation combines wooden and steel yokes in a steel frame and uses a counter-pendulum system.
Remains
Archaeological foundations
Frankish hall church
Excavations begun during construction of the present nave in late 1947 revealed the foundations of earlier churches beneath the destroyed building. The earliest structure was an approximately east-west-oriented Frankish hall church. Its rectangular nave was twice as long as it was wide, and a rectangular choir stood at the east end.
Quartzite sandstone and sandstone blocks formed the foundations, with some blocks measuring up to half a metre along an edge. Several had carefully cut dowel holes about 10 by 10 centimetres, indicating reuse. Isolated fragments of Roman bricks were also incorporated into the foundation.
Within the rectangular choir, two charcoal layers lay between three clay layers created by deliberate ground filling. Beneath a mortar layer was another clay layer associated with wattle-and-daub construction, reddened from above by fire. Two vessel sherds were embedded in it, including Badorf pottery, an early medieval ceramic tradition known for wheel-made vessels with decorated rims. Beneath this layer was the unaccompanied fill of a grave shaft containing a few skeletal remains and parts of a wooden plank.
Romanesque church
The Romanesque church expanded the earlier hall into a longitudinal building by adding two aisles, an apse that completely enclosed the former rectangular choir, and smaller annexes. Fragments of a Roman terrazzo floor lay near the former choir in front of the end wall of the north aisle. The foundations of both the Frankish and Romanesque churches covered an older cemetery containing wooden-coffin burials.
The Romanesque tower stood externally at the west, over the foundations of the earlier hall church. Its foundations used quartzite sandstone and included large fragments of Roman roof tiles. Tuff blocks faced the superstructure, and the base profile indicates an eleventh-century date. On the church side, a Romanesque floor of square terracotta tiles survived with a thin layer of fire damage. Reused bases and capitals in the apse have simple workmanship associated with the twelfth century.
Medieval tower and churchyard
Gothic tower
The present tower was begun in 1458, one year after the collapse of the Romanesque tower. Built beside the earlier tower’s foundations, it rises seven storeys and reaches 83 metres. In places, its brick walls are more than three metres thick. Its form follows the tradition of Flemish or Brabantine Gothic towers and includes bands of light blue stone.
The wooden spire burned after a lightning strike in the eighteenth century. Another lightning strike, followed by a severe snowstorm, destroyed it in February 1860. Since 1883, the spire has consisted of a riveted iron framework covered with thin copper plates. During fundamental repairs in 2012 and 2013, the upper spire was detached by crane and placed beside the church. Its iron framework was restored, shell-damaged steel sections were replaced, and new copper plates were installed over wooden sheathing.
Burial remains
The former churchyard surrounded the building, and a charnel house stood along its north side. Burials beneath the church floor were sometimes placed one above another. Two grave slabs associated with these in-church burials are embedded today in the western wall of the aisles.
Rebuilt interior and furnishings
Nave, crypt, and medieval works
The present nave is a Neo-Romanesque reconstruction, built after the crypt and choir. The surviving medieval triumph cross, dated 1486, and its fifteenth-century Crucifixion group are displayed in the rebuilt church. A seven-armed Marian chandelier, more than three metres high and made of gilded wrought iron and carved wood, dates from 1517.
A two-metre-high eagle lectern was cast in yellow metal at Dinant in the mid-fifteenth century. The late Gothic Terheeger pulpit, made before 1500, originally stood in the Leonhard Chapel, which was secularized by the French in 1802, and later in the chapel at Terheeg.
Sculpture and altar furnishings
Other surviving works include sculptures of Crispinus and Crispinianus, a Baroque group showing the Virgin Mary receiving instruction from Saint Anne, and Baroque figures of Saint Anthony of Padua and Saint Aloysius from the Franciscan Paterskirche, destroyed during the Second World War. The figure of Aloysius was installed after the former Franciscan monastery was dissolved.
The Neo-Gothic high altar was made in 1896 by the woodcarver Ferdinand Langenberg. Franz Xaver Haak created the Madonna for the Marian altar, donated in 1937 by the Kevelaer Brotherhood, as well as large nativity figures made between 1934 and 1937. Peter Haak carved the Stations of the Cross in 1953. They originally stood in the parish church of Saint Stephen in Kleingladbach.
In 1999, Klaus Iserlohe redesigned the interior and created the baptismal font, altar table, and antependium, a decorative facing for the front of an altar. The Crucifixion group was rearranged and rehung between the choir and nave in the position it had occupied before 1945.
Windows and later additions
Hubert Spierling designed the choir windows, which depict the New Creation in 1964 and the Lamb in the Heavenly Jerusalem in 1967. Will Völker of Lövenich created the 1954 nave windows showing the seven sacraments and the Creation, as well as the tower window depicting the catch of fish and ornamental and semicircular geometric designs for the high windows. J. Geffers designed a free composition at the entrance on the market side.
Klaus Iserlohe and Ludwig Schaffrath designed the crypt windows. Two eternal-light lamps beside the high altar were made in December 2020 by the Aachen metalworker Michael Hammers. Their dark red glass cylinders came from the Lamberts glassworks in Waldsassen, and each lamp carries eighteen crystal-glass chains supplied by D. Swarovski.
Organs
Choir organ
The choir organ has 16 stops, two manuals, and pedals. Its actions are pneumatic, and its swell division is enclosed so that its volume can be varied, extending to G4. Couplers link the manuals and pedal, including II/I, I/P, and II/P. The II/I connection is also available as sub-octave and super-octave couplers. Fixed combinations are marked ff, f, mf, and p, with a piano pedal.
Main organ
The main organ on the gallery has 55 stops, four manuals, pedals, and three effect stops. The former organ’s carillon and cymbelstern, a stop producing the sound of small bells, were retained, while a tubular-bell stop was newly made. An organ platform between the inner tower piers was constructed in spring 2015, with access from the tower staircase by a landing and gangway.
The instrument’s normal couplers are I/II, III/I, III/II, IV/II, I/P, II/P, III/P, and IV/P. Its sub-octave couplers are III/I, III/II, and III/III, while III/P is available as a super-octave coupler. In organ terminology, manuals are hand-played keyboards, pedals are foot-operated keyboards, and stops control sets of pipes.
