St. Josef (Weiden in der Oberpfalz): A Roman Catholic Parish Church in Germany
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History
St. Josef is a Roman Catholic urban parish church in Weiden in der Oberpfalz, Germany, built in the neo-Romanesque style between 1899 and 1901. It is the largest church in Weiden, the largest post-medieval church building in the Diocese of Regensburg, and one of Bavaria’s most important and largest Jugendstil churches. Jugendstil is the German-speaking form of Art Nouveau, known here for stylized ornament, mosaics, flowing decorative forms, and an integrated interior design.
The end of the shared-use church
For more than two centuries, Catholics and Protestants in Weiden worshipped in the same building under a Simultaneum, a shared-use arrangement in which different Christian confessions use one church. The arrangement at St. Michael’s Church lasted from 4 March 1656 until 31 July 1899. Repeated practical difficulties, rapid population growth, and the rising proportion of Catholics eventually made a separate Catholic church necessary.
Weiden’s population increased from 3,670 inhabitants in 1871 to 5,818 in 1890 and 9,959 in 1900. At the same time, the Catholic share of the population rose from 50 percent in 1863 to 75 percent in 1900. Enlarging St. Michael’s was initially considered, but Georg Dengler, a cathedral vicar and architectural expert from Regensburg, rejected the proposal in a report dated 10 March 1896 on structural and artistic grounds. The former parish church was therefore transferred to the Protestant community in return for compensation of 100,000 marks.
Construction and the new parish
The Munich architect Johann Baptist Schott designed the new church. Parish priest Max Josef Söllner initiated construction, and the first spade was turned in May 1899. Regensburg Bishop Ignatius von Senestrey laid the foundation stone on 24 June 1899. The building rose rapidly and was erected in 18 months, with the rough construction completed about a year after the foundation stone.
Söllner blessed the church on 11 November 1900. This date marked the beginning of the new mother parish of St. Josef and coincided with the formal end of the shared-use arrangement at St. Michael’s. After the high altar had been completed, Bishop Ignatius von Senestrey consecrated the church on 29 September 1901. The first interior scheme was finished by 1903. The mother parish later produced three further parishes, Herz Jesu in 1922, St. Konrad in 1934, and St. Elisabeth in 1954–55.
From Romanesque Revival to Jugendstil
Schott gave St. Josef a strict Romanesque Revival exterior and a spacious, restrained interior. Pilaster strips, round-arch friezes, and dwarf galleries drew on Romanesque churches in Cologne. A dwarf gallery is a small arcaded gallery applied to or built into the upper part of a church. The interior arrangement, especially the large arcades linking the subsidiary choirs with the main choir, recalled Maria Laach Abbey Church and buildings associated with the Hirsau reform, a medieval monastic movement whose architecture favored restrained interiors and strong connections between choir areas.
Between 1900 and 1903, the high altar, four side altars, pulpit, and organ were made according to Schott’s designs so that the furnishings would retain a unified character. The stained-glass windows, produced in 1900, followed a late-Romantic design connected with early nineteenth-century traditions.
The Munich painter Franz Hofstötter decorated the main apse in 1901. Both the parish and the artist were dissatisfied with the result, and Hofstötter proposed a fundamental redesign. His drawings for the sanctuary, transept, and crossing vault, supplied in 1905, adopted the Jugendstil manner. The redesign removed almost all visible evidence of the first apse paintings. Hofstötter completed only about half of the planned decoration before receiving several other church commissions in 1910. Wilhelm Vierling finished Hofstötter’s designs in 1914.
Later changes to the organ and bells
The original two-manual Maerz organ, made in 1902, was extensively rebuilt and enlarged by Steinmeyer in 1934. It was replaced by a new Eisenbarth organ in 1983. Thomas Jann Orgelbau carried out a general overhaul in 2010, and Banzhaf revoiced the instrument. In 2021, all its bellows were newly leathered and the organ was generally tuned.
The six-bell bronze peal also belongs to more than one period. One bell was cast by Gugg in 1900, while five were made by Otto in Bremen-Hemelingen in 1949. The peal is regarded as the second-lowest-pitched in the Upper Palatinate, after the bells of Regensburg Cathedral.
Remains
Plan and exterior
St. Josef is a three-aisled basilica, a church plan with a higher central nave flanked by lower side aisles. It measures 64 metres in length, 25 metres in width, and 35 metres across the transept. The central nave rises 18 metres internally, while the two towers reach 63 and 64 metres. For urban-planning reasons, the church faces north and is set prominently into the street line.
The monumental facade is formed by two four-storey towers with rich architectural articulation, triangular gables, and steep pointed roofs. The five-bay nave joins a two-bay main choir ending in a semicircular apse. A transept, the crosswise part of a church that intersects the nave, stands between the nave and choir and ends at both sides in semicircular apses. Applied round-arch arcades, pilaster strips, and connecting round-arch friezes organize the exterior. The apses of the north choir and transept carry dwarf galleries.
Interior structure and painted decoration
The interior is continuously vaulted but comparatively spare in its structural treatment. Two rows of semicircular arcades divide the central nave from the side aisles. Their stepped arches rest on half-columns with simple cushion capitals, while the central nave has a ribbed cross-vault carried by additional half-columns. A ribbed cross-vault is a ceiling whose intersecting surfaces are defined and supported by structural ribs.
Broad areas between the arcade arches and clerestory windows remain available for wall paintings. Clerestory windows illuminate the raised central nave. The subsidiary choirs open toward the main choir through large arcade arches, creating the spatial connections associated with Schott’s Romanesque and Hirsau-inspired design.
The crossing vault is covered with the four apocalyptic creatures from the Book of Revelation, the human, lion, bull, and eagle. Each has six wings, and each also represents one of the four Evangelists. Beneath them appear the four apocalyptic riders, associated with victory, war, famine, and death. The victorious rider carries a bow and wears a crown on a white horse. A sword-bearing rider on a red horse removes peace from the earth, a rider with scales apportions food to the hungry, and Death rides a pale horse with a scythe. Golden rays follow the ribs, while stars appear as golden tongues of fire falling toward the earth.
Paintings above the arcade arches present scenes from the Old Testament. They include Judith with the head of Holofernes, Moses with the serpent, Joseph being sold by his brothers, Abraham and Melchizedek, the prophet Jonah, David and Goliath, the crossing of the Red Sea, and the sacrifice of Isaac.
The main choir and apse
High altar
The high altar was made in 1900–01 by the Munich goldsmith Rudolf Harrach after Schott’s design. It stands on a base of Kiefersfeld marble. Its gilded-copper reredos, the decorated structure rising behind an altar, takes the form of a medieval reliquary shrine and is crowned at the centre by a tabernacle tower. A tabernacle is a shrine or cabinet used for reserving consecrated sacramental bread.
Four mosaic panels on the predella, the lower section of an altarpiece, show the symbols of the Evangelists. Above them are reliefs of the Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Presentation in the Temple, and Finding in the Temple. Red mosaic columns support the relief zone.
Apse imagery
The apse wall behind the altar is faced with marble slabs. Two adoring angels appear there, one carrying a sacrificial bowl and the other the crown of victory of eternal life. Beside the statue of St. Joseph and the apse windows are monumental paintings of the twelve Apostles, extending into the first bay before the apse.
Inscriptions in the apse concern separation from the love of Christ and the Word becoming flesh. The vault contains a monumental Trinity known as the Throne of Mercy. God the Father sits on a jewel-encrusted throne, Christ appears before him on a cross formed from golden flames, and the dove of the Holy Spirit unites the three figures. The Throne of Mercy is a Christian image of the Trinity in which the Father presents or supports Christ on the cross, with the Holy Spirit represented by a dove.
The original three coloured apse windows, produced in 1900 by the Munich firm Franz Xaver Zettler, were altered during Hofstötter’s Jugendstil redesign. The central opening was bricked up and filled with a figure of St. Joseph. The other two windows were shortened and made straight, receiving new stained-glass images of Saints Sebastian and Michael in 1907. This change allowed the apse vault to be lowered.
Hofstötter modelled the flaming golden cross, the throne of God the Father, and all the haloes in stucco. He also redecorated the previously unpainted wall surfaces with marble slabs, mosaics, and stucco reliefs. In the sanctuary and transept, thick coarse-grained plaster was treated to resemble blocks of tuff. Reliefs pressed into the damp plaster show bizarre ornaments, plants, animals, fantastic creatures, and related symbols against golden backgrounds.
Transept furnishings
Subsidiary choir altars
The two side altars in the subsidiary choirs belong to the neo-Romanesque furnishing phase. They were made in 1901–03 after Schott’s designs, with figures carved by the Munich sculptor Johann Huber. The western altar is dedicated to St. Michael. It shows God the Father, Christ, Mary as intercessor, and the archangel Michael guiding souls from purgatory. The eastern altar depicts the Holy Family.
Western transept altar
The western transept altar was also designed by Schott and made in 1901–03 with sculptural work by Huber. Its subject is the Sacred Heart vision of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. The side niches contain St. Francis de Sales and St. Bernard of Clairvaux. Stucco reliefs on the apse wall show Jesus healing a lame man and dining with tax collectors, while the apse vault presents the glorification of the Lamb from the Book of Revelation.
In front of the western transept altar is the tomb of Max Josef Söllner, the parish priest associated with the church’s construction. Nearby stands a coloured wooden Crucifixion group transferred from the former shared-use church. It is the only furnishing component brought from that building. The crucified Christ dates from the second half of the seventeenth century, while the Sorrowful Mother, made around 1770–75, is regarded as a high-quality Rococo work of the Upper Palatinate.
Eastern transept altar
The eastern transept altar shows the Virgin and Child presenting the scapular to St. Simon Stock. Reliefs of Saints Anne and Joachim flank the central scene. Four reliefs on the apse wall personify the cardinal virtues, Prudence as a woman with a serpent, Temperance as restrained fire, Justice weighing two scales, and Fortitude as an armoured warrior with a sword. The cardinal virtues are Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude, traditionally understood as fundamental moral virtues in Christian thought.
Bronze plaques below the altar bear the names of those killed in the two world wars. The apse vault depicts those killed for the sake of the Lamb. The walls of the transept apses are faced with polished Kiefersfeld marble, while their vault panels contain varied stucco rosettes whose painted surfaces and gold mosaic inlays animate a blue-grey ground.
Pulpit and organ gallery
The pulpit on the right side of the central nave was made in 1900–01 after Schott’s design. Hofstötter covered the pier between the pulpit bowl and sounding board with mosaic. He added stucco figures of the prophet Daniel and St. John the Baptist, which appear to support the sounding board.
Above the organ gallery, the west wall bears a bust of Pope Gregory the Great and the east wall a bust of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of church music. At the centre of the gallery, an angel with raised hands supports a lectern. Hofstötter added four extremely slender angels playing musical instruments to the organ facade, giving it an unusually altered appearance.
The present Eisenbarth organ has 52 stops distributed across three manuals and a pedal. Its key action is mechanical, meaning that movement of the keys is transmitted mechanically, while its stop action is electrical. The stated couplers are II/I, III/I, III/II, I/P, II/P, and III/P. The organ case was designed by Schott in 1901.
Towers, bells, and baptismal chapel
Six bronze bells hang in the two towers and sound the sequence A-flat, B-flat, C, E-flat, F, and A-flat. The four smaller bells are in the east tower and the two larger bells in the west tower. The second bell belongs to the earlier peal and was cast by Gugg in 1900; Otto of Bremen-Hemelingen cast the other five in 1949.
The baptismal chapel adjoins the western tower bay. Its walls are covered with mosaics, and Wilhelm Vierling created the complete decoration in 1912. Two angels and the dove of the Holy Spirit appear amid rich ornament, with deep luminous blues and greens contrasted with gold. A large Nativity scene is installed in the chapel during the Christmas season.
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