Franziskaner-Klosterkirche: The Ruin of Berlin’s Grey Monastery
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.4
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval
- Civilizations
- Holy Roman Empire, Margraviate of Brandenburg
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page10 sections
History
The Franziskaner-Klosterkirche in Berlin, Germany, was the church of a Franciscan monastery known as the Grey Monastery. The Franciscans were a mendicant religious order founded in Assisi around 1209 or 1210, whose communities emphasized preaching, poverty, and service. The monastery existed by 1249, and the church was built in the Gothic period, with recent archaeological and building-historical research placing its main construction in the last third of the thirteenth century. It became an early and influential example of brick Gothic architecture in Berlin.
Foundation and medieval construction
The church’s exact foundation date remains uncertain. One reconstruction proposes that a fieldstone hall church was built around 1249 and then replaced or incorporated into an early Gothic brick church between about 1250 and 1265 or between 1260 and 1270. Another interpretation regards the fieldstone walls as the first stage of a single building campaign rather than the remains of a separate predecessor. In either case, construction of the brick church continued into the first half of the fourteenth century.
The monastery occupied the southern part of the former margravial seat in Berlin. In 1271, the margrave transferred the property to the Franciscans, and in 1290 he gave them a brickworks. An inscription on the monastery’s former choir stalls preserved the memory of both gifts. This evidence encouraged a later dating of the church and weakened the earlier claim that it was Berlin’s oldest Gothic brick building. The church nevertheless differed from the older churches of medieval Berlin and Cölln, the neighboring settlement that later joined Berlin to form the city’s historic core, and it helped introduce new Gothic forms to the region.
Louis II, Elector of Brandenburg, was buried in the church in 1365. The building underwent renovation around 1500. Its association with the Brandenburg ruling house and its architectural innovations placed it within the religious and political landscape of medieval Berlin.
Reformation and later alterations
The Protestant Reformation was introduced in Berlin in 1539, after which the monastery was dissolved and the Franciscans departed. The former monastery rooms were given new educational and commercial uses. From 1571 they housed Berlin’s first printing press, and in 1574 the Berlinisches Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster opened in the complex. Leonhard Thurneysser, who established the press, restored the church in 1583 and 1584.
Further changes altered the building during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The former stair tower was demolished in the second half of the seventeenth century and replaced by a timber-framed staircase on the west side. In 1712, the rood screen, a partition separating the chancel from the nave, was removed. A fire then damaged the roof structure. Restoration in 1719 raised the floor by one metre and blocked two northern choir windows.
Nineteenth-century rebuilding
Major reconstruction took place during the first half of the nineteenth century. The gabled tower was demolished in 1826, and two new west towers were built from 1842. The floor was lowered again, and a new sacristy was added. Plans were prepared by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, a leading Prussian architect, Christian Gottlieb Cantian, an architect and builder, and the building inspector Wilhelm Berger. Berger’s second design was carried out, with work continuing until 1845.
Severe damp in the masonry led to the church’s closure in 1902. From 1926, most of the nineteenth-century alterations were reversed in an effort to recover the earlier character of the building. The church was reconsecrated on 24 May 1936.
War damage and cultural use
An Allied air raid on 3 April 1945 destroyed the church during the Second World War. The debris was removed in 1950, while the ruins were structurally secured between 1959 and 1963. The remaining monastery buildings were demolished completely, and the surrounding area was laid out as a green space. The church ruin is now a protected historic monument and is regarded as one of the region’s most important examples of brick Gothic architecture. It may also be the oldest building in historic Berlin preserved in something close to its former form.
Since the 1980s, the ruin has served as a venue for exhibitions and cultural events. Sculptures and other artistic works have been presented there since 1987. A support association took responsibility for the grounds in 1992, the ruin was restored again in 2003 and 2004, and responsibility passed to the Mitte district administration in 2016. Its continuing uses include exhibitions, theatre performances, and concerts. Plans for the redevelopment of the adjacent Molkenmarkt, adopted for planning by the Berlin Senate in 2016, envisage incorporating the ruin into a smaller-scale quarter based on historic block structures. Both winning competition designs selected in December 2021 included architectural responses to the ruin, and one proposed reconstructing the destroyed arcades between the church and Klosterstrasse.
Remains
Plan and construction
The surviving ruin preserves the main form of a three-aisled, four-bay basilica, a church whose central nave rises above lower side aisles. The nave measured approximately 29.5 by 23.7 metres, and the choir measured about 22 by 9.10 metres. Cross-rib vaulting once covered the interior, although no part of those vaults survived the wartime destruction. Their former springing points, where the vaults began, remain perceptible in the surviving wall arches.
The nave had an almost square ground plan, but its tall clerestory walls, the upper windowed part of the nave, gave the interior a relatively narrow spatial impression. Wall shafts and a small number of baked-clay impost capitals articulated the walls. Broad pointed-arch pier arcades opened the nave into the two side aisles. Each aisle received light from a separate window at its eastern end, while the monastery buildings once adjoined the northern aisle.
Choir and adjoining structures
The choir was two bays long and narrowed to the width of the central nave. Its polygonal termination, a multi-sided end to the choir, had a seven-tenths closure. One construction hypothesis places this feature around 1300, when it was added to an existing choir. A two-bay chapel and a stair tower originally stood beside the choir on its northern side. The stair tower was later removed, and its replacement was the timber-framed staircase built on the west side.
The choir was distinguished from the nave by more complex wall treatment. Pointed blind niches with trefoil arcades occupied the lower wall zone beneath the windows, while frescoes decorated the intervening surfaces. These paintings included representations of Saint Andrew and Saint Bartholomew. Very tall pointed-arch windows with profiled reveals illuminated the choir termination. The polygon widened slightly outward, creating an almost centralized spatial impression, and this type of choir was regarded as a model for Franciscan churches in Brandenburg and Stettin.
Piers, walls, and surviving exterior
The supports along the nave alternated between two forms. Some were clustered piers with polygonal plans, while others were square piers with a semicircular shaft on each side. Surviving elements include the nave pier arcades, the clerestory walls, portions of the fieldstone exterior wall of the northern aisle, the west facade, and the west facade’s profiled portal. The choir and nave survive as architectural ruins, allowing the relationship between the principal spaces to remain legible.
The church was built without a full tower in keeping with Franciscan rules, although a small ridge turret rose from the roof. The former gabled tower and the two nineteenth-century west towers are no longer part of the ruin. Fieldstone remains can be seen in the northern aisle’s exterior wall and beneath the choir termination. If the earlier interpretation is correct, they belonged to a rectangular hall church measuring approximately 52 by 16 metres. Under the alternative interpretation, they represent the first phase of the brick church itself.
Lost furnishings and instruments
The former choir stalls have disappeared, but their inscription preserved the margrave’s transfer of the monastery property in 1271 and his gift of a brickworks in 1290. The church also had several organs during its later history. An organ made in 1579 was replaced in 1689. Carl August Buchholz supplied another instrument with 25 stops in 1844, and the W. Sauer company installed an organ in 1936 with 29 registers on two manuals and a pedal, designed in the style of the organ reform movement.
