Marienkirche in Berlin-Mitte: A Medieval Urban Parish Church
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.5
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Holy Roman Empire, Kingdom of Prussia, Margraviate of Brandenburg
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page12 sections
History
Marienkirche is an Evangelical Lutheran parish church in Germany, built as a medieval brick-Gothic church and dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Its origins lie around 1270, and it remains Berlin’s oldest urban parish church still in sacred use. Standing at Neuer Markt in the former Neustadt, near the older Nikolaikirche, it was one of six medieval churches in the historic city center.
Medieval parish church
Marienkirche was first identified as a parish church on 3 January 1292, when it appeared under the Latin name ecclesia St. Marie virginis. Construction continued into the fourteenth century. The building was enlarged around 1300 and again around 1380, while its final medieval form was reached in 1413 after chapels were added beside the aisles.
In the medieval period, the church and the Heilig-Geist Hospital served as the two Berlin starting points for the pilgrimage route to Wilsnack. A stone expiation cross outside the west facade recalls another episode from the city’s medieval history. It commemorates the killing of Provost Nikolaus von Bernau in 1325 by citizens of Berlin and Cölln because he supported Pope John XXII.
Reformation and later history
Originally Roman Catholic, Marienkirche became Lutheran in 1539 during the Reformation, the sixteenth-century religious movement that produced Protestant churches across western and central Europe. From 1817 to 1948, its parish belonged to the Prussian Union of Churches. Since the late twentieth century, the church has served as a preaching church of the Evangelical St. Petri–St. Marien congregation in Berlin’s Mitte church district.
After the city took over Nikolaikirche in 1938, Marienkirche became Berlin’s oldest preaching site. It also emerged from the Second World War as one of the few large Berlin churches still usable for worship. Allied bomber crews used the church as a prominent orientation point, and it suffered war damage without being destroyed.
The war and subsequent redevelopment transformed the church’s surroundings. The densely built Marienviertel was cleared after the war, and surviving historic buildings were demolished during the extensive redevelopment of central Berlin in the 1960s. Marienkirche consequently changed from the dominant building of a medieval urban district into an isolated historic structure surrounded by open space and high-rise buildings. The television tower, opened in 1969, became part of this new setting.
Restoration and continuing use
Hermann Blankenstein directed a major restoration and redesign in 1893–1895. Earlier postwar repairs were followed by restoration in 1969–1970, when East German authorities addressed war damage during the redevelopment of Alexanderplatz and its surroundings. The work included new entrance portals by Berlin metal artist Achim Kühn. Historicist ornamental additions were removed in the postwar restoration.
Environmental works carried out from 2014 to 2017 partially lowered the ground around the building, making its original medieval ground level more apparent. Marienkirche is protected as a cultural-heritage monument in Berlin and continues to host parish worship, church-district and regional church events, university and ecumenical services, and church-music performances.
The church’s religious and civic history has continued into the modern era. Martin Luther King Jr., the American civil-rights leader and Baptist minister, preached there in September 1964 and declared that no border could separate God’s children. In 2017, Marienkirche hosted Berlin’s first ecclesiastical wedding of a same-sex couple. During the 1980s in East Germany, the Christmas Eve organ concert with Bible readings became associated with the intellectual blues scene’s support for the peace movement and the slogan “Swords into Ploughshares.”
Marienkirche also served as an orientation point for the astronomical azimuth used in establishing a unified geodetic coordinate system for German national surveying. The fundamental point of that system was at Rauenberg. In 1986, a pair of peregrine falcons established Berlin’s first breeding site since 1944 at the church. Their first attempt, in an old hooded-crow nest, was unsuccessful; later pairs used a nest box before breeding at Berlin City Hall.
Burials and memorials
Several figures connected with Brandenburg-Prussian and Berlin history are buried or commemorated at Marienkirche. Otto Christoph von Sparr, a Brandenburg-Prussian field marshal, was buried there in 1663. Carl Hildebrand Freiherr von Canstein, founder of the Canstein Bible Society, was buried in 1719. Other recorded burials and memorials concern the land-rent master Johann Berchelmann, his daughter Catharina Berchelmannin Pancovius, her husband Thomas Pancovius, and the physician and councillor Martin Weise.
Remains
Medieval structure
Marienkirche is a three-aisled hall church, a form in which parallel aisles are of approximately similar height and share a unified roof or vaulting system. Its nave has seven bays beneath a common roof, while a short, single-aisled polygonal choir completes the eastern end. Four chapels with separate transverse roofs adjoin the south aisle.
The medieval foundations and lower structural elements are built largely from fieldstone. Above them rises a red-brick hall in the northern European brick-Gothic tradition, which uses brick structural walls together with Gothic forms of decoration. Pointed-arch blind arcades, pilasters, and pinnacles articulate the eastern facade and the side chapels.
Inside, octagonal and clustered piers carry the vaulting, and their capitals are undecorated. The vaults combine cross-ribbed and net forms, while the main nave is described as having a star vault. The choir retains a well-preserved star vault. Beneath the church is a crypt, a partly subterranean chamber used for burial or devotional purposes, with a two-storey crypt chapel.
West tower
The square west tower was begun in the early fifteenth century after an earlier tower collapsed. Building research distinguishes five medieval construction phases. Its three-aisled lower section is approximately as broad as the nave and is slightly displaced to the north. The tower was built more than two metres from the nave before the two structures were joined.
The tower has two-shell masonry. Fieldstone with brick edges forms the lower exterior, while Rüdersdorf shell limestone was used above. The interior is largely brick in the lower part and entirely brick higher up. Lower window surrounds are limestone, with brick used for the remaining surrounds.
The tower helm is about 48 metres high, and the complete tower reaches approximately 90–91 metres. Following fires, the upper structure was rebuilt in Baroque form from 1663 to 1666 under Michael Mathias Smids. Carl Gotthard Langhans redesigned the helm in a Gothic Revival form in 1789–1790, with construction supervised by Carl Samuel Held and Georg Friedrich Boumann. The medieval west portal was replaced by a nineteenth-century Gothic Revival portal, while Kühn’s later entrance portals are made of repoussé copper, shaped by hammering the metal from the reverse to raise designs on the front, and incorporate cross symbolism.
Dance of Death fresco
The tower hall contains the monumental Dance of Death fresco, a late-medieval theme in which Death leads people from different social ranks in a procession. The mural measures 22.6 metres in length and two metres in height. Clerical and secular estates move through the scene with personifications of death, while Low German verses give the figures complaints about their fate and requests for postponement. These verses are regarded as the oldest Berlin poetry.
The fresco begins at the west entrance, passes around a pier, and continues along the west and north walls almost into the church interior. A Crucifixion scene at its center separates the clerical and secular groups. The work was probably painted around the plague year 1484. Its composition may have drawn on earlier Dance of Death paintings in Lübeck and possibly Hamburg. The mural was probably covered with lime during the Reformation and was rediscovered during restoration work in 1861 by Friedrich August Stüler. Heinrich Fischbach restored it, but moisture in the masonry later caused severe fading. A glass wall now protects the painting.
The opening figure is a preaching Franciscan. The painting’s Franciscan outlook, together with construction work then taking place at Berlin’s Franciscan Grey Monastery, has led to the conjecture that a Franciscan painted it. The mural was commissioned by Berlin’s burghers.
Choir furnishings
The Baroque high altar was created by Andreas Krüger around 1762. Its monumental structure separates the polygonal end of the choir from the remainder, allowing that eastern section to serve as a sacristy, the room used to store liturgical objects and prepare for worship. Composite columns frame three paintings by Bernhard Rode. Christ praying on the Mount of Olives appears on the left, the Apostle Thomas touching Christ’s side wound on the right, and the Descent from the Cross occupies the center. Above the central painting, a sculptural Salvator leans on his cross while two angels venerate him.
In front of the altar stands the Gothic baptismal font, a bronze casting dated 1437. Four dragon-shaped feet support its basin, whose surface is decorated with sixteen relief figures of saints beneath tracery arches.
Pulpit, tombs, and other works
The alabaster pulpit was made by Andreas Schlüter in 1702–1703. The nave benches face it. Its pulpit basket appears to float between two angels and is attached to four marble columns with gilded Ionic capitals. These columns interrupt an original clustered Gothic pier. Above, the canopy carries a glory filled with putti and trumpet-playing angels venerating the Bible.
The church retains rare original wrought Renaissance grilles in interior and exterior areas, as well as historic tombs, epitaphs, and a former Gothic winged-altarpiece shrine with three holy bishops. A memorial to Regina Stillerin is also preserved. The monumental tomb of Otto Christoph von Sparr was created by Artus Quellinus the Elder, possibly with assistance from Bartholomeus Eggers. A statue of Martin Luther stands outside the church.
After the Second World War, numerous works from the destroyed Nikolaikirche and Franciscan monastery church were transferred to Marienkirche. A Marian altarpiece made around 1520 for the Franciscan church was lent to the Heiligengrabe convent in 2004. Its return to Berlin was contractually secured, although it remained at Heiligengrabe in February 2014.
Bells and organ
Five bells hang in the church tower, with strike notes g°, h°, cis′, e′, and e″. The four larger bells use cranked yokes. The largest, cast by Johann Jacobi in 1705, weighs about 6,000 kilograms and measures 2,080 millimetres in diameter. It was originally made for Berlin Cathedral and was transferred to Marienkirche in 1742 after the cathedral and its towers had become unsafe. The cathedral was demolished in 1747.
Joachim Wagner built the organ from 1720 to 1722 after studying for two years under Gottfried Silbermann, and the instrument was inaugurated in 1723. Johann Georg Glume designed its case, which Paul de Ritter completed in 1742. The organ was repeatedly altered. In 1800, Friedrich Falckenhagen, following plans by Georg Joseph Vogler, removed 1,400 of its 2,556 pipes. Johann Simon Buchholz rebuilt it in 1829, and Heinrich Schlag and Sons modified it in 1893–1894. Wilhelm Sauer increased the number of stops to 57 and installed cone chests, organ wind chests in which valves control the air supply to individual pipes, with tubular-pneumatic action.
The instrument survived the Second World War largely intact. From 1947 to 1949, Alexander Schuke’s workshop replaced its pneumatic action with electro-pneumatic action, which combines electrical control with pneumatic operation, and moved its disposition toward a Baroque sound. Further changes followed in 1957, 1970, and 1985. After severe damage was identified in the winter of 1996, the congregation chose a new organ rather than reconstructing the damaged instrument.
Alfred Kern and Sons of Strasbourg built the replacement in 2002 according to Wagner’s 1721 concept and disposition. It reconstructs all 40 of Wagner’s stops using surviving historic pipes and reproduces the Baroque case by Glume and de Ritter, while retaining historically important alterations made in 1908. Its wind channels, chests, and bellows follow surviving Wagner organs. The manual arrangement and compass were adapted for modern musical practice, the compass was extended to f3, and the instrument received Neidhardt III tuning at the modern pitch of 440 Hz, five additional stops, and a pedal coupler.
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