St. Peter und Paul: Weimar’s Lutheran Parish Church
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page13 sections
History
St. Peter und Paul is an Evangelical Lutheran parish church in Weimar, Germany. Its present building is a late Gothic hall church constructed between 1498 and 1500, and the church has been Lutheran since 1525 after earlier serving as a Catholic church. Martin Luther preached here, establishing an early connection with the Reformation, the sixteenth-century movement that divided Western Christianity and led to the formation of Lutheran churches.
Medieval Foundations and Late Gothic Reconstruction
The first church on the site was built between 1245 and 1249. A fire destroyed it in 1299, leaving its foundations. A second church followed and suffered severe damage in the town fire of 1424. The present church emerged from the late Gothic rebuilding undertaken between 1498 and 1500.
Ernestine Burial Church
From the middle of the sixteenth century into the early seventeenth century, the church served as the princely burial place of the Ernestine branch of the House of Wettin. The Wettins were a German ruling dynasty, and their Ernestine branch governed territories in central Germany, including Saxe-Weimar. The church continued to be associated with the ducal family after the main period of burials, as the ducal household attended services there as well as at the court chapel.
Music and the Weimar Church
Johann Sebastian Bach frequently played the church organ, and two of his sons were baptized at St. Peter und Paul. The conductor and musicologist John Eliot Gardiner has suggested that several of Bach’s cantatas written for festive forces may have been first performed here. His proposal includes Christen, ätzet diesen Tag, written for Christmas, and Der Himmel lacht! Die Erde jubilieret, written for Easter Sunday in 1715. This attribution remains a suggestion rather than a certainty.
Herder and the Ducal Burials
Johann Gottfried Herder served as general superintendent at the church from 1776 until his death in 1803. A general superintendent was a senior Protestant official responsible for clergy and church administration within a territory. Herder, an eighteenth-century theologian, philosopher, and writer associated with Weimar Classicism, was buried in the church. The names Herderkirche and Herderplatz became associated with the church and the square before it, while the square was formally renamed after the Herder Memorial was erected in 1850. A plaque marks Herder’s former official residence in the house north of the church.
Duchess Anna Amalia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, also Duchess of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, was buried in the church in 1807 at her own request. She was the last regent to be buried there. Her burial continued the church’s long association with the ruling family.
War Damage and Reconstruction
Bombing on 9 February 1945, near the end of the Second World War, heavily damaged the church. Debris clearance began in 1945, and rebuilding between 1948 and 1953 secured the outer walls, reconstructed the roof and roof turret, repaired the west tower, installed and plastered new wooden vaults, and restored the chancel arch. The church reopened on 14 June 1953, while work on the interior furnishings continued until 1977.
The Cranach altarpiece had been removed to safe storage in 1940, which spared it from destruction in the 1945 air raids. Between 2010 and 2016, comprehensive restoration included the pulpit, baptismal font, and altarpiece. Two specially glazed windows were installed to protect the altarpiece from ultraviolet light.
Church, State, and Public Memory
On 4 December 1988, Superintendent Reder handed five people over to East German security authorities after they had occupied the church to express their wish to leave the country. The occupants and four people who knew about the action received lengthy prison sentences. Reder was later identified among almost 80 Thuringian pastors and church employees registered as unofficial collaborators by the Ministry for State Security. No specific action by him as an informer, or definite connection between that activity and the church occupation, has been established.
St. Peter und Paul and Herderplatz became important meeting places during the peaceful revolution in East Germany in the autumn of 1989. The church forms part of the Classical Weimar ensemble with Herder’s residence and the Old Gymnasium. Classical Weimar was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1998. In 2012, the church joined the International Community of the Cross of Nails, a network associated with churches destroyed during the Second World War.
Remains
St. Peter und Paul is a three-aisled late Gothic hall church. In a hall church, the nave and side aisles have approximately the same height, producing a broad, unified interior space. The choir contains the dynastic burials, while the nave and altar area preserve furnishings, monuments, and artworks connected with the church’s medieval, Reformation, and later history.
Interior Fabric and Medieval Elements
The Gothic interior is represented by the baptismal font, the stairs leading to the pulpit, and parts of a mural depicting the history of Saint Ursula. These elements belong to the surviving historic furnishings and decoration of the church. The chancel arch and wooden vaults were reconstructed during the postwar rebuilding, while the pulpit and baptismal font were included in the comprehensive restoration carried out between 2010 and 2016.
Cranach Altarpiece
The principal altarpiece is a large triptych made between 1552 and 1555. A triptych is an artwork with a central panel and two hinged wings. Recent research attributes the work to Lucas Cranach the Younger rather than to his father, Lucas Cranach the Elder, who was long believed to have begun it shortly before his death. The altarpiece is regarded as a major work of sixteenth-century Saxon-Thuringian art.
Elector Johann Friedrich I of Saxony commissioned the altarpiece, which also serves as his funerary monument and that of his wife Sibylla and their descendants. They are buried beneath the vault in front of the altar. Their names appear as an epitaph on the predella, the lower section of an altarpiece, and their portraits occupy the opened side wings.
The central imagery includes the crucified Christ, John the Baptist pointing toward Christ, the Lamb of God, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Martin Luther. Other scenes show Christ’s victory over Satan and death, Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, the bronze serpent, Moses preaching to the Israelites, and the Annunciation to the shepherds. When the wings are closed, their outer faces show the Baptism of Jesus and the Resurrection.
The imagery presents Reformation theology through Christ-centered symbolism, including the ideas of Solus Christus, salvation through Christ alone, and Sola scriptura, authority grounded in scripture alone. Luther holds an open Bible and points toward it, while Cranach the Elder is shown being washed by blood flowing from Christ’s wound. The original grave slab of Cranach the Elder is in the altar area. It was transferred from his burial place at the Jakobskirche cemetery, while a copy remains on the south side of the Jakobskirche.
Burials and Funerary Monuments
The choir contains the burials and funerary monuments of Elector Johann Friedrich I of Saxony; his wife, Sibylla of Jülich-Cleves-Berg; Agnes of Hesse, the first wife of Johann Friedrich II of Saxony; Duke Johann Wilhelm I of Saxe-Weimar; his wife, Dorothea Susanne of the Palatinate; Duke Friedrich Wilhelm I of Saxe-Weimar; his first wife, Sophia of Württemberg; Duke Johann of Saxe-Weimar; his wife, Dorothea Maria of Anhalt; and Duchess Anna Amalia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.
The nave also contained additional grave slabs, including one associated with Joh. Poppo von Greiner, together with tombstones belonging to aristocratic families. The church contains the so-called Luther Shrine, a triptych with portraits of Martin Luther, alongside the dynastic monuments and the Cranach works.
Organ
The present organ was built around 2000 by W. Sauer Orgelbau of Frankfurt an der Oder in the historic case of an instrument made by Johann Gottlob Trampeli in 1812. It reconstructs an earlier Walcker organ from the beginning of the twentieth century and incorporates surviving registers from the 1908 Walcker instrument, together with a 1978 8-foot Chamade, a reed stop whose pipes project horizontally. The organ has 53 stops on three manuals and pedal. Its manuals are the keyboards played by the hands. The instrument has mechanical key action, electric stop and coupling mechanisms, slider chests that distribute air to the pipes, adjustable tremulants, 128 combination settings, a crescendo roller, and a swell pedal for the third manual.
Bells
After Bach’s period, the church had six bells. The principal peal consisted of four bells with approximate pitches of B, D-sharp, F-sharp, and B. The largest weighed about 4,300 kilograms, was last recast in 1606 by the Erfurt founder Hermann Königk, and was rung only on major festivals. Jakob König cast the death bell in 1632. Together with the confession bell cast by Wolf Hilliger in 1566, it formed the Sunday peal. The pre-Reformation Mary bell was cast in 1294 and was rung with the confession bell on weekdays. A watch bell from 1680 hung in the roof turret, while the main tower held the storm and clock bells.
The three large bells were melted down for armaments during the First World War. In 1922, the old Mary bell was surrendered toward a new peal of chilled cast iron made by Schilling and Lattermann. These bells were named Luther, Herder, and Bach, but after more than 80 years they had reached their load limits. The foundry Rudolf Perner of Passau cast three replacement bronze bells in 2009. Installed on 28 September 2009, they entered service on Reformation Day that year. Named Luther, Herder, and Bach, they are respectively the Eternity Bell, Peace Bell, and Baptism Bell, with decoration designed by Walter Sachs. Their tuning relates them to the bells of the palace tower, the Roman Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart, and the Jakobskirche. The former cast-iron bells have stood in the courtyard of the Holzdorf estate since 6 May 2011.
