Dwa kościoły. Budownictwo kultowe w międzywojennych Niemczech jako przestrzeń modernistycznych eksperymentów

Abstract

The time between WW I and II was a period of intensive development of church architecture in Germany. In the new situation after the defeat in WW I on the wave of Christian renewal movements, the concept of the church as a building corresponding to its functions, as an object expressing the character of religion and the vision of a congregation as a community in modern society was re -formulated. The dynamically developing church architecture was an area of intense experiments (especially in the 1920s.), creating new forms, as well as devising new iconography by Rudolf Schwartz, Otto Bartning, or Dominikus Böhm. The paper draws attention to a certain community of the main antagonized Christian and Protestant denominations on the example of two buildings erected on the eastern periphery of the then Germany (from 1945 constituting the western part of Poland): the Catholic Church of St Anthony in Schneidemühl (now: Piła, Hans Herkommer, 1928–1930) and the Protestant Cross-Church in Stettin (now: Szczecin, Adolf Thesmacher, 1929–1931). The first was built in a small town as a representative seat of the Prelature, a branch of the Catholic Church in the Protestant region, near the then border with (revived again) Poland. The building is a continuation of an innovative and conservative concept realized by Herkommer at the Frauenfriedenskirche in Frankfurt am Main (1927–1929), and is a testimony to the search for forms expressing the rationalist aspirations for the renewal of the Catholic Church, however without abandoning the main principles of the Tradition. For this purpose, Herkommer applies ‘industrial’ forms used in the Bauhaus circle, creating a clearly avant-garde building: not only in the local context of a small border town of eastern Germany, but also in the Catholic tradition of sacred architecture. Hiring an avant-garde architect and using modernist forms was the decision of one man: Monsignor Maximilian Kaller, the leader of the Prelature. The Church of the Cross in Szczecin was raised in a luxurious district of a great Protestant city, so it was the parish church of the Protestant elite. Although built of brick and clearly referring to the tradition of the Gothic architecture of this region, the Church of the Cross also reveals its striving for the maximum reduction of forms and the use of the language of abstraction. When building a Protestant church, Thesmacher resorted to forms applied primarily in Catholic architecture, especially to the forms used by Herkommer. Thesmacher created a facility expressing attachment to the local tradition and manifesting the modernity of the Evangelical church in Pomerania. As a result, both churches are a testimony to functionalist aspirations, although, of course, the functions differed from those on which, for example, the founders of the Bauhaus were focused.