In a city that has seen centuries of political and religious change and sometimes turmoil, Berlin’s Nikolaikirche, or St Nicholas Church, looks as if it had witnessed it all. With its twin-spike spires, it is Berlin’s oldest church and a readily-recognized icon of its skyline, both today and in historic images.
In the 1600s, the church was already celebrating its 400th anniversary
And yet, for forty years after World War II, it was absent from the scene, reduced to a shell by Allied bombing during the war, and further reduced when its remaining ceiling vaults and many of its pillars collapsed in 1949. Only in the last years of East Germany did it, and the neighborhood around it, return to life.
Surrounded by reconstructed medieval-era buildings, it is the centerpiece of the Nikolaiviertel, or Nikolai Quarter, the closest Berlin has to a historic center. Though it sits near the point where two small riverside villages became Berlin early in the 13th century, it feels like what it is: a recreation, not really connected to the busy city that surrounds it tightly with modern buildings and side streets.
Well before its World War II destruction, the church was no stranger to turmoil and change.
In the 15th century, the area’s rulers, the Margraves of Brandenburg built a ‘city palace,’ or Stadtschloss a short walk away, to serve as their residence, and Berliners, who then numbered only 8,000 or so, rebelled against being forced to pay for it. The so-called ‘Berlin Indignation’ was put down, and the town lost its political and economic privileges.
Originally Catholic, in 1539 it was taken over by Lutherans and became Berlin’s leading center of Lutheran worship and theology.
Over the centuries, as the city grew, spreading out over more territory, the old center became more business and less residential; by the end of the 19th century, the central Berlin area around it, now called Mitte, or Center, became nearly all-business and the congregation at Nikolaikirche shrank.
By Reformation Day in 1938, it had become so small that it merged with another church, and the building became a concert hall and church museum, which is more or less what the reconstructed building is today, renowned for spectacular acoustics.
But its last years as a church were not unmarked by turmoil, either. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the area around it was the scene of frequent street-fighting between Nazi thugs and left-wing workers’ militias. One of those involved was Horst Wessel, a street criminal who became an SA leader; his death in 1930 made him a Nazi hero and his funeral crowd thronged the area around the church, where his father had been pastor for ten years.
The baptismal font, which originally had paintings on all eight faces, was removed in 1939, first to another church and then a museum.
The reconstructed church has a spare, almost austere look, in part because so much of the interior decoration was list first through neglect and then in the bombing and its aftermath.
This is sort of a case of ‘altared’ states: These sculptures were once part of an elaborate altar at the front of the church. They represent Faith, Love, Hope, Humility, Patience and Devotion. All the pieces were made of wood, but the craftsmen of the era used a variety of techniques, both in surface preparation and by painting grain into the outer coating to give the impression of stone or precious metals.
Many of the pieces now on display in the church survived the bombings by not being there. As the congregation and support for its building diminished over its last eighty years, many of the pieces, especially some of the most significant, ended up in museum collections, and were only restored to the church after its rebuilding.
