St Catherine’s Church, the Katharinenkirche, is one of the harbor city’s most recognizable landmarks, with its nearly 400-foot copper-clad spire visible far and wide. At a distance, it might be taken as a proclamation of pride, but up close, it wears the scars of its history.
One of Hamburg’s oldest buildings, and the second-oldest tower in the city, it dates to the 13th century, but was nearly destroyed in the 20th by an air raid in 1943. Rebuilding began seven years later, carefully restoring elements of its beauty, but unlike many other rebuilt churches, leaving testament to the damage.
Two views from nearly the same location, 1943 and 2022
The interior columns and walls are massive—when they were first built, starting around 1250, that was the only way. The church’s Gothic features were a 16th century adornment, and don’t include buttresses to support the walls.
Magnus Manske (above) and Calips (below) through Wikimedia Commons
Today, their stark appearance, contrasted with the beautiful fittings and hanging art creates a space that compels thought, without defining what we should think. Perhaps the best hint is a railing emblazoned in German with the motto “We have no enduring city in the past; we seek the one in the future.”
Like Venice, Hamburg grew from early settlements on clusters of frequently marshy islands in the Elbe river, which flows fairly steadily for 700 miles from the Czech-Polish border until it gets to Hamburg, where it splits into two main streams and a crazy-quilt of small streams trying to find their mother. After Hamburg, there’s a reunion, and 50 km later, the North Sea.
Lower image: Dietmar Rabich/Wikimedia
St Katharinen was built on one of those marshy islands; in the 1250s, 1,100 larch tree trunks were driven into the soil to support it. It was originally a smaller building, with a single nave and the massive base of the tower as its oldest parts. In the 1400s, it got a brick Gothic do-over with the additional, longer naves, and by 1657 the Baroque rooftop was added to bring the spire up to its full height.
St Katharinen is one of the five main Lutheran parishes of Hamburg, but over the years its congregation has changed repeatedly. It was originally built for a community of fishermen living on the surrounding islands. With its location at the then-edge of the harbor, it became a traditional church for seamen.
Then, in the 1880s, the entire medieval quarter of fishers and sailors it abutted was torn down to build the Speicherstadt, a ‘city’ of warehouses for free trade with the world; that came as part of a deal in which Hamburg gave up its age-old independence from other German states in return for a free port separate from the rest of the harbor.
While no one was allowed to live in the free port area, thousands of warehouse and processing workers moved to the areas behind St Katharinen and became its new congregation.
St Katharinnen in its old neighborhood, 1870s
St Katharinen’s organ has a long history and a relatively short one. The long history starts in 1670, when a new organ was installed with 58 stops, 88 ranks, and four manuals and pedals; it may have been the largest organ in the world at the time. Bach visited Hamburg as a teenager to hear it. In 1720, shortly before he became the Cantor of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, he returned to play it as an audition for the organist post at a nearby church.
The present organ, completed in 2013 after years of work, is as precise as possible a recreation of the one destroyed in the bombing; it uses salvaged portions of the originals, and detailed photos and descriptions made before the war as a guide.
The rebuilding of the church took place between 1950 and 1957, with the tower finished last. Fifty years later, between 2007 and 2012 more reconstruction was done, giving the church its present appearance, and also a surprise discovery. The doorway below, in the north wall, was filled in and covered over sometime after 1500. The bronze plate in the frame represents the original door, now set in a frame of steel and glass as a kind of window or showcase.
Left image: Frank Schulenberg/Wikimedia
