Berliner Dom
Berliner Dom, the city’s cathedral. It’s never just a matter of religiosity to seek out and visit a city’s cathedral. It is not a matter of belief or not. It’s history. Architecture. Art. A chance to pause and reflect. A place where sound feels equally mystifying as the architecture. Most of all it’s paying your respects to the city itself.
A chance to sit down with a book on the history of the place and just read a few lines. By reading about the history of the building you learn about the history of the city and in this case of the German nation. In case you were thinking these lines are an excuse to save us of the trouble..nope.
With the elevation of the St. Erasmus Chapel in the newly built electoral palace at Cölln on the Spree to a collegiate monastery, the history of the cathedral on the Spree island began in 1465. Although this was never the seat of a bishopric, due to its special position under canon law, the term “cathedral church” became established – as with other collegiate churches. The eight-person chapter was provided with income from the villages in the Berlin area, in which it also held jurisdiction. These cathedral villages included Kaulsdorf, Ladeburg, Lichtenrade, Schönefeld, Zeestow and Zepernick.
In 1536, Elector Joachim II moved the cathedral monastery to the former Dominican church south of the palace. A crypt as a burial place for the ruling house was created in the following period in the area of the choir of this late Gothic hall church. This gave the monastery, whose chapter was also increased to 12 people, a significant upgrade and renewal.
In 1539 the elector introduced the Reformation in the Mark Brandenburg and the cathedral became a Lutheran church. Since the monastery adhered to a large part of the traditional ecclesiastical customs, soon after the death of Joachim II an increasing loss of importance began, so that in 1608 Elector Joachim Friedrich his abolition and conversion into a parish church, the “highest parish church here in our town of Cölln on the Spree “Ordered. It was probably during this time that the former monastery church was given a double-towered extension in the west.
Even under the first Prussian King Friedrich I, this church was considered dilapidated. So Friedrich II had it torn down and a new baroque building at the pleasure garden based on plans by the Dutch architect Johann Boumann the Elder. Ä. erect, which was consecrated on September 6, 1750. The coffins from the ruler’s crypt were transferred to the new building.
On the 300th anniversary of Luther’s posting of the theses, Lutherans and Reformed people came together in the United Church. On this occasion, Karl Friedrich Schinkel received the order for the extensive structural redesign of the Boumann Cathedral. He redesigned the baroque building inside and out in a classicistic way. The baroque ornamentation was removed, the portal widened to a large column position and covered with a triangular gable, and the tower was supplemented with two smaller flanking towers facing the pleasure garden.
In the course of the following decades there were repeated impulses for the construction of a new building. Several drafts for a new cathedral are known from Schinkel. King Friedrich Wilhelm IV had already drawn his own designs as Crown Prince. Building on this, Friedrich August Stüler developed the project of a huge three-aisled, later even five-aisled basilica based on Italian models with a Campo Santo to accommodate the ruler’s crypt.
Construction began in the east and north, but the revolution of 1848 brought this work to a complete standstill. Stüler’s new plans, which now envisaged a monumental central building, also remained unrealized. A competition in 1867 was unsuccessful.
Due to increasing industrialization, Berlin developed into a metropolis, from 1871 it was the capital of the newly founded German Empire, so that the “Old Cathedral” was increasingly felt to be no longer representative enough. The Catholic architect Julius Carl Raschdorff, originally from Silesia, was commissioned to work out designs for a new cathedral.
Before that, Raschdorff worked as a city architect in Cologne and in 1878 accepted the call to the Technical University of Charlottenburg. Before it could be realized, however, he had to modify his plans several times, not least after the Prussian House of Representatives had approved only ten million Reichsmarks instead of the twenty million Reichsmarks that had been hoped for. In 1893, the existing structure was finally torn down to make room for the historicist new building.
The interior design was largely influenced by Anton von Werner, who designed the altar windows and the dome mosaics and enjoyed the favor of Wilhelm II. A few decorations were only completed later, such as the bronze doors in the west (1907), the pulpit of the Sermon Church (1908), the large mosaic picture of the west portal (1920) and the painting of the field above the imperial porch (1937).
With its distinctive shape, the Berlin Cathedral is one of the main crowd pullers in the federal capital today. The two-storey, monumental-looking main front on the pleasure garden side is preceded by a pillared hall with a granite open staircase. The four-storey east side, facing the Spree, is reminiscent of baroque palace architecture and makes the original tripartite structure of the building clearly visible: Baptism and marriage church in the south, sermon church in the middle and memorial church (demolished in 1975) in the north.
In the north-western tower are the bells, which with their full, warm sound invite you to worship and prayer twice a day. The dome, which was not fully rebuilt after its destruction in World War II, with its 98 meters still towers over most of the surrounding buildings and can be seen from many points in the city. The Berlin Cathedral is often referred to as the “entrance gate to Museum Island”.
The view from the dome at a height of 50 meters shows the grandiose location of the Berlin Cathedral in the historic center of Berlin. The visitor is rewarded for climbing 270 steps with a view of the new Humboldt Forum, Museum Island, Straße Unter den Linden, synagogue, Gendarmenmarkt, Reichstag and the Red City Hall. More
