Who does something like that? The crowd in front of the Evangelical Paul-Gerhardt-Kirche at Wisbyer Straße 7 last weekend is just as big as the horror on the faces of those gathered. Pastor Almut Bellmann and the congregation are shocked. It happened on Thursday evening, just after 7 p.m.: Puffs of smoke came from the church built between two residential buildings. A passer-by called the fire department. She extinguished it, but the altar, the wooden sculptures, everything is charred. The masonry of the apse has cracked due to the heat, endangering the statics. Several organ pipes have melted. Clouds of soot wafted through the nave up to the two towers.
The church is now unusable. It was obviously vandalized on purpose as it was closed at this time. The lock on the heavy gate has been broken. An unidentified person was seen hurrying out of the burning place. It is unthinkable that the fire would have spread to the many apartments to the left and right of the church building from the 19th century, a brick architectural mixture of neo-Gothic and Art Nouveau, dedicated in 1910. The fire department of the State Criminal Police Office determined.
The church miraculously survived the Second World War, even though an aerial bomb had fallen on the roof. Until now, the congregation, which has been shrinking in number, has had its religious home in the building named after the theologian and hymn writer Paul Gerhardt. Weddings, baptisms and confirmations took place here. However, it was rumored that the priorities of the parishes in Prenzlauer Berg Nord should be shifted more to the more attractive use of the Gethsemane Church, which had become legendary as a result of the citizens’ movement at the time of reunification. There were even considerations of using the Paul Gerhardt Church for secular purposes, such as for sporting events. Rumors that have not been confirmed by the parish office. It is true that recently in the Gethsemane Church, just a ten-minute walk away, corona deniers had disturbed the service several times and made threats. The officials are also investigating in this direction.
Klaus Killisch and Sabine Herrmann
That was once: Now only the photograph remains of Gerhard Noack’s altar painting from 1910.
Why the Paul Gerhardt Church became the scene of the crime is still a mystery. The memories of an exemplary Church & Art campaign have also been burned away. Until Easter 2020, well-known artists had covered the wooden historical altar painting of the resurrected Jesus with a completely new modern image every year at Passiontide. Always until Holy Saturday. It was always a special ritual when the spiritualized, idealizing portrait of the risen Savior, painted in 1910 by the Nazarene Gerhard Noack, disappeared under a modern, often abstract imagery from Ash Wednesday until Easter Vigil. Opportunity for discourse on faith, religion and art for the congregation as well as for the many pilgrims from the cultural scene who have made a pilgrimage to the art service.
Markus Rheinfurth
One of the carved angels also fell victim to the flames.
When Noack painted his Messiah four years before the First World War, everything seemed to be ideally linked to faith. In the devotional image, the Son of God, risen from the dead, floated in a wreath of lights. The parishioners and the artists who successively covered him with their respective imagery during Lent, such as Sabine Herrmann, Felix Droese, Katharina Grosse, Lothar Böhme, nail artist Günter Uecker, Ursula Sax and finally the painter Klaus Killisch, humorously and affectionately called Noack’s savior the “ most beautiful man from Prenzlauer Berg”. Precisely because this Son of God was floating up there, so immaculately beautiful, almost lovely and far from all tiresome earthly things. Now there is nothing left of this symbolism of the good, the beautiful. ideals. Just ash, charred wood, and a huge scorched patch.
Klaus Killisch and Sabine Herrmann
This is a piece of memory: the last Passion Time picture by the Berlin painter Klaus Killisch from Ash Wednesday to Easter Vigil 2020. The historical Jesus painting by Noack was hidden underneath.
Was that an attack on a symbol? The regional bishop of the Evangelical Church, Christian Stäblein, rushed to the crime scene at the weekend. The churchman struggles to keep his composure and at first has difficulty finding the words for a little devotion outside the gate, which the police have cordoned off with red and white tape. Even then you have the smell of burning in your nose. A young man in the crowd says, “What’s going on in our country? Now, after the synagogues and mosques, must the Christian churches also be guarded?”