Capernaum Church
Capernaum Church is one of the two places of worship of the Lutheran Capernaum Congregation, a member of the Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia, an umbrella comprising Lutheran, Calvinist and united Protestant congregations. The church is located on Seestraße No. 34 in the locality of Wedding, in Berlin's borough of Mitte. The church was named after Capernaum, today Kfar Nachum כפר נחום in today's Israel.
Christians revere the town of Capernaum, since on Sabbaths Jesus of Nazareth used to teach in the local synagogue. The synagogue where Jesus possibly taught is a handsome, standing ruin open to visitors. Therefore, it is likely that the town has been the home of Jesus, at least for some time. In Capernaum also, Jesus allegedly healed a man, and a fever in Simon Peter's mother-in-law.
Congregation and church
The area belonged previously to the Nazareth Congregation, the oldest in Wedding. Due to the high number of new parishioners moving in at the end of the 19th century the Nazareth Church grew too small. Count Eduard Karl von Oppersdorf, who purchased many grounds along Seestraße in order to develop them as building land, offered to donate a site for a new church and a considerable sum of money to build it. He considered a prestigious site on a square to be developed in Antwerpener Straße, but Berlin's planning and zoning board refused to approve that. Thus he offered the site on the crossroads of Seestraße #34/35 with Antwerpener Straße No. 50 on the condition of starting the constructions until a certain date, otherwise the tendered money would be forfeited. Oppersdorf speculated for a rise of land prices by the establishment of a church in the area.Thus in 1896 the presbytery of Nazareth Congregation, presided by Pastor Ludwig Diestelkamp, commissioned the architect Baurat. Carl Siebold from Bethel, then leading the construction department of the Bethel Institution, to build an additional church in the undeveloped area. Diestelkamp knew Siebold through his friend Friedrich von Bodelschwingh. On 30 September 1897 the cornerstone was hastily laid. Effective constructions were only started in 1900.
Siebold, who built almost 80 churches, many of them in Westphalia, recycled his design for Christ Church in Hagen-Eilpe, which he adapted to the site on Seestraße. On 22 July 1902 the church was finished. The Evangelical Association for the Construction of Churches, a charitable organisation then headed by the Prussian Queen Augusta Victoria, co-financed the constructions. On 26 August the same year she, her son Crown Prince Frederick William and her husband King William II attended the inauguration of Capernaum Church, the latter in his then function as summus episcopus.
In the following year the Capernaum Congregation was constituted as independent legal entity, within the then Protestant umbrella Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces. The new congregation took over the northwestern part of the parish of the Nazareth Congregation, which is the northwestern part of the locality of Wedding, including the African Quarter north of the church building and the Schillerhöhe northeast of the church building.
Building
Due to the location of the site the church is not oriented, but directed to the southeast. The building consists of three longish naves on an asymmetric ground plan. While the northeastern nave is large and harbours a loft, in order to place more seats, the southwestern nave to Antwerpener Straße is narrow, rather resembling an aisle.The outside structure of Romanesque Revivalism, built from red brick, with its Lombard bands and the entrance hall to Antwerpener Straße rather resembles a basilica. Siebold's design is inspired by Romanesque architecture of Rhenish churches such as St. Apostles, and Great St. Martin Church.
The quire is highlighted by two octagonal towers, which are connected by a columned gallery of arcades. The room underneath the elevated quire was designed for the instruction of confirmands, thus being an early example of a structure combining church and community centre functions.
The tower at the crossroads of Seestraße with Antwerpener Straße, topped by a typical Rhenish steep rhombohedral spire, was built to form a landmark. Siebold designed it after the towers of St Mary's Assumption Church. The façade to Seestraße showed a great rose window. A second, considerably smaller tower connects the church building to the alignment of houses in Seestraße. In 1909 August Dinklage, Olaf Lilloe, and Ernst Paulus added a rectory in Rundbogenstil with round-arched windows in Seestraße #35, finished on 1 April 1911, thus inseriating the church with the alignment of houses. The rear wing of the rectory confines the backyard of church and rectory as a semi-closed court.
Destruction and Reconstruction
The Allied bombing of Berlin in World War II inflicted severe damages on Capernaum Church. In May 1944 the church completely burnt out to the outside walls, in February 1945 the main tower was also hit and burnt out.Starting in 1952 the architect Fritz Berndt began the reconstructions, accomplished by architect Günter Behrmann until 1959. The structures were simplified, the rose window was replaced by three biforium windows, while the main tower now bears a steep gable roof. The gable towards Seestraße was simplified due to the new simple gable roof, covering the main nave, the side naves carry catslide roofs, thus the nave to Antwerpener Straße lost its spire lights. The church was re-inaugurated on the occasion of the feast of Evangelical New Year on 29 November 1959.
Furnishings
Originally the church was sparingly furnished. The main nave was not vaulted but covered by a wooden ceiling, repeating in the middle the gable-roof form of the outside roof. Both side naves had even ceilings, supported by columns with cubic capitals. The lofts opened through three wide arches into the main nave.Mural paintings repeated Lombard bands and Romanesque ornaments. The quire was elaborately decorated with mural paintings typical for the Evangelical churches of the end of the 19th century. The apsis painting displayed an enthroned Jesus of Nazareth in a mandorla surrounded by angels alternating with palms. A painting on the tympanum on top of the apsis depicted the Roman Centurion asking Jesus to heal his servant. Stained glass windows of ornamental and figured design in the apsis continued the rich colourfulness of the quire. All this was destroyed in May 1944.
The new interior of 1959 under a wooden barrel vault is very plain. Behrmann created a new altar and a new pulpit. Eva Limberg designed the new christening bowl, the candlestick, carried by Apostle figures, and the lectern, depicting the scene of the Roman Centurion and Jesus. In 1958 August Wagner created new coloured windows above the altar, after the design of the Hermann Kirchberger. The windows depict the Benedictive Jesus, the Nativity of Jesus, and the Descent of the Holy Spirit. A surviving element of the original furnishing is a larger than life-sized copied statue of the benedictive Jesus after the famous statue by Bertel Thorvaldsen.
The Capernaum Congregation in the Nazi Era
After the premature re-election of presbyters and synodals on 23 July 1933, which the Nazi government had imposed onto all Protestant church bodies in Germany, the Nazi partisan Protestant so-called Faith Movement of German Christians gained a majority in the presbytery of the Capernaum Congregation, like in most congregations within the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union. With the new majorities on all levels of church organisation the German Christians systematically tried to subject any unadulterated form of Protestantism by way of firing church employees of other opinion, blocking church property for non-Nazi Protestant groups, prohibiting collections for other purposes than the officially approved ones.The majorities of German Christian synodals – first in the provincial synod of Brandenburg, competent for the Berlin and Brandenburg subsection, and then in the General Synod of the overall Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union – voted in the so-called Aryan paragraph, meaning that employees of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union – being all baptised Protestant church members -, who had grandparents, who were enrolled as Jews, or who were married with such persons, were all to be fired.
On 11 September 1933 :de: Gerhard Jacobi|Gerhard Jacobi, pastor of the William I Memorial Church in Berlin, leading the opposing synodals, gathered opposing pastors, who clearly saw the breach of Christian and Protestant principles and founded the Emergency Covenant of Pastors, presided by Pastor Martin Niemöller. Its members concluded that a schism was unavoidable, a new Protestant church was to be established, since the official organisation was anti-Christian, heretical and therefore illegitimate.
Three out of six pastors of the Capernaum Congregation joined the Covenant to wit Karl Berlich, Helmut Petzold, and Friedrich Lahde, the latter holding as senior pastor the office of chief executive of the presbytery, dominated by German Christians since the imposed re-election. In 1933 among the pastors of Berlin, 160 stuck to Gospel and Church, 40 were German Christians while another 200 had taken neither side. The same was true for the average parishioners, the vast majority did not bother being non-observant, many did not even participate in the elections, those who did, often voted for the German Christians, but in the following Struggle of the Churches, they never acted up as German Christian activists. The Kirchenkampf was an enactment performed by two minority groups within a rather indifferent majority.
As part of the re-election campaign the Nazi government and the Nazi party promoted that Nazi party members of Protestant descent, who were not members of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union, would join that church body in order to secure a clear majority of votes for the Nazi group of the German Christians. In 1933 the Capernaum Congregation reached a number of about 70,000 parishioners through these tactical mass enlistments. Once the interest of the Nazi leadership, to convert official Protestantism into a Nazi movement, faded due to the ongoing problems with opponents from within the churches, the policy changed. Many Nazis, being anyway non-observing Protestants, seceded again from the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union and the number of parishioners of the Capernaum Congregation dropped to 41,000 by 1935.
The existing majorities in the bodies on the different levels of church organisation remained, since in the synods the majority of German Christian synodals had voted for an abolition of further church elections. Parishioners' democratic participation by elections only re-emerged after the end of the Nazi reign. The Nazi government preferred the Protestant church bodies to weaken their influence in Germany by letting them enter into a destructive self-deprecation, once in while orchestrated by Nazi government interference in favour of the German Christians, but mostly in favour of the Protestant church bodies' dropping into insignificance.
The pastors of the Emergency Covenant of Pastors advanced their project of a new Protestant church and organised their own synods with synodals representing the intra-church opposition. The movement declared Protestantism was based on the complete Holy Scripture, the Old Covenant of Jewish heritage, and the New Covenant. The participants declared this basis to be binding for any Protestant Church deserving that name and confessed their allegiance to this basis. Henceforth the movement of all Protestant denominations, opposing Nazi intrusion into Protestant church affairs, was called the Confessing Church, their partisans Confessing Christians, as opposed to German Christians (Deutsche Christen, DC\\\