St. George's Anglican Church, Berlin

St. George's Church
St. George's Church
	The new St. George's Church, seen from southeast
Religion
Affiliation	Anglican
District	Diocese of Gibraltar in Europe
Province	Canterbury
Leadership	Rev. Canon Christopher Jage-Bowler
Year consecrated	1885 (1st building); 1950 (2nd building)
Location
Location	Neu-Westend, a neighbourhood in the Westend locality of Berlin
Geographic coordinates	52°30′44″N13°15′31″E / 52.51222°N 13.25861°E
Architecture
Completed	1885 (1st building); 1950 (2nd building)
Construction cost	ℳ 130,000 (1885)
Materials	Silesian granite and taylored glacial erratics (1885)
Website
	http://www.stgeorges.de/

Last updated December 04, 2023

St. George's Church (Englische Kirche zu St. Georg between 1885 and 1944) is an Anglican church in Berlin, Germany, a parish of the Diocese in Europe of the Church of England. The original building was erected on Monbijou Park in 1885, but during the Second World War was destroyed in allied bombings. The original site on Oranienburger Straße happened to be in what had become the Soviet sector of Berlin in 1945 and was therefore abandoned and the ruins removed in 1949. In 1950, the congregation built a new church on the corner of Preußenallee and Badenallee in Neu-Westend, part of the Westend locality of Berlin in the British sector. The church served as the garrison church of the British Army during the Allied occupation, and reverted to civilian control in 1994.

History

There had been Anglican worship in Berlin since at least 1830. From 1855 the Anglican congregation used a gatehouse at Monbijou Palace as the English Chapel.^[1] The chapel soon became too small for the services of the congregation, regularly attended by Princess Royal Victoria, Crown Princess of Prussia and the German Empire.^[2] In 1883 Crown Prince Frederick William and Victoria provided a site in the park of Monbijou Palace close to Monbijoustraße and the Domkandidatenstift.^[2] Julius Carl Raschdorff, who would later design Berlin's Supreme Parish and Collegiate Church, was commissioned to develop the plans for a church in close collaboration with Crown Princess Victoria and was sent to England on a study tour.^[2]

Old St. George's Church, 1884–1949

The church was built under the patronage of Crown Princess Victoria.^[1] The cornerstone was laid on 24 May 1884, Queen Victoria's birthday.^[2] The construction was financed through donations to the royal couple on the occasion of their silver wedding, with provision for a minister.^[2] The church was built of Silesian granite and glacial erratics, covered with a patterned slate roof cladding.^[2] British relatives of the princess donated the stained-glass windows.^[2] The church, seating 300, was inaugurated on 19 November 1885.^[2] The Kings of Prussia, who were also German Emperors, were the church's patrons.^[1] On their visits to Berlin, Queen Victoria and King George V visited the church in 1888 and 1913, respectively.^[1] During World War I it was the only Anglican Church in Germany which was allowed to remain open, thanks to William II who was then its patron.^[1]

After the war the congregation developed not only for Britons but also for American, German, Indian, Chinese, Finnish and Russian Christians.^[1] In 1921, Charles Andrew Schönberger came to Germany and opened a branch of the Anglican Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel in Berlin, opposite St. George's on Oranienburger Straße 20/21.^[3] A number of proselytes among the Jews of Berlin joined the Anglican congregation. When the Nazi persecution of Jews and even Jewish-born Christians (see Prussian Union of Churches § Protestants of Jewish descent) became more and more unbearable, the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel relinquished its premises on Oranienburger Straße to Heinrich Grüber's help organisation, Grüber Bureau [ de ], on 7 December 1938.^[4] The Grüber Bureau cooperated with Bishop George Bell, who had engaged his sister-in-law Laura Livingstone to run the Berlin office of the International Church Relief Commission for German Refugees.^[5] A plaque at the new building on Oranienburger Straße 20 commemorates the joint efforts of the Anglicans and the Confessing Church.

St. George's, which was closed after the outbreak of the Second World War, was hit by allied bombing in 1943 and 1944.^[1] The ruins of the church, which after 1945 was in the Soviet Sector of Berlin, were later demolished by the German Democratic Republic (GDR).^[1]^[6]

New St. George's Church, 1950–present

After the war, the congregation consisted mostly of members of the British forces and administration stationed in Berlin. In 1950, a new St. George's Church was built by Korth and Stevens in the Neu-Westend neighbourhood in the British Sector as the garrison church of the British forces.^[1] From 1945 to 1954 the Lutheran congregation of Melanchthon Church on Wilhelmstraße, close to the Smuts Barracks, also hosted the British garrison church community. The pews of St. George's still bear the insignia of the British regiments once garrisoned in Berlin. In 1987 the original church silver, donated by Crown Princess Victoria, was discovered in a city cellar and has since been used for weekly worship.^[1] Since the British forces withdrew from Berlin in 1994, the church has been used by civilians.

Related Research Articles

Mischling was a pejorative legal term which was used in Nazi Germany to denote persons of mixed "Aryan" and non-Aryan, such as Jewish, ancestry as they were classified by the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935. In German, the word has the general denotation of hybrid, mongrel, or half-breed. Outside its use in official Nazi terminology, the term Mischlingskinder was later used to refer to war babies born to non-white soldiers and German mothers in the aftermath of World War II.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Prussian Union of Churches</span> German Protestant church body

The Prussian Union of Churches was a major Protestant church body which emerged in 1817 from a series of decrees by Frederick William III of Prussia that united both Lutheran and Reformed denominations in Prussia. Although not the first of its kind, the Prussian Union was the first to occur in a major German state.

Oranienburger Straße is a street in central Berlin. It is located in the borough of Mitte, north of the River Spree, and runs south-east from Friedrichstraße to Hackescher Markt.

Westend is a locality of the Berlin borough Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf in Germany. It emerged in the course of Berlin's 2001 administrative reform on the grounds of the former Charlottenburg borough. Originally a mansion colony, it is today a quite densely settled, still affluent territory adjacent to Berlin's inner city in the east.

Friedrich Karl Otto Dibelius was a German bishop of the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg, a self-described anti-Semite and up to 1934 a conservative, who became a staunch opponent of Nazism and communism.

Monbijou Park is a park in Mitte, a district of Berlin, Germany. The park is bounded to the south by the river Spree, to the west by Monbijoustraße, and to the north Oranienburger Straße and Monbijouplatz. It is close to the Friedrichstadt Palast, Neue Synagogue and the Sophienkirche.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Monbijou Palace</span> Castle in Berlin, Germany

Monbijou Palace was a Rococo palace in central Berlin located in the present-day Monbijou Park on the north bank of the Spree river across from today's Bode Museum and within sight of the Hohenzollern city palace. Heavily damaged in World War II, the ruins were finally razed by the authorities of East Berlin in 1959. The palace has not been rebuilt.

The Pfarrernotbund was an organisation founded on 21 September 1933 to unite German evangelical theologians, pastors and church office-holders against the introduction of the Aryan paragraph into the 28 Protestant regional church bodies and the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche (DEK) and against the efforts by Reich-bishop Ludwig Müller and the German Christians (DC) since April 1933 to merge the German Protestant churches into one Reich Church that would be Nazi in ideology and entirely lacking any Jewish or Christian origins. As a Christian resistance to National Socialism it was the forerunner of the Confessing Church, founded the following year.

Jerusalem Church is one of the churches of the Evangelical Congregation in the Friedrichstadt, a member of the Protestant umbrella organisation Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia. The present church building is located in Berlin, borough Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, in the quarter of Friedrichstadt. Jerusalem Church is fourth in rank of the oldest oratories in the town proper.

Gethsemane Church is one of four church buildings of the Lutheran Northern Prenzlauer Berg Evangelical Congregation, within the Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia, an umbrella organisation which includes Lutheran, Reformed, and United Protestant Calvinist congregations.

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 (Reformed) 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.

Mitte is a central section of Berlin, Germany, in the eponymous borough of Mitte. Until 2001, it was itself an autonomous district.

Jesus Church (Kaulsdorf) (German: Jesuskirche, colloquially also Dorfkirche, village church) is the church of the Evangelical Berlin-Kaulsdorf Congregation, a member of today's Protestant umbrella organisation Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia (under this name since 2004). The church building is located in Berlin, borough Marzahn-Hellersdorf, in the locality of Kaulsdorf. The church was named after Jesus of Nazareth. The congregation's parish comprises the area of the historical village of Kaulsdorf, which had been incorporated into Berlin by the Prussian Greater Berlin Act in 1920.

The Reich Association of Jews in Germany, also called the new one for clear differentiation, was a Jewish umbrella organisation formed in Nazi Germany in February 1939. The Association branched out from the Reich Representation of German Jews established in September 1933. The new Association was an administrative body concerned predominantly with the coordination and support of the emigration and forcible deportation of Jewish people, subject to the Reich government's ever-changing legislation enforced by the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt). The legal status of the new organisation was changed on 4 July 1939 on the basis of the Nuremberg Laws, and defined by the 10th Regulation to the Citizenship Law issued by the Reich's ministry of the Interior. The Association assumed the so-called oldReichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, which was the name under which the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden had been operating since February 1939.

Christ Church, Jerusalem, is an Anglican church located inside the Old City of Jerusalem, established in 1849 by the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews. It was the original seat of the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem until the opening of St. George's Cathedral, Jerusalem in 1899; the compound also included the 19th century British Consulate. From its inception, Christ Church has been supporting a form of Christianity focused on Jesus' Jewishness, offering Christian texts translated into Hebrew by its own leaders.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wilhelmstraße (Spandau)</span>

The Wilhelmstraße in the Berliner district of Spandau is the connecting street between Spandau and Potsdam. In the north, at Seeburger Straße and the Ziegelhof, the Wilhelmstraße runs into the Klosterstraße, about a kilometre south of Spandau Station.

More than 60 percent of Berlin residents have no registered religious affiliation. As of 2010, at least 30 percent of the population identified with some form of Christianity, approximately 8.1 percent were Muslim, 1 percent were Jewish, and 1 percent belonged to other religions. As of 2018, the number of registered church members has shrunk to 14.9 percent for EKD Protestants and 8.5 percent for Catholics.

The Deutsche Evangelische Christuskirche is a church on Montpelier Place in Knightsbridge, London. German Christian theologian Julius Rieger has described it as the most significant German church in London.

Heinrich Grüber was a Reformed theologian, pacifist and opponent of Nazism.

Spandauer Vorstadt is a historic district in what is now the Mitte district of Berlin.

References

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 "About us", on: St George's Anglican Episcopal Church, Berlin, retrieved on 14 May 2012.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Blankart, Michaela (2003). "St. George's Anglican Church". House of Hohenzollern . Archived from the original on 25 April 2018. Retrieved 14 May 2012.
↑ In 1893 David Baron and Schönberger (1841–1924, died in Berlin) had founded the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel in London. In 1973 the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel merged with other missionary societies to form the Messianic Testimony.
↑ Hartmut Ludwig, "Das ›Büro Pfarrer Grüber‹ 1938–1940", in: ›Büro Pfarrer Grüber‹ Evangelische Hilfsstelle für ehemals Rasseverfolgte. Geschichte und Wirken heute, Walter Sylten, Joachim-Dieter Schwäbl and Michael Kreutzer on behalf of the Evangelische Hilfsstelle für ehemals Rasseverfolgte (ed.; Evangelical Relief Centre for the formerly Racially Persecuted), Berlin: Evangelische Hilfsstelle für ehemals Rasseverfolgte, 1988, pp. 1–23, here pp. 2seq. No ISBN.
↑ Hartmut Ludwig, "Das ›Büro Pfarrer Grüber‹ 1938–1940", in: ›Büro Pfarrer Grüber‹ Evangelische Hilfsstelle für ehemals Rasseverfolgte. Geschichte und Wirken heute, Walter Sylten, Joachim-Dieter Schwäbl and Michael Kreutzer on behalf of the Evangelische Hilfsstelle für ehemals Rasseverfolgte (ed.; Evangelical Relief Centre for the formerly Racially Persecuted), Berlin: Evangelische Hilfsstelle für ehemals Rasseverfolgte, 1988, pp. 1–23, here p. 10. No ISBN.
↑ "St. George's Anglican Church". Preussen.de. House of Hohenzollern. 2003. Archived from the original on 3 January 2011. Retrieved 22 December 2020.

External links

Media related to Saint George's Church (Berlin) at Wikimedia Commons
Homepage of St. George's congregation
Entry in Berlin's list of monuments (Landesdenkmalliste) with further sources (in German)

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[Old_St.George's-1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 "About us", on: St George's Anglican Episcopal Church, Berlin, retrieved on 14 May 2012.

[St.George's-2] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Blankart, Michaela (2003). "St. George's Anglican Church". House of Hohenzollern . Archived from the original on 25 April 2018. Retrieved 14 May 2012.

[3] In 1893 David Baron and Schönberger (1841–1924, died in Berlin) had founded the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel in London. In 1973 the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel merged with other missionary societies to form the Messianic Testimony.

[4] Hartmut Ludwig, "Das ›Büro Pfarrer Grüber‹ 1938–1940", in: ›Büro Pfarrer Grüber‹ Evangelische Hilfsstelle für ehemals Rasseverfolgte. Geschichte und Wirken heute, Walter Sylten, Joachim-Dieter Schwäbl and Michael Kreutzer on behalf of the Evangelische Hilfsstelle für ehemals Rasseverfolgte (ed.; Evangelical Relief Centre for the formerly Racially Persecuted), Berlin: Evangelische Hilfsstelle für ehemals Rasseverfolgte, 1988, pp. 1–23, here pp. 2seq. No ISBN.

[5] Hartmut Ludwig, "Das ›Büro Pfarrer Grüber‹ 1938–1940", in: ›Büro Pfarrer Grüber‹ Evangelische Hilfsstelle für ehemals Rasseverfolgte. Geschichte und Wirken heute, Walter Sylten, Joachim-Dieter Schwäbl and Michael Kreutzer on behalf of the Evangelische Hilfsstelle für ehemals Rasseverfolgte (ed.; Evangelical Relief Centre for the formerly Racially Persecuted), Berlin: Evangelische Hilfsstelle für ehemals Rasseverfolgte, 1988, pp. 1–23, here p. 10. No ISBN.

[6] "St. George's Anglican Church". Preussen.de. House of Hohenzollern. 2003. Archived from the original on 3 January 2011. Retrieved 22 December 2020.

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]