Jerusalem Church () is one of the churches of the Evangelical Congregation in the Friedrichstadt (under this name since 2001), 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 (except of suburbs incorporated in 1920, which are partly older).
Early history of Roman Catholic Jerusalem Church A certain Müller, a burgher of Berlin, endowed a chapel in gratitude for his lucky rescue from a Saracen assault during his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On 18 October 1484 Arnold von Burgsdorff, Prince-Bishop of Brandenburg, issued an indulgence, promising all those helping to restore the chapel 40 days less in the purgatory.Karin Köhler, Christhard-Georg Neubert and Dieter Wendland, Kirchen und Gotteshäuser in Berlin: Eine Auswahl, Berliner Arbeitskreis City-Kirchen (ed.), Berlin: Evangelische Kirche in Berlin-Brandenburg, 2000, p. 148. . The indulgence is the oldest surviving document mentioning the chapel, then consecrated to Mary(am) of Nazareth, the Holy Cross, Pope Fabian, and Sebastianus of Narbonne.Arno Hach, Alt-Berlin im Spiegel seiner Kirchen: Rückblicke in die versunkene Altstadt, 2nd ed., Ammerbuch: Beggerow, 2002, pp. 29seq. . The chapel was then located in the fields about 1 km outside of St. Gertrud's Gate (close to today's Gertraudenbrücke) of the city of Cölln (a part of today's borough Mitte of Berlin) on the highway to Magdeburg and Leipzig (today's Axel-Springer-Straße and Lindenstraße).
The chapel was known for its copy of the Holy Sepulchre, as imagined at that time. This structure within the chapel earned it its name, which in 1540 appeared first in a document (Capella zu Hierusalem).Arno Hach, Alt-Berlin im Spiegel seiner Kirchen: Rückblicke in die versunkene Altstadt, 2nd ed., Ammerbuch: Beggerow, 2002, p. 30. . Also the present north–south directed street then ending at the chapel thus got its name Jerusalemer Straße in 1706.Lexikon: Alle Berliner Straßen und Plätze. Von der Gründung bis zur Gegenwart: 4 vols., Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben Edition Luisenstadt, 1998, vol. 2: 'Fri – Len', p. 366. In 1484 a warden (Kleuser, literally Hermit) took care of the chapel and collected alms from the passing travellers for the pertaining hospital.
As a Lutheran place of worship (1539–1682) In 1539 Prince Elector Joachim II Hector converted from Catholicism to Lutheranism, as many of his subjects had done earlier. The Jerusalem Chapel thus became Lutheran too, like most of the electoral subjects and all the churches in the Electorate of Brandenburg. During the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) with its severe decimation of the population chapel and hospital were given up.
In 1680 Johann Martitz, an Electoral Councillor, donated a new hospital dedicated to the inhabitants of Friedrichswerder, an adjacent city under electoral domination, founded in 1658 next to Cölln, a city of town privileges. Frederick William, the Great Elector, the founder of Friedrichswerder, bestowed the deserted chapel as the first, then Calvinist parish church to the new city.Arno Hach, Alt-Berlin im Spiegel seiner Kirchen: Rückblicke in die versunkene Altstadt, 2nd ed., Ammerbuch: Beggerow, 2002, p. 33. . In 1662 Friedrichswerder got its own church within the city's boundary, the Friedrichswerder Church.
As a Calvinist and Lutheran Simultaneum (1682–1830) In 1682 Jerusalem Chapel became a Calvinist and Lutheran simultaneum. In 1688 Prince-Elector Frederick III founded another new city under electoral domination, Friedrichstadt, which included Jerusalem Chapel in its municipal boundary. In 1689 and 1693–1695 Giovanni Simonetti restored and extended the chapel to become Jerusalem Church, which was continuously staffed with a Calvinist and a Lutheran preacher from 1694 on.Günther Kühne and Elisabeth Stephani, Evangelische Kirchen in Berlin, 2nd ed., Berlin: CZV-Verlag, 1986, p. 56. . In 1701 the Judge Krause at the Kammergericht (then Supreme Court of Brandenburg) added a sepulchre chapel for his family to the church building.
In 1708 the parish of Jerusalem Church, meanwhile too small for the Calvinist and the Lutheran parishioners, was divided, when the New Church, another simultaneum, was opened and took over the northern part of the parish district. Both Calvinist and both Lutheran congregations of the New Church and of Jerusalem Church kept a kind of parish federation, e.g. maintaining common cemeteries, three of which are comprised – with cemeteries of other congregations – in a compound of an overall of six cemeteries.
They are among the most important historical cemeteries of Berlin. They are located in Berlin-Kreuzberg south of Hallesches Tor (Berlin U-Bahn) (Friedhöfe vor dem Halleschen Tor). With effect from 1 January 1710 Friedrichstadt (and thus the parish of Jerusalem Church) and four other cities were united to form the Royal Residence and Capital City of Berlin ().
Frederick William I of Prussia commanded on 1 November 1725 to build the church building, the foundation stone was laid on 27 November 1727 and since 1728 has been built on the church building.Oekonomische encyklopädie, Band 221, Seite 428, Heinrich Gustav Flörke, Johann Georg Krünitz, Friedrich Jakob Floerken, Johann Wilhelm David Korth, Ludwig Kossarski, Carl Otto Hoffmann, Verlag J. Pauli, 1854. In 1728–1731 Philipp Gerlach replaced the old structure including the sepulchre chapel by a new church building, whose southerly tower had a wooden top, which – poorly built as it was – had to be torn down again in 1747. The tower then remained a stump.Wolfgang Gottschalk, Altberliner Kirchen in historischen Ansichten, Würzburg: Weidlich, 1985, p. 172. . Due to the position of the site in the middle of a crossroads with streets entering from five directions the quire of the church was not oriented, but directed to the north.Since baroque times church buildings are often not built according to the biblical tradition of orientation.
In 1817, under the auspices of King Frederick William III of Prussia, the Calvinist and the Lutheran congregations at Jerusalem Church, like most Prussian Protestant congregations, joined the common umbrella organisation called the Evangelical Church in Prussia (under this name since 1821), with each congregation maintaining its former denomination or adopting the new united denomination. At first both congregations maintained their respective denomination, thus continuing the simultaneum.
As a Prussian Union place of worship (1830–1941) In 1830 the congregations merged and adopted the new denomination of the Prussian Union. The parish federation with the congregations of the New Church ended then. In 1838 – maybe as reward for adopting the Union – Karl Friedrich Schinkel rebuilt the church on state expenses and added a new tower top, reaching the height of 72 m.
In 1878/1879 Edmund Knoblauch completely restructured Jerusalem Church, only keeping its curtain walls, which were covered with a new layer of yellow bricks and decorated with terracotta forms. Inside the prayer hall were 1,400 seats, illuminated by stained glass windows and covered by a structured wooden ceiling. In the following years the congregation lost many of its parishioners because its parish became commercialised and huge edifices of publishing houses and insurances gradually superseded the prior residential buildings. The number of parishioners shrunk to 10,000 (1933), then considered a small number for an urban congregation. Thus in July 1933 the congregation reunited with that of the New Church, reducing the number of pastors at Jerusalem Church from two to one.Hans-Rainer Sandvoß, Widerstand in Kreuzberg, altered and ext. ed., Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand (Memorial to the German Resistance) (ed.), Berlin: Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, 21997, (Schriftenreihe über den Widerstand in Berlin von 1933 bis 1945; No. 10), p. 203. ISSN 0175-3592.
During the Struggle of the Churches During the Third Reich the congregation and the umbrella, to which it belonged, fell into deep disunity (For the general outline see Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union and Struggle of the Churches). The polarisation within the old-Prussian Church started already before the Nazi takeover in 1933. In the orderly election of the presbyters and synodals on 13 November 1932 the Nazi Faith Movement of German Christians ran for the first time for seats in the presbyteries of the congregations and synods of the old-Prussian church body. The Positive Union, a conservative KirchenparteiA Kirchenpartei (church party) in German Protestantism is a group nominating candidates in a list for church elections and compares roughly to nominating groups in the Church of Sweden. with traditions back in the 19th century, had no candidates running for presbytership in the congregation of Jerusalem Church, thus many nationalist parishioners rather voted for the German Christians.Peter Noss, "Schlussbetrachtung", in: Kirchenkampf in Berlin 1932–1945: 42 Stadtgeschichten, Olaf Kühl-Freudenstein, Peter Noss, and Claus Wagener (eds.), Berlin: Institut Kirche und Judentum, 1999, (Studien zu Kirche und Judentum; vol. 18), pp. 574–591, here footnote 8 on p. 590. . Among the congregations in the inner city of Berlin that of Jerusalem Church was one of the four, where the German Christians gained already at this time a, narrow though, majority of the seats in the presbytery ().By that election the German Christians gained majorities in the presbyteries of four out of 79 congregations in the inner city. The average was 28,6%, in eight the German Christians won about 40%, in 18 congregations less than 20% of the seats in the presbyteries. Cf. Peter Noss, "Schlussbetrachtung", in: Kirchenkampf in Berlin 1932–1945: 42 Stadtgeschichten, Olaf Kühl-Freudenstein, Peter Noss, and Claus Wagener (eds.), Berlin: Institut Kirche und Judentum, 1999, (Studien zu Kirche und Judentum; vol. 18), pp. 574–591, here p. 575. .
Jerusalem Church then belonged to the deanery () Friedrichswerder I, whose superintendent (cleric in chief in a deanery) Friedrich Geest (1868–1940), pastor of confidence of Paul von Hindenburg, held an ambiguous position as to the Nazi opposing Confessing Church. The liberal D. Alfred Fischer (1874–1940), since 1901 pastor at Jerusalem Church and opposing the German Christians, and his younger colleague Dr. Rudolf Köhler (until May 1933) had hard times with them dominating the presbytery since 1932.In 1921 Alfred Fischer advanced as a member of the consistory of the ecclesiastical province of Brandenburg, bearing the title (supreme) consistorial councillor (, then Oberkonsistorialrat as of 1930) within the old-Prussian Church. Cf. Debora Paffen and Hans-Jürgen Mende, Die Friedhöfe vor dem Halleschen Tor. Ein Friedhofsführer: 2 parts, Hans-Jürgen Mende (ed.), Berlin: Edition Luisenstadt, 2003, part 2: 'Jerusalems- und Neue Kirche, Friedhof I / Jerusalems- und Neue Kirche, Friedhof II', p. 15. /2Hans-Rainer Sandvoß, Widerstand in Kreuzberg, altered and ext. ed., Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand (ed.), Berlin: Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, 21997, (Schriftenreihe über den Widerstand in Berlin von 1933 bis 1945; No. 10), pp. 193 and 203. .