The following article is from our October 2005 issue.

A War Wound Gloriously Healed. Bombed out in 1945, Dresden's Frauenkirche will be re-consecrated this month. By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Dresden's magnificent Church of Our Lady is once again the premier Protestant baroque sanctuary in Europe. More than 600,000 private donors from around the world provided most of the funds for its reconstruction. On Oct. 30, the Frauenkirche will be inaugurated in a dazzling worship service. Now church officials wonder - will it jump-start the re-evangelization of the most de-Christianized part of Germany?

Extraordinary ecclesial splendor is about to envelop Dresden on the last Sunday of October, the eve of Protestantism's Feast of the Reformation. First, the eight new bells of the Lutheran Frauenkirche will send shivers down many a spine as they toll in the consecration of this massive church after 10 years of reconstruction.

Heaviest among them is the 4,000-pound "Peace Bell" named for the prophet Isaiah ("swords to ploughshares," Isaiah 2:4). It bears the image of New York's collapsing Twin Towers, an event its designer Christoph Feuerstein witnessed while visiting Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001.

Then in this Saxon capital, where 40 years of Communist rule have reduced the Christian community to a minority of 24 percent, loudspeakers will for the first time carry the roar of the Frauenkirche's new 4,873-pipe organ to some 100,000 visitors filling the surrounding squares and streets.

As a procession of bishops, pastors, statesmen, ambassadors and luminaries from around the world, including the Duke (Edward) of Kent representing the British Crown, enters the huge church, congregants inside and outside will intone one of Christendom's most beloved hymns:



Now thank we all our God,

With heart and hands and voices,

Who wondrous things has done,

In whom the world rejoices.



No anthem could be more fitting. It was written in 1636 in Eilenburg, another Saxon city, under circumstances analogous to the ones that flattened Dresden, where a firestorm caused by Allied bombs killed up to 200,000 people and made the Frauenkirche's unique 12,000-ton sandstone dome implode shortly before the end of World War II.

The Rev. Martin Rinkart wrote this hymn's lyrics. He was Eilenburg's last surviving pastor at the height of the Thirty Years' War (1618-48). Besieged by Swedish forces, this town was packed with refugees, as was Dresden three centuries later by huge crowds of mainly women and children who had fled the advancing Soviet army. Famine and pestilence plagued Eilenburg, obliging Rinkart to conduct up to 50 funerals every day. Yet he found the fortitude to pen his great testament to faith culminating in the third stanza:



All praise and thanks to God

The Father now be given,

The Son, and Holy Ghost,

Supreme in highest Heaven,

The one eternal God,

Whom earth and heaven adore;

For thus it was, is now,

And shall be evermore.



These words seemed foolhardy given the situation in which they were written - foolhardy like the determination of chiefly private individuals led by trumpeter Ludwig Güttler to rebuild the 300-foot
edifice that had towered over Dresden since the 18th century; now it is once more its most visible landmark, the first thing one sees from miles away when one approaches the Saxon capital.

This project caused much controversy, even within the state-related Lutheran Church of Saxony. Was it right to spend $170 million on the resurrection of such a monumental edifice when there were plenty of other churches around - and most of them scantily attended, some asked? Should this money not rather be spent on daycare centers and low-cost housing?

These were curiously silly proposals, for it was clear that they would not have stirred much generosity from private donors. More theologically persuasive seemed to be the argument that the 777,000 cubic feet of rubble to which the church had been reduced - with remnants of the statue of an angel mournfully watching over the pile - should be preserved for all times as a powerful caveat against war.

But a faction led by Johannes Hempel, bishop of Saxony's Lutherans at the time of the German reunification, thought otherwise. This group that ultimately won a majority in the Saxon synod (church parliament) felt that the rubble had long enough served as a memento; that the time had come to "heal this gaping wound in Dresden's heart," as church architect Ehrhard Burger phrases it in an interview.

Burger describes his task of planning and executing the Frauenkirche's reconstruction as the crowning of his career - a "one in ten million job." A fervent Lutheran, he very much found himself operating simultaneously in the two realms of which all Christians are citizen, according to his denomination's theology. On the one hand, there were practical tasks such as directing his workmen to sift through the rubble in order to salvage more than 8,500 pieces of sandstone of which 3,800 were reused in the reconstruction. Blackened by the air raid's flames, they now stand out in the church's brilliant new facades as dark
mementos of the war.

On the other hand, Burger also found himself a servant of the spiritual "kingdom to the left." As the sanctuary grew heavenward meter by meter, Burger conducted worship services for his masons, many of who had long given up the Christian faith of their childhood. "It was very moving to observe these men with tears in their eyes as they sang for the first time in decades hymns they had learned in their childhood," says the Rev. Christoph Münchow, an official of the Saxon church.

Ask Burger which part of the rebuilt Frauenkirche has the greatest pastoral significance in a post-Christian era with its many seekers, and he will point first and foremost not to its soaring, brilliantly painted copula, not even to the magnificent organ built by Daniel Kern of Strasbourg, France, in the spirit of famous organ-builder Gottfried Silbermann, arguably the ultimate master of this craft whose "Queens of the Instruments" have graced Saxon churches, including this one before it burned, ever since the 18th century.

No, it is the charred altarpiece found under the rubble that is of the greatest relevance to the perplexed in search of transcendence, according to Burger. It shows Jesus
kneeling in Gethsemane, agonizing over his impending passion, pleading with the Father to "let this cup pass from me." (Matthew 26:39). This, says Burger, attracts strangers to a faith they no longer know, directs them to a God sharing man's suffering and dereliction, an ideal starting point for pastoral discussions.

Some 600,000 people have so far donated $125 million for the Frauenkirche's resurrection, including New York's German-born cell biologist Günter Blobel, who bequeathed almost his entire Nobel Prize of nearly $1 million, and the British Dresden Trust, which contributed the $660,000 gilded cross that now crowns this sanctuary. It was fashioned by London goldsmith Adam Smith faithfully following the designs by his 18th-century German namesake, Johann Georg Schmidt. Smith's father was one of the bomber pilots whose deadly cargo had destroyed Dresden on Feb. 13, 1945.

There were many reasons for these people's generosity - historical, aesthetic, cultural and, yes, religious with a heavy emphasis on the need for reconciliation. But the net effect is manifestly missionary. Last year, the Frauenkirche lured 500,000 tourists to Dresden. There have already been several baptisms of adults who became Christians while visiting this church and talking to its pastor.

And there is no doubt that the church will relentlessly make use of its evangelistic lure, Münchow said. Unlike so many Protestant sanctuaries, it will always be open, hopefully setting an example to every village church. There will be two devotional services every day and two full liturgies every Sunday.

Flying in the face of the widely held fallacy that Lutheran churches are stark and unwelcoming temples; this one is full of baroque playfulness and imagery. Yet, just as Bach's cantatas are Lutheran theology set to music, the Frauenkirche is an architectural manifestation of Lutheran theology. This becomes most clearly visible in the way the key components of the chancel are lined up: squarely facing the congregation is the elaborate pulpit, behind it the baptismal font, still behind it the altar designed - in Luther's words - to "entice the faithful to come to the Lord's Supper." Thus the two pillars of Christian worship, Word and Sacrament, are on the same trajectory here.

Again in one line with pulpit, font and altar - though high above the latter - is the organ, an almost 20-ton instrument, giving this sanctuary an "eschatological dimension," as Münchow explains. This, too, is Lutheran theology - that church music is "sacred and divine" (Luther), giving the worshiper a foretaste of the Hereafter.

There will be organ recitals every day, and there will be a powerful lecture series on the basics of the Christian faith, beginning with the Ten Commandments. It could well turn out, as one Dresden pastor mused, that for the future of the Church the resurrected Frauenkirche will become more significant than the original when it was built over a quarter-millennium ago based on the ingenious plans of George Bähr, then Dresden's city architect.

Back then, almost everyone in town professed to being a Christian. That was before two 20th-century tyrannies, first National Socialism, then Communism, almost destroyed the city's spiritual fiber. But the man whose huge statue stands guard outside the Frauenkirche with his right forefinger pointing at the Scripture famously summed up the certain fate of "our ancient foe":



And though the world, with devils filled,

Should threaten to undo us,

We will not fear, for God hath willed

His truth to triumph through us.

The Prince of Darkness grim,

We tremble not for him;

His rage we can endure,

For lo, his doom is sure;

One little world shall fell him.



These words are taken from Martin Luther's stirring hymn "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." They will be sung in the Frauenkirche on Reformation Day - one day after its re-consecration.

- Uwe Siemon-Netto is a Washington-based columnist and university lecturer. He was born and raised in Saxony.