New church home windows by Ólafur Elíasson in Greifswald | EUROtoday

Früh muss man in den Dom kommen, an einem leuchtenden Sommermorgen, und an der Nordseite gen Osten gehen, dorthin, wo der Umgang zwischen Außenmauer und Binnenchor beginnt. Goldübergossen liegen dann die Granitplatten auf dem Boden. Der ganze Raum ist erfüllt von einem Licht, das alle Farben eins werden lässt und doch an gotischen Gewölberippen und Fensterlaibungen wieder in aller Buntheit zerflirrt.

„Er ist dein Schatz, dein Erb und Teil, dein Glanz und Freudenlicht“, schreibt Paul Gerhardt über Gott, den „Ursprung aller Ding“ in seinem großen Choral „Ich singe dir mit Herz und Mund“. Hier, im Dom Sankt Nikolai zu Greifswald, singt das Licht. Hunderte mundgeblasene Scheiben aus farbigem Glas geben diesem Gesang ihren Atem. Und wie wir kurz vor und kurz nach unserer Geburt noch kaum zu trennen wissen zwischen Tasten, Hören und Sehen, so treten wir hier ein in eine Flut sichtbarer Töne, in „ein gläsernes Meer, mit Feuer vermengt“, wie es Johannes von Patmos im fünfzehnten Kapitel seiner biblischen Offenbarung beschreibt.

Since the beginning of April, the new colored windows by the Icelandic artist Ólafur Elíasson have been on display in Greifswald Cathedral. The community has been wanting to have colored light in the cathedral for five or six years. And it was to be the work of a respected artist. “Ten names were on our list. At the top was Ólafur Elíasson,” reveals Tilman Beyrich, Protestant pastor at St. Nikolai. “I wrote to his office. He replied immediately that he would be very happy to do it. 'In the church where Caspar David Friedrich was baptized? That would be something!' He had never made a window before, but under such interesting spatial conditions – that appealed to him.”

The history of these windows is long, more than two hundred years to be fairly precise. The Napoleonic Wars had left many churches in ruins. Greifswald Cathedral, which was already more than five hundred years old at the time and had been one of the most important churches in Pomerania since the university was founded in 1456, was also in a state of disrepair: it had been used as an ammunition depot and as a military barracks. With the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Greifswald, which had been Swedish since the Peace of Westphalia, i.e. for 167 years, became part of Prussia.

Frederick William III had ordered a renovation program for the churches in his expanding empire. In 1818, Greifswald also wanted to benefit from this. In the same year, the city of Stralsund, a good thirty kilometers northwest of Greifswald, had asked Caspar David Friedrich to send in designs for the redesign of St. Mary's Church in Stralsund. The competition committee at the time consisted of the Greifswald architect and landscape painter Gottlieb Giese and the Greifswald cathedral priest Johann Christian Friedrich Finelius. Both were close friends with Friedrich; Giese had attended Johann Gottfried Quistorp's drawing class in Greifswald together with Friedrich. It was thanks to their vote that Stralsund accepted Friedrich's design and rejected Karl Friedrich Schinkel's. However, the city had no money to implement Friedrich's plans.

Now, as Beyrich tells us, Giese followed his friend's designs when redesigning Greifswald Cathedral: all baroque superstructures, carvings and paintings in the central nave were removed, the entire red brick vault was plastered and whitewashed. A neo-Gothic inner choir was added to the east, creating a new ambulatory.

The altar area was raised by steps. The old winged altar was badly damaged. “Frederick himself had suggested not erecting a new altar with paintings, but leaving it with the golden cross,” Beyrich continues. “This lonely cross – in the mountains or on the beach – was Frederick's vision of a new spirituality anyway.” Giese followed this vision when redesigning Greifswald Cathedral. “He had windows made of frosted glass installed in the neo-Gothic inner choir because he wanted to have stained glass windows behind them in the east wall, whose light would only fall into the chancel in a frosted form. A colorful light as a background for the golden cross – which is why a winged altar with paintings was also not necessary.”

Friedrich's idea of ​​using light itself as a medium of proclamation instead of figurative painting had to wait two hundred years for its implementation. During the romantic redesign of the cathedral between 1818 and 1834, there was no money for the colored windows in the east wall. In 1895, wealthy citizens of Greifswald wanted a winged altar again, but the cathedral priest at the time was able to avert this by persuading the donors to have colored windows. However, industrially manufactured figurative representations of the four evangelists and a Last Supper scene were installed in the outer wall, which could not be seen from the nave because of the inner choir in front of it.

Until around 1982, when the cathedral was renovated in the GDR, the windows had been in the wall for almost ninety years. They were removed and relocated. There was no money for the renovation; some of the panes were stolen. So the east window remained white again.

September 5, 2024 marks the 250th anniversary of Caspar David Friedrich's birthday. He was born in Greifswald, just a few steps from the cathedral, directly opposite its north wall. He was baptized in St. Nicholas's. His ideas are the basis for the romantic redesign by Giese. Friedrich's brother Christian, who won awards for his woodcuts, ran a large carpentry shop in Greifswald. The cathedral's neo-Gothic pulpit, the organ facade and the pews were made there according to designs by Christian Friedrich. Caspar David Friedrich's close spiritual and familial connection to St. Nicholas's Cathedral justified the community's renewed efforts to finally implement the ideas of 1823 for Friedrich's anniversary. The federal government, the state and the East German Savings Bank Foundation provided the money for this. After Elíasson's commitment, the Oetker Foundation and numerous individual donors added something.

Elíasson's window uses 65 different colors borrowed from the spectrum of the morning sky in Friedrich's painting “Hutten's Grave”: from violet and red-purple at the bottom, through yellow and green in the middle, to deep blue at the top. “The individual panes are made in a very traditional way: stained glass with lead diamonds,” explains Beyrich. “Elíasson works with a diamond pattern: the lines run into small circles at the corners. According to a computer-generated algorithm, the circles at the diamond corners get larger and larger when you look at the window from bottom to top. In the yellow-green area of ​​the window, the circles formally replace the dominance of the diamonds. Above, in the blue of the sky, the diamonds are completely displaced by circles that overlap and ultimately fill exactly the shape of the final round window. This is an old symbol that appears in ancient Greek philosophy: everything in heaven is circular. Everything on Earth is square.” Beyrich laughs: “Down here we only ever sell square meters. No one would think of selling a circle.”

But that's not all: behind the east wall of the cathedral is the building of the Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg. A large mirror with a diameter of one and a half meters is to be mounted on its roof: a heliostat. “It rotates with the solar and captures its gentle all day lengthy,” explains Beyrich. “Throughout the day, in keeping with exact calculations, the mirror guides the daylight by means of the coloured space of ​​the glass and throws it onto the milky internal choir home windows. Depending on the time of day, very totally different colours then seem within the milky space of ​​the internal choir. When your complete set up is completed, a complete of eighty small mirrors will probably be mounted on the roof of our archive on the east wall under the window, which can once more focus the incoming gentle from the heliostat and redirect it onto the central home windows. These will then create extra lighting results within the vault and on the partitions.”

The cathedral community is enthusiastic about the design. It uses traditional manufacturing techniques and is nevertheless technically sophisticated. The interplay between stained glass windows and mirrors is unique in Europe. In the first four weeks after the service to inaugurate the new windows alone, eight thousand visitors came to the cathedral outside of events. The colorful breath of the glass attracts people. But Beyrich, who is delighted with all of this, is also interested in something else: “It has a ravishing Easter symbolism with the sunshine of the resurrection, which now lastly varieties the correct context for the golden altar cross.”