THE MIRACLE OF WISMAR
W hen I started teaching, all these‘ centuries ago’ in Germany, I was asked to introduce a novel to the Sixth Form, which was called‘ Zanzibar, or the last reason’, by an author called Alfred Andersch. Subsequently I taught the book to Sixth Formers A- level German students in different schools in England. It wasn’ t about Zanzibar at all, but about a town on the Baltic coast in North Germany, which could easily be identified as Wismar, in the Middle Ages a flourishing port of the Hansa.
The main character in the book is a boy, deckhand to a fishing boat, who dreams of getting away from the place, then under the rule of the‘ Others’, meaning the Nazis. One night the fishing boat sets out on a voyage across the Baltic to Sweden with two strange passengers on board, a Jewish girl refugee and a wooden statue of a reading monk, which was threatened by the Nazis as‘ degenerate art’. The statue had been in the care of one of the three great medieval churches of the town, at St George’ s.
The other two churches were St Mary’ s, the church of the Town Council and St Nicolai by the harbour, the church of the sailors. These were churches of cathedral size, built from bricks, since North Germany has no stone for building. Shortly before the end of the Second World War, in the night of 14 th to 15 th April 1945, the town was bombed and the churches
StOM Page 6 destroyed, together with most of the town. St Nicholai could be repaired, St Mary’ s was demolished apart from the tower, St George’ s stood as a ruin and survived as such the rule of the DDR, the communist part of Germany, until on 25 January 1990 the gable fell down on to the roof of a neighbouring house, killing one of its inhabitants.
The West German Foundation for the care of listed buildings was called upon to secure the ruin, but subsequently the town and its citizens decided to rebuild their church as a project for the Millennium.
To build a cathedral sized church was a truly monumental task, and like the original church building took much longer than 10 or even 20 years. To start with, the materials had to be created for the building.
A Scandinavian brick firm was charged to make medieval sized bricks, the builders had to re-learn the techniques of creating gothic arches and vaults, apprentices were trained to pass this knowledge on to future generations, bronze entrance doors were commissioned, the work of the local artist Karl Henning Seeman, which depicted biblical stories of flight and expulsion as they had been experienced by the population during and after the war. While the building went ahead, especially while under floor heating was installed, archaeologists had the opportunity to