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