St. Johann

The architectural ensemble with St Johann, the Trade School in the background, 
and on the right, the Schiller Gymnasium (high school) (©Taxiarchos228/Wikipedia)

This imposing church in my part of town, Wiehre, is dedicated to Saint John the Baptist and was consecrated on October 15, 1899. A festive service celebrated the 125th anniversary one day before St. John's Day on Sunday, June 23.

St. Johann, believing in a contemporary way

Festively illuminated sanctuary with an empty monstrance on the altar

Red Baron attended the festive service, which was celebrated by Auxiliary Bishop Dr. Peter Birkhofer. He has a very personal relationship with Sankt Johann, for he had worked as an assistant priest in the parish from 1984 to 1997 during his doctoral studies in Freiburg.

Throughout the High Mass, the sonority of Louis Vierne's Messe solennelle in C sharp minor op.16 was overwhelming. The choir of St. Johann, winds, drums, and organ gave their best. Vierne composed the mass in 1899, the year of St. Johann's consecration, with echoes of Wagner's romantic style. As a Frenchman, he was undoubtedly one of the great admirers of the father of the leitmotif, as many of his compatriots still are today.

Bishop Birkhofer preached on the naming of the later Caller in the Desert, the evangelist Lucas describes in verses 59 to 64 of the first book: ⁵⁹When voiceless Zacharias and his wife Elizabeth came on the eighth day to circumcise the child, they were going to call him Zechariah after his father,  ⁶⁰but his mother said in reply, "No. He will be called John." ⁶¹But they answered her, "No one among your relatives has this name." ⁶²So they made signs, asking his father what he wished him to be called. ⁶³ He asked for a tablet and wrote, "John is his name," and all were amazed. ⁶⁴Immediately, his mouth was opened, his tongue freed, and he spoke, blessing God.

The sermon was too long, contributing to the fact that, including the remarkable music, the Mass was the longest Red Baron has ever experienced, with one and three quarters of an hour.

In the run-up to the anniversary, Peter Kalchthaler gave a lecture on the history of the church. Unfortunately, I couldn't listen to him, but at my request, Peter sent me his slides and notes from his presentation, From Gasworks to a Parish Church.

St. Johann in der Wiehre symbolizes Freiburg's rapid growth, which grew from 16,000 (1850) to over 60,000 (1900) people in just 50 years.

The city took this growth into account and developed the infrastructure in the Wiehre area. The Lerch Plan of 1852 shows the bridge over the Dreisam, built in 1846.

The plan also shows the gasworks (the white building) in the center of the picture, which was opened on December 1, 1850, the site where St. John's Church was later built.

With its two round gas tanks, the Badische Gesellschaft für Gasbeleuchtung Spreng & Sonntag constructed the factory as a city tenant. Here, town gas was produced from coal, which mainly fed the gas lanterns on the streets. The factory was closed in 1884 after the new, more efficient municipal gasworks in Stühlinger were completed.

Much of Freiburg's growth occurred in the Wiehre district, whose population had expanded eastwards into the Mittel- and Oberwiehre. This also increased the need for church buildings for the now larger parishes of both denominations. The Protestant Christuskirche's foundation stone was laid on June 29, 1889, and the church was consecrated in 1891.

In 1889, at the instigation of Mayor Otto Winterer, the city made the site of the former gasworks available as a building site free of charge for a new Catholic parish church for the southern districts of the city. As the site was handed over on St. John's Day (June 24), the new building was to be dedicated to John the Baptist.

St. Johann seen from Kaiserbrücke.
Note the bronze statues of German emperors at the four corners.
They were collected during the Second World War to be melted down
but never returned to their pedestals.

Architect Baurat Joseph Durm from Karlsruhe deliberately chose the late Romanesque cathedral of Bamberg as a model, turning away from the Minster Church, whose appearance was not to be impaired.

Thank you, Peter.

Here are two other views:

St John, seen from the back.

Another historic photo. Looking down empty Talstraße
during the Corona shutdown on March 23, 2020.
.

The celebration of the 125th anniversary continued with a St. John's table.

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Würzburg

Following Heidelberg and Rothenburg, our trip's next and final destination was not the other favorite city of my American friends, Munich, but Würzburg, a city in Franconia that is home to wine and beer.

There is a wine Franconia and a beer Franconia, but both liquids are drunk in abundance in both parts.

Our group experienced Würzburg in the rain. I have been to the prince-bishop's city on the Main many times. So here are some links to previous visits.

Our class reunion in 2006 took place in Bayreuth. Elisabeth and I visited Würzburg on the outward journey.                                            

In 2011, we, i.e., some of my classmates, made our last bicycle tour along the Main and Tauber rivers. We also spent two nights in Würzburg. 

Back then, I showed two of my friends Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen's laboratory, where he discovered the rays named after him in 1895.

On June 1, in the morning, the group mounted the car for Würzburg. When we arrived, it rained. Luckily, we spent the morning in the residence, the palace of the prince-bishops. 

         View of the forecourt of the residence from a fly-screened window. No sun in the sky.
The Marienberg fortress can be made out in the background on the hill to the left.

Initially, the Würzburg bishops resided in the castle on the Marienberg. However, this was no longer representative at the beginning of the 18th century. So the prince-bishops had their magnificent baroque residence built on the city's outskirts between 1720 and 1780, the style of which bears the signature of Balthasar Neumann.

I had to hold my old hands  still while stretching the telephoto lens on my iPhone to its limit.

Würzburg's rise began on June 17, 1156, when the local Bishop Gebhard von Henneberg married the newly crowned Emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa) to the still very young Beatrice of Burgundy, heiress to the Free County of Burgundy (today Franche-Comté). The wedding is depicted in the Imperial Hall of the Residence.

The Investiture of Bishop Herold as Duke of Franconia.
Painted by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (©web Galery of Art/Wikipedia)

The diocese of Würzburg contributed considerable sums to finance Barbarossa's military campaigns. So the Emperor enfeoffed Bishop Herold von Höchheim with the dukedom at the Imperial Diet held at Würzburg in 1168. From then on, the Würzburg bishops held the title of princes.

All went well until October 1631, when Prince-Bishop Franz von Hatzfeld, also Prince-Bishop of Bamberg, fled from the advancing Swedes under King Gustav Adolf to the "hilige (holy)" city of Cologne. The Würzburg city council realized that the town could not be defended against 26,000 Swedes and opened the gates. Only the Marienberg fortress put up resistance and was stormed.

It was over by the beginning of November 1631. Gustav Adolf appointed a royal government and declared the bishoprics of Würzburg and Bamberg Swedish hereditary fiefdoms. After the king died in the Battle of Lützen, the Swedish Chancellor Oxenstierna gave the fiefdom in June 1633 to his general, Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, who used it to form his Duchy of Franconia.

In 1634, the Swedes suffered a heavy defeat in the Battle of Nördlingen and withdrew hastily from southern Germany. As a result, Würzburg fell to the Imperial forces under General Ottavio Piccolomini in October 1634, and Franz von Hatzfeld returned to his prince-bishoprics.

The large staircase has unique ceiling paintings.

The Weiße Saal (White Hal)l with entrance doors to the Kaisersaal (Imperial Hall)

On the way to the guided tour of the city, our group stopped by the court chapel.

The weather was miserable, so many participants returned to the hotel to relax before the highlight of the evening: a concert of the Mozartfest with the Wind Ensemble Zefiro at the Kaisersaal of the residence.

Since there were no strings, the wind instruments started without a tuning delay.

It started getting dark, but Wolfgang's music kept us awake.

The excellent musicians enjoyed the well-deserved final applause.

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Iso Himmelsbach

Yesterday, I attended Iso's funeral.

I got to know Iso at a Wikipediastammtisch (Wikipedia regulars' table). A colleague working on an article about the Freiburger Bächle had invited Iso, the great expert on historical water management in Freiburg.

Following the discussion, some details in the Wikipedia article had to be changed.

Later, we both worked in the Freiburg Schau-ins-Land Historical Society on a committee charged with improving the society's ailing financial situation. The project was so successful that Iso and I were asked to audit the association's accounts in the following years. Since the association's accountant was located in Breisach,  once a year, we took turns driving his cigarette-smoking car or my non-smoking car to the historical town on the Rhine.

We had many discussions during the trip. Iso impressed me with his knowledge of Freiburg's local history and sharp judgment. He frequently spoke of his mother, whom he adored.

After this assignment, I frequently met Iso in the city. We drank many a coffee together and chatted.

I learned a lot from the funeral service handout, including the origin of the name Iso.

Iso means "iron strong," i.e., he has an iron will to do good, to fight evil, and is your soul's best protection.

St. Iso came from a noble family in the Swiss canton of Thurgau. He was a monk in the monastery of St. Gallen and, for a long time, head of the outer monastery school. Monk Iso was regarded as a musical genius and well-versed in history and medicine. Rudolf I, the later Burgundian king, asked Iso to teach at the monastery school of Munster-Granfelden in the Bernese Jura region. The pious scholar died there at forty-two on May 14, 871.

The blessing hall at Freiburg's main cemetery

And then, the celebrant quoted a few verses from St. Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians:
¹³ Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. ¹⁴ For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. ¹⁵ According to the Lord's word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep ... ¹⁸ Therefore encourage one another with these words.

Iso's urn was buried in his parents' grave. Particularly impressive is the gravestone with the inscription of a citation by Father Alfred Delp* S.J., "Tod ist für uns nicht Abgrund und Absturz und Zerrinnen und Scheitern, sondern. Tor ins Leben hinein: Durchgang (For us, death is not an abyss and a fall and disintegration and failure, but the gate into life: a passage). "

What a testimony of faith! R.I.P. Iso

*German priest and philosopher Alfred Friedrich Delp SJ was a significant figure in Catholic resistance to Nazism and a member of the inner Kreisau Circle resistance group. In 1944, he was falsely accused of being involved in the failed July Plot to overthrow Hitler. Delp was arrested, sentenced to death, and executed on February 2, 1945.

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Men's Literature

The poster on display at Freiburg's International Partnership Market at the Madison booth was a most photographed eye-catcher.

Schulte & Schulte is an allusion to Schulze & Schultze. These names are the German "translation" of Dupont et Dupond dans les Aventures de Tintin by the Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, known under the pen name Hergé.

Thomson and Thompson (the English translation) appear in most of the 24 comic albums as two clumsy detectives looking like twins. They are suspicious, regard themselves as ingenious, and are suitable for many comic interludes in the booklets.

Red Baron was curious, wanted to know what men usually read, and went to the Carl-Schurz-Haus.

Here the two Schultes, Bettina, cultural editor at the Badische Zeitung and a lecturer at the University of Freiburg's Frankreichzentrum, and Friederike, Director of the Carl-Schurz-Haus, sit relaxed with stacks of books in front of them.

The two ladies presented German and American literature. Still, somehow, I had misunderstood the theme of the evening because I was expecting a presentation of books typically read by men, such as erotic novels or science fiction. I never read the latter, but unfortunately, I rarely find the time to read "real" literature.

After many weeks, I finished Christoph Martin Wieland's biography in February. Currently, I am reading Erasmus, Biography of a Free Spirit, by Dutch author Sandra Langereis, which is over 1200 pages long. Erasmus has always interested me as the most educated man of his time and because of his relationship with Freiburg.

Friederike raved about Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road as an introduction to men's literature, which impressed her as a young traveler to America.

I remember that American literature, being the measure, was booming in Germany after the war. When we, the 17 students, had all passed the Abitur (high school certificate), we put our pocket money together and offered our class teacher Die Nackten und die Toten, the German translation of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead.

Red Baron devoured American novels as a young man, admiring the strong but lonely men fighting their way through life. From Here to Eternity by James Jones was one of my favorites. Of course, I read Ernest Hemingway's short stories. The ladies also mentioned Ernest's novel Fiesta, initially The Sun Also Rises.

Back to German literature.

After the war, Literary Group 47 tried to restart German literature. Although many female authors were present, men dominated. Nicole Seifert tells the story in her book ... einige Herren sagten etwas dazu  (Some Gentlemen Said Something About It)

Then, 40 years ago, Klaus Theweleit tried in Männerphantasien to come to terms with the sexual, psychological, and socio-political prehistory of National Socialism in the Weimar Republic.

As a self-confessed old eroticist, Martin Walser retells Goethe's Marienbad Elegy in his book Ein liebender Mann (A Loving Man). The almost toothless 72-year-old is even said to have kissed the young 17-year-old Ulrike von Levetzow,

The ladies also discussed Pulitzer Prize-winner Gwendolyn Brooks' new poetry collection, In the Mecca.

Coming to an end, Robert Musil's opus magnus Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities) was not to be missed.

And finally Bettina mentioned her collection of essays, Heute ist ein guter Tag, das Patriarchat abzuschaffen (Today Is a Good Day to Abolish Patriarchy).

It was an enjoyable and, at the same time, informative evening, thanks to Schulte and Schulte.

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Quantum Theory and Determinism

This was the title of another seminar in the series Which Truths Can We Build Upon? Physics and Theology in Discourse, addressing physical, philosophical, and theological perspectives.

Let us start with the conclusions first. From a physicist's standpoint of view, they are trivial.

Causality, the relationship between cause and effect, is an observed phenomenon and has been described quantitatively in physics since Newton, but what does scientific truth mean in this context?

By status, do the students mean our current understanding of God and the universe? Natural sciences make decisive contributions to the latter. I think that modern philosophers and theologians without a good understanding of physics cannot credibly lecture or preach to people today.

With our current level of knowledge, it is impossible to answer the question: Is the future determined? How the answer might look in the future is pure speculation.

The students distributed handouts with German texts of philosopher Ernst Cassirer from his 1936 book Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics.

Cassirer's ideas were shaped by the interpretation of quantum mechanics at that time. So are his statements: Causality and randomness do not contradict but complement each other, and the question of free will should not be mixed up with the question of physical indeterminism.

However, the currently established laws of nature allow us, although only in principle, to determine the future from past events, except for occasional quantum events that we cannot influence.

So, what is called soft determinism in the above slide is indeterminate.

Sabine Hassenfelder wrote that much of the debate about free will in the philosophical literature concerns not whether it exists in the first place but how it connects to moral responsibility.

This means that the question of free will boils down to one's personal view, whether it includes morality and ethical accountability (toward God).

Indeed, further slides addressed the theology of determinism and free will, which Red Baron is no expert on.

Here is a slide the content of which theologians and laypeople alike will gnaw their teeth out.

Lagniappe

In the students' handout, I read a passage by Ernst Cassirer that did not get my approval. Here is the English translation:

Modern physics had to give up the hope of exhaustively representing the whole of natural phenomena with a fixed system of symbols. It is faced with the necessity of applying different types of symbols of schematic "explanations" to the same event: Physics must describe one and the same being as a "particle" and as a "wave" and must not be deterred from this use by the fact that the visual unification of the two images proves to be impossible.

From this, Cassirer conveys that philosophy must also be viewed from various perspectives.

What a misjudgment about physics. None other than Heisenberg bitterly complained that our language cannot clearly describe processes in the atomic realm. Red Baron once wrote an essay in German: Über das Verstehen in der Physik (About understanding in physics).

Sabine Hossenfelder even goes a step further, arguing that much of the supposed weirdness of quantum mechanics just comes from forcing it into everyday language. She is very much a math person and personally doesn't see the need to translate math into everyday language. Once we have the mathematics, and at least someone understands it, it is often possible to communicate it verbally and visually.

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Rothenburg ob der Tauber

There are many Rothenburgs in Germany, but when people say Rothenburg, they mean the medieval town above the little Tauber River. We entered the city from the bus parking east, and our guide moved along the Schmiedgasse (blacksmith lane) toward the center.

We passed the Plönlein with the Kobolzeller Steige, the most photographed object in Rothenburg.

Suddenly, we turned sharp left and stood before To Hell, a place that translates to a medieval drinking parlor?

Rothenburg is in the background,
while the river's course can only be guessed in the lush flora.

We hiked along the Burggasse (Castel Lane) on the city's western edge and looked into the Tauber valley deep below.

Before Rothenburg became a free imperial city under the Habsburgs in 1274,
the hill was crowned by a Staufian castle dating back to 1170.

Suddenly, we stood at the town's north gate, where the city guide drew our attention to a significant opening. 

All gates were closed at nightfall to protect the towns against evil intruders. At the time of closing, citizens outside the city walls got Torschlusspanik (panicked because the gate was closing). Latecomers not only had to climb through the small opening in the gate but also had to pay an obolus. This money hurt the citizens more than the bending down.

Tilly (left) watches Mayor Georg Nusch drinking (right) (©Pietro/Wikipedia)

Our group was let out on the market square around midday, so I arrived in time to watch the presentation of the Meistertrunk (masterful drink)

In 1631, during the Thirty Years War, the commander-in-chief of the Catholic League, Generalissimo Tilly, besieged the town. Rothenburg resisted and subsequently was stormed. The inhabitants feared the fate of Magdeburgum deletum. Indeed, Tilly sentenced the councilors of the Protestant imperial city to death and ordered the place burned and plundered. 

Legend has it that in their distress, the councilors offered Tilly wine as a welcome drink in a splendid, colorful glass that held 3 ¼ liters. This appeased him, and he said that if someone could drink this tankard of wine in one go, he would spare the town. Former mayor Georg Nusch volunteered, and, to everyone's amazement, he managed to empty the glass in one go. Tilly was impressed and kept to his promise. 

Following the spectacle, I had the Rothenburg specialty of a snowball with a coffee in a café.

Strengthened, I traced the scallop shell marking that Rothenburg, like most towns in Germany, lies on a Jakobsweg (Camino de Santiago). 

So I arrived at St James' Church, where the saint stood before the entrance, presenting the scallop shell.

St. James' "free leg" intrigued me, pointing at the bifurcation of the Jakobsweg to Tübingen /Speyer or Ulm/Konstanz.

Click to enlarge

The church's interior is dominated by Friedrich Herlin's Twelve Apostles Altar of 1466, flanked by scenes from the life of young Jesus.

When I stepped out of the church, it started raining again. So, I took refuge in the Medieval Museum of Crime.

I visited the place with my family in 1984 on one of our trips from Geneva to Germany, during which I showed my children historical regions.

      

Justice in Olden Times

Here is the book I then bought, which is as full of details as the exhibition. I will only present two items from the thousands of objects shown:

Click to enlarge

Protocol against Katharina Ranzebach, Martens, after her husband's name, known as the Martenschene, was heard at the Schöningen office (Brunswick) in 1656.

She was suspected of witchcraft.

Excerpt from her interrogation before the Halsgericht*

*A court that could impose the death penalty (hanging)

"..The devil had come to her in sleep, and if she had not slept, he would have left her aside, especially since she dreaded him very much and she had crossed and blessed herself in front of him. He made himself over her in her sleep and has done shame with her; she could not defend herself, and she had fought for half a quarter of an hour. He told her she should not bless herself when he came and that her husband was not at home but herded the oxen in the field at night. After that, he came to her in the garden, and on top of that, he told her she should not bless herself; otherwise, he would break her neck. He had fornicated with her and wore black clothes; his name was Onymus. She had to tell him that she wanted to do what he wanted, she should not believe in God, she had to take several steps back and lift her fingers and swear by her soul that she did not want anything to do with God but give up on him and believe in him the devil. Then he gave her two pfennig and promised her that she should have more to come in than from God. Item she admits that he was in her prison last night and fell on her body, but she blessed herself with the cross that his shame could not be accomplished. Item she confessed that he wanted to dampen her with the rope ..."

Here is an example of corporal punishment of children in the 17th century. Unthinkable today?

Later in the afternoon, our group visited rainy Tauberbischofsheim. The city's code of arms with the wheel indicates that it once belonged to the bishopric of Mainz. Large German regions, including Erfurt, belonged to the Archchancellor of the Holy Roman Empire. The Catholic bishop kept his Heim (home) on the Tauber River, although he never visited the city. 

The day ended with dinner at the Cistercian monastery in Brombach. Cistercians need a place far from civilization and a valley with a small river to found their monastery. The Brombach site strangely reminds me of the Cluny Abbey in France.

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Big Bang & Creatio Ex Nihilo

This was the title of the second contribution by the students to the seminar, "Which truths can we build upon? Physics and Theology in Discourse."

The idea of a creation out of nothing Christian theology developed in the second century. But already in the Jewish tradition, the universe is not created from pre-existing matter because God has absolute power and does not depend on any condition.

The table shows the Christian argument for a creatio ex nihilo. God's will to create a world began in time. Christianity implied the inherent goodness of creation and connected it to the idea of salvation.

In physics, nothingness is not defined. Traditionally, a vacuum contains no matter; it has no ether but fields. So particles pop up in the Higgs field and disappear.

Since Galileo, the (Catholic) Church has been regarded by many as antiscientific. Still, a Jesuit, George Lemaître, came to the conclusion of an expanding universe in analyzing Einstein's general relativity theory. In 1927, he estimated the Hubble constant two years before Edwin Hubble published his article about the redshift of light attributed to an expanding universe.

In 1931, Lemaître became the father of the Big Bang when he proposed an initial "creation-like" event he called L'Hypothèse de l'Atome Primitif (The Primeval Atom Hypothesis).

Initially, Einstein bitterly opposed an expanding universe, but he could not ignore Hubble's measurement of the redshift of light reaching us from distant stars.

Finally, in 1933, when Einstein had listened to a talk by Lemaître at the California Institute of Technology, he applauded and is supposed to have said, "This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened." 

©Gliscritti/Wikipedia

A photo featuring Robert Millikan*, George Lemaître, and Albert Einstein was taken after the lecture.

*the man who measured the charge of the electron.
 

In 1936, Pope Pius XI re-founded* the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, where selected and nominated scientists advise the Vatican on scientific matters. In March 1960, Georges Lemaître became the president until 1966.
*He continued similar earlier papal advisory bodies on scientific issues.

When Pope Pius XII heard about the Big Bang, he went overboard. In 1951, he spoke to the members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, "It seems that modern science, by ingenious recourse to millions of centuries, has somehow succeeded in witnessing the 'Let there be light' at the original beginning when matter came into being and a sea of light and radiation broke out of it, thus the creation in time, hence a creator. God, therefore, exists." His shortsighted proof of God is no longer shared by anyone today.

In Wikipedia, we read, "In relation to Catholic teaching on the origin of the Universe, Lemaître viewed his theory as neutral with neither a connection nor a contradiction of the Faith; as a devoted Catholic priest, Lemaître was opposed to mixing science with religion, although he held that the two fields were not in conflict. "

The following slides summarize the distribution of the "assignments" between the three branches well thought out.

Click to enlarge

Thank you, students, for the lucid seminar.

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Heidelberg

When I ask my American friends which German cities come to mind first, they usually choose Heidelberg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and Munich in any order or according to their preference for wine or beer.

My readers know that Red Baron likes to travel. Although my balance problems now force me to use a walking stick, I decided to book a short trip to Würzburg.

Heidelberg was one stopover on our journey. The tour company had offered a boat trip on the Neckar, so we had little time to visit the city I know well.

Heidelberg's stone bridge dates from 1788.

Our boat passed below.

The Heidelberg castle greets from afar.

Looking for a café, I passed the two towers protecting the bridgehead.

As we were threatened with a sumptuous dinner at our hotel in Biebelried, Red Baron made do with a typical German Kaffee und Kuchen, i.e., Heidelbeeren* in Heidelberg.

*Coffee and blueberry pie

©Tk/Wikipedia

There was just enough time left to visit the Heiliggeistkirche (Church of the Holy Spirit), which has an incredible history.

At the request of Elector Ruprecht III of the Palatinate, Boniface IX elevated the Church of the Holy Spirit to a collegiate church. Its canons were also professors at the young University of Heidelberg. They used the sinecures of the Heiliggeistkirche, initially granted to other churches, to finance their teaching activities.

With the introduction of the Reformation under Ottheinrich in 1541, the Heiliggeistkirche initially became a Lutheran parish church; from the introduction of Calvinism by Frederick III, it served as a place of worship for the reformed congregation. Under Elector Ludwig VI, the church temporarily became Lutheran again, but with the Bavarian and Spanish occupation during the Thirty Years War, the Heiliggeistkirche was once again Catholic.

After this unsteady change, Elector Johann Wilhelm decreed the Palatinate division of churches in 1698, i.e., the Heiliggeistkirche, like all Protestant churches in the Electoral Palatinate, was to be allowed to be used by the Catholics (Simultaneum). However, this practice proved unsuccessful. So, in 1705, the building was separated by a dividing wall in the so-called Declaration of Religion: the Reformed congregation was given the nave, and the Catholic congregation was given the choir.

The wall in place

This separation remained in place for over two centuries, except for a few brief interruptions when the wall was removed and rebuilt.

In 1936, an "irony of history" occurred when the Nazis awarded the Heiliggeistkirche to its Lutheran pastor, Hermann Maas, an opponent of the regime.

The breathtaking church interior

On June 24, 1936, Maas held a solemn service to celebrate the demolition of the wall that had divided the church for over 230 years.

    

Here I stand! Yes, the church is Lutheran.

A sight in the Heiliggeistkirche that was a provocation at the time and is now a demonstration is the physics window of 1984 by Johannes Schreiter in the south aisle.

©Dr. Manfred Schreiber

Some of the congregation felt so offended by the depiction of the Apocalypse that Schreiter was deprived of the commission for the remaining five church windows.

At the top of the physics window is a sentence from 2 Peter 3:10: "But the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night when the heavens will melt with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat, and the works that are in them will be burned up." But Schreiter then takes comfort from Isaiah 54:10: "But my "mercy shall not depart from you, nor shall the covenant of my peace perish, says the Lord, your merciful one."

The swelling mushroom cloud is completed by Einstein's formula and the date of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Pacifist Einstein is twice the father of the atomic bomb. His formula E=mc², derived from the general theory of relativity, was correctly interpreted by contemporary physicists.

Einstein's second paternity for the atomic bomb was his signature in a letter to President Roosevelt. This letter contained the information that the Nazis were already working on the atomic bomb.  Edward Teller, the later father of the hydrogen bomb, presented it to his famous colleague for signature.

An Einstein could not err, so the Americans launched the Manhattan Project. They left nothing to chance and developed a uranium and a plutonium bomb simultaneously. Oppenheimer is the keyword.

When Einstein heard the news that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, he felt complicit. He suffered for the rest of his life, "If I had known that the Germans would not succeed in constructing the atomic bomb, I would have stayed away from everything." Shortly before his death on April 18, 1955, he called the letter from 1939 the biggest mistake of his life.
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