Marienkirche

The Marienkirche in Württemberg announces itself from afar with its tower. The tower grows from a square base into an octagonal upper section, and the richly decorated transition emphasizes the change. A golden angel with a flag and a cross, usually understood as the Archangel Gabriel, stands at the very top. The townspeople built the church in the forties of the fourteenth century as the first house of God within the town walls. It belongs to the important Gothic sacred buildings of Württemberg. In 1988 it became a national cultural monument.

Between 1521 and 1548 the reformer Matthäus Alber worked here, spreading the ideas of Martin Luther into the surroundings. Four statues in the choir make that story visible. On one side stand Philipp Melanchthon and Matthäus Alber, opposite them Martin Luther and the mayor Joss Weiß. A break came in 1726, when a town fire badly damaged the church and almost the whole interior perished. Only two objects survived: the late Gothic Holy Sepulchre and the baptismal font from 1499. Between 1893 and 1901 the church underwent a comprehensive neo-Gothic restoration.

The stone vault probably saved the oldest surviving part, the sacristy by the choir. On its walls are scenes from the life of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, whose attribute is the wheel. Above the two-sided altar hangs a cross by Hans Gottfried von Stockhausen. On the rosette in the floor you will look through the two angels to Jesus in a red robe. The organ has 3 813 pipes, and the changing temperature inside the church can alter their tones. The climb leads past the bells to the rose window behind the organ, and old pipes rest in the roof space. Even from the ground, however, one picture holds most strongly. The angel above the church has fallen, been restored and returned to the summit.