Christuskirche

Christuskirche stands in Frankfurt’s Westend as a historicist church with rough natural-stone walls and steeply sloping roofs. A neo-Gothic basilica, it follows medieval models from Brittany and England. Danish architect Aage von Kauffmann arranged three naves beneath carved buttresses and tracery windows, while the bell tower meets the main nave at a forty-five-degree angle.

Emil Moritz von Bernus founded a foundation that supported construction during the early 1880s. Air raids in 1943 and 1944 left the church in ruins for more than thirty years. Worship continued in a temporary barrack until rebuilding restored the structure in 1976 and 1977. The interior now joins chapel-like rooms in the former side aisles and apse to the main nave.

Christuskirche serves the Protestant Christus-Immanuel congregation, a Serbian Orthodox community and the Protestant Oromo community from East Africa. Its smallest bell survived the 1944 fire and returned to the tower, while Martin Mosebach’s novel Westend makes the damaged church’s threatened demolition part of its story.