Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church

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Coordinates: 52°30′18″N, 13°20′06″E

View from outside

The ceiling inside the old church

Inside the new church

The Protestant Emperor William Memorial Church (in German: Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche) is located in Berlin on the Kurfürstendamm in the center of the Breitscheidplatz. The old church was built between 1891 and 1895 according to plans by Franz Schwechten.^[1]

Emperor Wilhelm II ordered the construction of the church in honor of his grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm I.^[2] The neo-romanesque style refers to many romanesque churches in the Rhineland like Bonn Minster.

The original construction was of impressive monumentality and size. Mosaics inside the church recalled the life and work of Emperor Wilhelm I. During World War II, the church was destroyed during a British RAF bombing raid in 1943. The only remainder of the old building is the ruin of the belfry, which is also referred to as "der Hohle Zahn" ("the hollow tooth").

Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church around 1900

After the war, from 1951 to 1961, a new church was built right next to the site of the old one according to the plans of Egon Eiermann. It features a cross made of nails from the old Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by German Luftwaffe bomb attacks in Britain, in what was called the Coventry Blitz. It was consecrated on May 25, 1962, the same day as the new Coventry Cathedral, which like the Gedächtniskirche, was built alongside the ruins of the old building, which were kept as reminders of the horrors of war. Besides the Coventry cross, it houses an iconic cross of the Russian Orthodox Church and a graphic known as the Stalingrad Madonna by Lieutenant Kurt Reuber, created in December 1942 in Stalingrad (now Volgograd), as symbols of reconciliation between the three countries that were once at war.

In December of 2007, Charles Jeffrey Gray, a former British pilot who carried out World War II bombing raids over Germany, joined a campaign to rescue the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church from decay. After reading about the condition of the Church, Gray contacted Wolfgang Kuhla, the chairman of the church's advisory board, urging that its tower be restored. In response, a fund was launched to help raise the costs of its repair.