St. Boniface Church

Martin Weber (1890-1941) spent two years in the monastery before settling in Frankfurt as an architect in 1925 - the very year in which the New Frankfurt was launched as a radical urban renewal project. Weber, then just in his mid-30s, had always been fascinated by building churches; with the St. Boniface Church in Sachsenhausen, he created a novelty of expressionist architecture in 1926 that caused a sensation throughout Germany: a church in reinforced concrete and faced with red clinker bricks. Many contemporaries criticized Weber for this, but at the same time the church became a model for similar projects and it is precisely the seemingly profane building materials that give the building with its hexagonal tower a special appearance. The floor plan takes into account the dual function of the church, which was consecrated in 1927: the lower part is a place of remembrance, where Weber created a chapel for the fallen of the First World War. The mighty pointed arch hall in the upper part, on the other hand, is turned towards life and heaven. Weber himself is said to have modeled the passage from the main portal towards the altar on the ascent from the dark here and now to the radiant hereafter;