Feature: Rebuilding a murdered church

WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 (UPI) -- The rector of Leipzig's venerable university resigned Thursday in a strange and very German controversy between church, state and academia over the reconstruction of a Gothic sanctuary murdered by the communists.

Rector Volker Bigl, a renowned professor of medicine and neural chemistry, stepped down after the government of the eastern German state of Saxony decided to rebuild Leipzig's graceful university church, whose destruction, in 1968, on the orders of communist leader Walter Ulbricht triggered the protest movement that 21 years later was instrumental in bringing down the Berlin Wall and ultimately communism in Eastern Europe.

"That thing must go," commanded Ulbricht, a native Leipziger who hated his hometown's academic, bourgeois and religious traditions. When Germany's oldest university church was blown up May 30, 1968, hundreds of thousands of weeping people filled the huge Augustusplatz -- then Karl Marx Platz -- at whose western edge this graceful edifice stood.

After the blast, it seemed suspended in the air for a few split seconds, before collapsing into a heap of rubble and dust. With it perished its organ built by Johann Scheibe, an instrument much beloved by composer Johann Sebastian Bach who had certified it in the early 18th century and claimed that it alone in all of Leipzig met his standards.

That same night, the first defiant "Prayers for peace," commenced. Over the next two decades they would evolve into a huge undertaking throughout what was then called the German Democratic Republic.

The "Paulinerkirche," as it was called, is to be rededicated in 2009 on the occasion of the university's 600th anniversary, thus ending what is and will doubtless continue to be one of the most bizarre hullabaloos over just how to remedy the architectural consequences of Nazi and communist barbarity.

To complicate matters, this is not a dispute between, on the one side, the state with secular concerns, and the church with spiritual arguments. Neither is it just a local matter. A full 27 Nobel laureates from all over the world have got into the act, and one of them, Guenter Blobel of New York, an oncologist, is actually heading the association advocating the church's reconstruction. Other supporters include Richard von Weizsaecker, Germany's former President.

On the other hand, those opposing this project are by no means all heathen. Bigl is a committed Christian but prefers erecting a more functional building containing elements that would remind the university community -- and the rest of the world -- of the slaughtered edifice. Johannes Richter, former regional bishop of Leipzig, argued that, like a murdered human being, an assassinated church could not be resurrected.

Indeed, the once powerful territorial Evangelical Lutheran Church in Saxony stated it was "taken aback" by the state government's decision. One prominent pastor told United Press International this political decision showed once more that the Catholic counter-reformation was in full swing right there, at the cradle of the Protestant Reformation.

How did he arrive at this conclusion? Well, for one thing the government of once very Lutheran Saxony was heavily laced with Catholics. Then of course there was the worrying news that the Vatican had offered roughly $10 million to buy the university-owned land on which the church stood, a goodly contribution toward its reconstruction, though the Catholic interlocutors vowed to make it ecumenically accessible.

Well, what nerve! Was the "Paulinerkirche" not Lutheran since 1543? And had the Lutherans not kindly allowed the Catholic minority to use it after their own parish church burned down in an air raid on Dec. 4, 1943? And now this! "Don't the Catholics have any shame?" the pastor asked, not wishing to have his name mentioned in print.

Of course this seems like an argument among two goldfish over who was to have control of a huge lake. For there are probably less than 10 percent Christians left in post-communist Leipzig, and the eastern German Protestants, perhaps exhausted from their years of valiant opposition, were woefully slow and short of self-esteem in reclaiming their traditional position after the end of communism.

At first they stalled for years before grasping the opportunities military chaplaincy offered in this de-Christianized land. Then, they resisted plans to rebuild the huge Frauenkirche (Church of our Lady) in Dresden, the state capital, which had been bombed in World War II.

Thanks to a breathtaking private initiative, the Frauenkirche is being re-erected, anyway. It will be ready by 2005 and already serves as a venue for ecumenical services -- Lutherans and Catholics. And guess who is one of this project's prime movers? New York's inveterate Guenter Blobel, a native Saxon, who donated much of his 1999 Nobel price in medicine and physiology to this enormous undertaking.

Meanwhile, there is no time to be lost in Leipzig because not only must the church to be rebuilt within the next six years, but also much of the university, which must rank among the ugliest communist structures on what before the war was a magnificent square laced with elegant early 19th-century structures.

They all burned down in the 1943 air raid but could have been rebuilt had not Ulbricht, a scion of Leipzig's red-light district, hated them almost as much as the church. So he had them were razed and replaced by gray concrete horrors, including a vile skyscraper Leipzigers nicknamed the wisdom tooth.

The university's only ornament is a monstrous bronze relief above its entrance, titled "Karl Marx -- the revolutionary and world-changing effect of his teachings." Until now, it was impossible to remove it because architects feared that it held together the whole shoddy structure, which might collapse if this "work of art" were removed.

Perhaps it will finally be gone by 2009. Perhaps then a copy of the destroyed church will dominate the university's campus. Perhaps then a painful wound will heal in this glorious old city in the center of Europe, a city to whose often tragic fate Martin Luther alluded to in 1545 when he consecrated this former sanctuary of the Dominican order as a Protestant house of worship and Germany's first university church.

The text on which he preached on that occasion is significant in the present context: "And when he drew near and saw the city he wept over it" (Luke 19:41).