Candles are burning on the altar. A musician practices the harpsichord. Some visitors stand in the bright, white church room, looking at the bronze corpus “Memento Mori” by Leiko Ikemura, a life-size figure, lying on the floor in the middle of the room. Everyday life in the St. Matthew Church on the Matthäikirchplatz at the Kulturforum.
For 20 years the church has been a place where everyone meets: worshipers and musicians, visual artists and clergymen. The Evangelische Kulturstiftung St. Matthäus has been in existence for 20 years. “The foundation arose from the church’s property sales when the Potsdamer Platz was built on,” says Pastor Hannes Langbein, who took over the management of the foundation in 2018 from the founding director, Christhard-Georg Neubert, who had been shaping the company for many years.
And even if the then Senate Building Director Hans Stimmann wanted to make the church disappear into a grove of hundreds of trees: today it has become an integral part of the cultural forum. As the oldest building in the ensemble, it is a visible sign of the history of the area.
The entire cultural forum can be seen from the tower of the church. “On Sundays, some people go first to the picture gallery and then to our church service – or first to the church and then to the philharmonic hall,” says Langbein. The church itself is also a cultural site: three to four exhibitions a year take place in the church on average – the spectrum ranges from Björn Dahlem to Jorinde Voigt to Norbert Bisky, who drew 20,000 visitors to the church last year.
“It is important to me that we open the church space to artists – especially now, in the corona crisis,” says Langbein. That is why the foundation usually engages an instrumental soloist for every service that takes place in the church. “Churches are one of the few places where artists can currently perform without any problems,” says Langbein. “We also have a responsibility to make that possible.”
World premieres meet tradition
Several times a year there are world premieres of new sacred music in the St. Matthew Church, thanks in particular to the committed cantor Lothar Knappe. And on the first Christmas day, a commissioned composition by the foundation is traditionally presented in the church.
And thanks to a scholarship awarded by the foundation in cooperation with the Brandenburg Cathedral, graduates of the Braunschweig University of Art can live and work as “Artists in Residence” at the Brandenburg Cathedral for a few months. “As the St. Matthäus Foundation, we are strongly represented in the Kulturforum,” says Langbein. “But we are the art and culture foundation of the entire regional church.”
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The more than 200 works by modern artists that the foundation now owns are therefore also loaned to congregations and church institutions throughout the regional church: from Görlitz in the south to Lenzen and Prenzlau in the north. In the coming years, Langbein also wants to radiate more strongly than before in the Brandenburg region.
Only the finances sometimes worry the foundation: Because the cultural foundation lives largely without church taxes even in the 20th year of its existence. A good third of the income comes from the interest on the property resulting from the sale of the former church property, for the rest you rely on donations, collections, rental income and other third-party funds.
Which is why Langbein is particularly happy about some of his neighbors’ campaigns: On Saturday and Sunday, after the festive service with Bishop Christian Stäblein, the Karajan Academy, the Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, will play two benefit concerts for the cultural foundation.
