‘Destroyed By Modernization’: Medieval Berlin’s Diverse Religious Roots Unearthed
BERLIN — Countless boxes sealed to the brim with bits and pieces of medieval Berlin fill the corners of the basement in the city’s Office for Monument Preservation. As the small team of archaeologists prods history out of the dirt at the site of the city’s founding, they are slowly bringing medieval Berlin’s religious past to the present.
But they’re working against time.
The Molkenmarkt, where the excavation is taking place, is the site of Berlin’s founding more than 800 years ago and its oldest marketplace. The archaeologists began their work in 2019; so far, they’ve made over 600,000 finds.
Last December, they made one of their most startling discoveries yet: 188 saintly figurines, including one of Saint Catherine and another of the Virgin Mary.
These figurines are evidence of a devout Catholic medieval Berlin, which historians say was more religiously diverse than people understand. They hope that the archaeologists make discoveries that bring this evidence to the present. But, soon the modern and largely secular city will seal this history again as it delivers on a 2016 promise to build 450 apartments in an effort to address its housing shortage.
“We are doing this work to document the place before its complete destruction,” said Björn Zängle, the local excavation director. “In 20 or 50 years, someone may have a question that our work may provide the answer to.”
Overlooking the Molkenmarkt is the Soviet-built TV tower, the 13th-century St. Nicholas Church and the Prussian Red Town Hall. At the site, the history is just as layered. Zängle’s excavation team, which splits in two across the dig site, travels through each layer of Berlin’s expansive history with garden tools.
Photos by Enzo Luna
This history often overlaps in the shallow, packed dirt, which sits on top of groundwater from the nearby river Spree. When the archaeologists sift through and separate Berlin's shattered history, it’s Judith Schachtmann’s job to clean, organize and package the remains.
Schachtmann is the team’s lost and found officer. Shoe box-size packages containing ceramics, animal bones and other items surround her office, inside the Office for Monument Preservation’s basement, from as far back as the 12th century when Berlin was founded.
But these findings don’t necessarily show the city’s religious history. That’s why their discovery of the figurines in December was so important. Months later, Schachtmann said the team is still analyzing the figures.
And still, more findings are pouring into the basement.
Schachtmann said the construction deadline doesn’t worry her, but her exasperated sighs betray her.
“You have side projects where you use more time and go into much more detail,” Schachtmann said. “Sometimes you have special material which is worth looking at but then you think, ‘Oh gosh, I have so much to do and so little time.’”
So far, they believe that the 14th-century, three-inch tall clay figurines were objects of Catholic devotion due to bone fragments they found in an inlay on three of them.
The 188 figurines are uniform in design, with a variation of just two: a male with a crown and a female with eight curls on her head. They found the figures in a dump, broken at the neck, so they also believe that the figurines were made generically for sale in large quantities. In fact, some figurines have fingerprints where an artisan would have squeezed the clay to form the saint’s neck.
What they don’t know is where the figurines were made and who they represent. But, in a city of three million where only 8.5% of the people identify as Catholic, does anyone care enough to know?
For historians like Dr. Jörg Feuchter, the head of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanity, the work Schachtmann and Zängle are doing is providing opportunities to see a time period that lacks a physical presence in the city.
“There is almost no remainder of medieval Berlin above ground,” Feucther said. “It has been thoroughly destroyed by modernization, and also by war, and then also again, by the efforts of the GDR government to modernize.”
Even though Feuchter said the excavation will not lead to new understandings of medieval Berlin among historians, he believes the work is still important because they’re preserving the city’s past.
For Feuchter, the figurines confirm what historians already know about medieval Berlin before the Protestant Reformation: It was a Catholic town like any other at the time in Germany. But, with more time, Feuchter would like to see the archaeologists unearth evidence of a medieval town that wasn’t as homogenous as people have come to believe the middle ages were.
According to Feuchter, who wrote a book about the first Berliners, Jewish, Slavic and German people lived alongside each other in the Molkenmarkt, each practicing their own religion.
“This new society was like an American town where different people came together,” Feuchter said. “It was not founded under the seat of a prince or a bishop.”
Feuchter said studying this history is important to better understand the present and future of the city.
Berlin faces growing intolerance of immigrants and their religions, especially Muslim Arabs from countries like Turkey and Syria. right-wing extremist political parties like the Alternative for Germany echo Nazi talking points and pine for a homogenous, white and Christian society. History, however, shows that such a time never existed.
Uncovering evidence of Berlin’s multicultural past to counter such propaganda, motivates Zängle.
“Since the Middle Ages, the city of Berlin has a history of migration,” Zängle said. “It was founded by settlers from the Rhineland in western Germany, and until today, it's a place of migration.”
This story has been published as part of a partnership with USC Annenberg’s School of Journalism.
Enzo Luna is a daily radio producer and a long form video senior producer for Impact, an award-winning hour-long documentary show. He is passionate about telling multimedia stories that explore culture, politics, economics, and health through people-centered narratives. He is currently pursuing a master's degree at USC’s Annenberg’s School of Journalism.