The ringing of the church of St. Stefan and St. Magdalena in Tegernbach has a very eventful history: During the First World War and again in the Second World War, the people of Tegernbach had to give up a church bell.
A painful experience.
The dedication of the 500 kilo bronze giantess even fits in with this.
Tegernbach
- How do you get a 500 kilo bell down from the church tower? Especially if you don't have a crane or other special equipment? When the people of Tegernbach had to give up the larger of their two church bells during the Second World War, they saw only one possibility: They threw the bell dedicated to the Sorrowful Mother of God out of the front sound hole. It didn't matter that the bronze body opened a crack on impact. Because one could not expect that the bell would call again for a service.
It went to the bell cemetery near Hamburg Central Station, where the Tegernbacher “metal donation” expected nothing more than the melting down.
At home, in the branch church of St. Stefan and St. Magdalena, a makeshift replacement was hung in the bell room: The village blacksmith father of today's church caretaker Thomas Kernle donated an empty oxygen bottle.
You couldn't ring the bell with it, but at least the clock hammer found a surface to strike every quarter of an hour.
In this way, the villagers did not have to do without their usual striking hour.
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The bell dedicated to Our Lady of Sorrows has a little sister: She was allowed to stay in Tegernbach during World War II.
© Katharina Schlamp
Already in the First World War the people of Tegernbach had to give away a church bell - at that time the big one was given to them and the smaller one was confiscated. In 1923 it was replaced by a new one, which still hangs in the imposing oak bell chair made in 1777. It is dedicated to Saint Sebastian and comes from the Regensburg bell foundry Hamm-Hofweber, which among other things contributed three bells to the seven-part ringing of the Wieskirche.
Connections that go back a long time exist between Tegernbach and the municipality of Steingaden, in which the Wieskirche is located. In 1147 Welf VI., Count of Lechrain and the Ammertal, gave Tegernbach to the Steingaden Monastery that he had founded. It is probably thanks to the cosmopolitan, fun-loving and art-loving nobleman that the church of St. Stefan and St. Magdalena was unusually lavishly built and richly decorated for a village church. Welf brought bricklayers and other craftsmen from Lombardy. For the first time since Roman times, bricks that were burned on the spot were used again.
The original Romanesque style of the building later passed through the fashions of the centuries.
In the Gothic style, the exposed brickwork was covered with a thin lime plaster.
The windows and entrance received pointed arches, which were removed again in the baroque period.
The branch church has remained essentially unchanged since the last major renovation in 1774.
After the Second World War, the Painful Mother of God surprisingly returned from the Hamburg bell cemetery to Tegernbach - unscathed except for the crack that she had suffered when she fell from a height of around 20 meters.
Many years later it was removed again - this time with a special crane - and repaired so that it got its old full sound back.
The series
In the series "The Bells of Mittelstetten", the daily newspaper presents the bells of all six places of worship and their history in cooperation with the Association for Village Life. The association will soon publish its research as a brochure.
