The towerless church of Schwäbisch Gmünd

About 1315 the burghers of Gmünd began a new church on the site of the Romanesque basilica that had stood there since the twelfth century. The two west towers of the old building, added about 1210, they left standing; the new work was simply built around them. Shortly after the start, between 1325 and 1330, a stonemason from Cologne took charge: Heinrich Parler. His name is really an office — a «Parlier» was the foreman of a masons’ lodge.

Heinrich changed the plan fundamentally. Instead of a basilica with a high central nave he raised three aisles of equal height, carried on slender piers: a hall church, the first great one in southern Germany. The nave was finished about 1341. On 17 July 1351 the foundation stone of the hall choir was laid, the piece with which the Parlers made their name. From their lodge comes also the Holy Sepulchre of about 1350, with clothing and weapons exact in every detail to the fourteenth century.

Heinrich died about 1370 in Gmünd; his son Johann carried on the work. The high altar was consecrated only in 1410, the vaults were added from 1491, and only in 1521 did the church stand as it had been meant to. The road of European Gothic ran through this little town on the Rems.

The two old towers stood through it all while the new church grew around them. Between them spanned a heavy arch that braced them against each other. That arch had one drawback: from the nave it blocked the view of the choir and the high altar. The building masters decided to take it down.

In the night of Good Friday, 24 March 1497, the towers gave way. Both collapsed. Nobody was hurt. The town clerk Rudolf Holl recorded what happened in the church that night: six people were keeping the vigil at the Holy Sepulchre, two old men and four schoolboys. When the dust rose they could see no light at all; they groped their way to a window in the choir and climbed out. Not one of them had a scratch.

The people of Gmünd called it a sign. That it happened of all nights in the night when the church remembers the death of Christ, and that the six watchers came out unharmed, was depicted on an indulgence print and retold for centuries. The towers were never rebuilt — the money was lacking. On the site of the north tower the Schreyer chapel was finished in 1507, on that of the south tower the sacristy in 1515. The bells moved into the Romanesque residential tower at the edge of the churchyard, called Glockenturm ever since: a stopgap that has lasted five centuries.

A towerless church invites mockery, and Gmünd has always had to live with it. The strictly Catholic town was often called «Swabian Nazareth» beyond its walls. But the story the people of Gmünd like best to tell is not about mockery but about innocence.

A poor fiddler, the legend runs, played in a Gmünd chapel before the image of Saint Cecilia. He played so beautifully that the image threw him its golden shoe. The man was accused of church robbery and sentenced to death. Before the sentence was carried out he was allowed to play once more — and before the eyes of the whole town the image threw him the second shoe as well. His innocence was proved.

The story is older than Gmünd; it belongs originally to the Volto Santo of Lucca and to Saint Wilgefortis, the Kummernis. Justinus Kerner saw such a Kummernis image with its legend in 1815 in a church near Gschwend, and on 3 September 1816, walking near Gaildorf with his friend Ludwig Uhland, conceived the poem «Der Geiger zu Gmünd». On 9 December 1816 it appeared in print. Kerner moved the action to Gmünd, and not by chance: a goldsmith figures in the old legend, and Gmünd was the gold and silversmiths’ town above all others — about the middle of the eighteenth century it counted some 250 master goldsmiths. Since 1906 the Fiddler Fountain has stood in the town garden. The towers never came back; the fiddler stayed.