St. Matthew Church

St. Matthew Church is a neo-Romanesque church at the southern edge of the Tiergarten in Berlin. It is the only historic building within the modern setting of the Kulturforum.

Situated within the Kulturforum complex just off Potsdamer Platz, the neo-Romanesque St. Matthew Church (Matthäuskirche) was another of August Stüler's projects, erected in 1846. Immediately recognizable as a small reminder from the past in the ultra-modern setting of the Kulturforum's National Gallery, it was erected as a new parish church at a time of fast population expansion in an elegant district on the southern edge of the Tiergarten.

St. Matthew Church architectural features

The neo-Romanesque church, with period features such as the round narrow arched windows and a horizontal lined brick pattern was designed by Schinkel's pupil who had succeeded him as the head of the Prussian building commission. Its particularity is the triple nave structure and the three separate gables or ridged roofs. It was the first church in Berlin purposely built in a square although initially it merely stood in isolation surrounded by fields. The high tower has a pointed octagonal spire.

Albert Speer's attempts to have it torn down in the early 1930s to make way for an area of the Germania project for the Berlin as capital of the Reich failed. When the whole district was destroyed at the end of the Second World War the Matthäuskirche was still standing. The Church was reconstructed in 1960 with a plain modern interior and left standing in the same isolated way it has ever since.

The Church is known for its Christmas concert programme and exhibitions.