Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church is a protestant church consisting of the ruins of an old church, a belfry, and a new church in Berlin. Built at the behest of Kaiser Wilhelm II in the late 1890s, the original church was seriously damaged during an air raid in 1943. After the war, the church was not reconstructed as a reminder of World War II. Instead, a modern church with an attached chapel and a belfry was built around the old one between 1959 and 1963.
Today nicknamed the “hollow tooth,” the old church was a Neo-Romanesque structure with 2,740 square meters of wall mosaic. However, only a remnant of the spire, the altar, the baptistery, and most of the entrance hall survived the bombing raid. The ruins later became an important site in Berlin. Therefore, Egon Eiermann, the new church’s architect, had to take the ruins into consideration while creating a design.
Although Eiermann initially planned to demolish the old church, public reaction made him change his mind. The modern design involved four new structures built with concrete, steel, and glass. The walls of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church feature a concrete honeycomb design containing 21,292 stained glass inlays. Gabriel Loire, the designer of the glass, took inspiration from the colors of the stained glass in Chartres Cathedral: the dominant blue color with ruby red, emerald green, and yellow tints.
