Frauenkirche

Another Church of Our Lady, and you'll find one in most large, old, German cities as devotion to Mary was an important part of German religious life in the Middle Ages. This one, built at the behest of Emperor Karl IV (or Charles, if you prefer the English way) in the 1350s, was built on the site of a former Jewish neighborhood. After the Black Death reached Nuremberg in 1349, the residents of the town drove out the Jews in a pogrom. The synagogue was destroyed for the building of the Hauptmarkt-- the market place in front of the church, and then Charles ordered the church to be built as the new imperial church, and had his son baptized here. The church became Lutheran in 1525, but reverted back to the Catholic Church in the early 1800s. It was almost completely destroyed in WW II, and mostly restored by 1953, with a further period of restoration work in the late 1980s.

Architecturally and artistically: this was the first Gothic hall church in Franconia. It has three of the city's oldest surviving stained glass windows. The Tucher altar is the considered the most important panel painting before the works of Albrecht Dürer. The Mannleinlaufen-- the glockenspiel in the tower of the church, which was created in 1509, depicts the scene of Karl IV (he who exiled the Jews) promulgating the Golden Bull of 1356, the edict which set the conditions for governing the empire. During World War II, the figures were removed from the tower and along with many other treasures, hidden in the art bunker beneath the city.

There's a statue of Edith Stein. A convert to Catholicism from Judaism in the 1920s, she became nun, and was executed at Birkenau in 1942. She was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1998 under the name she chose when she entered the Carmelite Order: Theresa Benedicta. If you're interested, here's a short biography:

https://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/sa…Read more