Wengen Church

›God's workshop‹ – is what the townsfolk of Ulm called St Michael's Church, which now bears the name Wengen Church. Typical of the times, the building was kept very austere in the course of the rebuilding after the war.

Only a few architectural relics today tell of the fact that there was once a monastery complex in the western part of Ulm's old town – between Wengen-, Ulmer- and Walfischgasse: the Michael zu der Wengen monastery with its associated church. Built in 1399 and later renovated in the Baroque style, this church was already the third to be erected by the Augustinian Canons, following two previous relocations. In the course of secularisation, in 1805 it became the first Catholic parish church in Protestant Ulm.

The complex, which had survived completely intact until 1944, was almost entirely razed by Allied bombing at the end of the war. Nothing remained of the cloistered quadrangle newly built in 1699 and of the late-Gothic tithe barn only the staircase tower was left standing. The church itself was badly damaged. In the course of the rebuilding of the church ruins starting in 1953, the former nave was joined with the choir and, to it, a new north-aligned nave attached at a right angle, all in a deliberately simple architectural style. Since then, the old choir has been used as a side chapel.

Reconstruction of this makeshift church in 1997 had a brightening effect on the room.
It may have lost its architectural splendour and all of its decoration by the Baroque painter Franz-Martin Kuen but the church is an authentic monument to construction in the immediate post-war period.