Berlin Mosque

About

Standing at Brienner Straße 7–8 in the Wilmersdorf borough of the German capital, the Berlin Mosque, officially the Wilmersdorfer Moschee, was designed by the architect K. A. Hermann and built between 1923 and 1925. The Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement (Ahmadiyya Anjuman Ishāʿat-i-Islām Lahore) owns and manages the mosque.

On 6 August 1923 the foundation stone was set in place, and on 26 April 1925 the completed mosque was officially inaugurated. Hermann shaped the mosque in a Neo-Mughal idiom, onion dome, pastel surfaces, and a symmetrical front recalling the tombs of the Mughal Empire and most famously the Taj Mahal. Two slim minarets, each 27 metres (90 feet) high, rise on either side of the prayer hall, and a two-storey imam's residence stands beside the mosque.

The minarets and dome were heavily damaged by Soviet shelling during the Second World War. The mosque was reopened in 1952 after a grant from the Berlin Monuments Department made initial repairs possible, and the two minarets themselves were finally rebuilt between 1999 and 2001.

History

The mosque grew out of an early-1920s effort by the Indian Muslim activists Abdul Jabbar Kheri and Abdus Sattar Kheri, known together as the Kheri Brothers, to establish an Islamic centre in Berlin. Their contact with the Woking Muslim Mission in England brought the project to the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement, Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha'at-i-Islam Lahore, which took it on and financed the building entirely through donations. The foundation stone was laid in 1924 on a corner plot at Brienner and Berliner Straße in Wilmersdorf, and the completed mosque, designed by the German architect K. A. Hermann in a Neo-Mughal style modelled on the Taj Mahal, was formally inaugurated on 23 March 1928. Its original manager, Hugo Marcus, was a Jewish convert to Islam who later helped fellow Jews escape Nazi persecution. During the Second World War the twin minarets, used as machine-gun positions, were struck by Soviet artillery and reduced to stumps, and the dome itself took a direct hit. The mosque reopened in 1952 after initial repairs, and a sustained restoration beginning in 1996 with support from the Deutsche Stiftung Denkmalschutz rebuilt the northern minaret in 1999 and the southern minaret in 2001, with a further conservation phase completed between 2017 and 2021.

Significance

As the oldest mosque still standing in Germany, the Wilmersdorf Mosque is a foundational landmark in the history of Islam in the country and in early twentieth-century European Islam more broadly. Its Neo-Mughal architecture, built in modest plaster, wood and concrete to fit a limited budget, carried South Asian Muslim sacred design into the heart of Weimar-era Berlin. It has been protected as a historical monument since 1993, and each October it takes part in Germany's nationwide Tag der offenen Moschee, opening its doors to visitors of every background.

Architecture

Neo-Mughal architecture modelled on the Taj Mahal and other Mughal-era tomb buildings, with a central ribbed dome flanked by twin onion-domed minarets and a two-storey imam's residence adjoining the prayer hall