Ulm Minster

Ulm's old parish church stood outside the walls, and the townspeople tired of being cut off from it, as they were in 1376, when Emperor Charles IV besieged the city. They also wanted free of Reichenau Abbey, which had incorporated the church in 1327 and drew its income without carrying the upkeep. A town of barely 10,000 resolved to build inside the walls and pay for it itself. Mayor Ludwig Krafft laid the foundation stone on 30 June 1377, with Heinrich II Parler, from the Holy Cross Minster at Schwäbisch Gmünd, as master builder; his plan was a hall church of three roughly equal aisles with a west tower and two choir towers. A twin-towered west front was generally reserved for bishops' churches and abbeys, and Ulm was never a bishop's seat.

Michael Parler, from the cathedral lodge in Prague, took over in 1381; Heinrich III Parler ran the lodge from 1387 to 1391. In 1392 the work passed to Ulrich Ensinger, who had worked at Strasbourg; the plan now called for a main tower of more than 150 metres. To keep the proportions the nave had to rise well above what the Parlers intended, making a basilica of the design; the change is still legible in the height difference between nave and choir. The church was consecrated on 25 July 1405, still under a temporary roof.

Ulrich's son Matthäus Ensinger took charge in 1446 and vaulted the choir in 1449 and the north aisle in 1452; after his death in 1463 his son Moritz vaulted the nave and built the sacrament house by 1471, completing the basilica his grandfather planned. Matthäus Böblinger, master builder from 1477, altered the plans, above all the main tower, and in 1492 the vaults threatened to force the piers out of true. Burkhard Engelberg of Augsburg strengthened the west tower's foundations, pulled down the heavy aisle vaults and divided the aisles with slender piers under lighter ones. Catastrophe was averted, but the church was left without the flying buttresses usual in a Gothic basilica, and the north wall of the nave is still up to 27 centimetres out of plumb.

In a named vote in 1530/31 Ulm's full citizens went over to the Protestant confession by a majority of seven-eighths, and the minster became Protestant. In the iconoclasm of 19 June 1531 more than sixty altars were removed, the high altar among them, and the reliefs on the pulpit basket destroyed; the council had warned the owners beforehand, so those altars could be taken to safety. Building stopped in 1543 with the main tower at about 100 metres and the choir towers at some 32 metres, halted by political tension, the Reformation and lack of money. The site lay idle over three hundred years; in 1817 the interior frescoes were painted grey.

Work resumed in 1844 under Ferdinand Thrän to 1870, then Ludwig Scheu to 1880, and new flying buttresses over the aisles stabilised the nave after three and a half centuries without them. In 1877 the Jewish congregation of Ulm, including Albert Einstein's father Hermann, gave money for a statue of the prophet Jeremiah, set below the main organ. Completion of the west tower began in 1885 under August von Beyer and ended on 31 May 1890 with the setting of a finial; it was raised ten metres above the older plans, a change sometimes explained as a wish to overtop Cologne Cathedral at 157 metres, which Ulm has denied. The church belonged to the city until 1894, when it passed to the Protestant parish.

The air raid of 17 December 1944 destroyed some 80 per cent of Ulm's medieval centre and hit the other buildings on the Münsterplatz, but the minster came through barely damaged; its 19th-century windows were shattered, the medieval choir glass having been removed beforehand. On 1 March 1945 a 500-kilogram bomb went through the roof and the choir vault without exploding, and lay there for days until men carried it out. The broken sandstone ribs were rebuilt in reinforced concrete, and the cracking that followed was cured in a renovation begun at the end of 2018.

The minster is a protected monument and the largest Protestant church in Germany, held by the Ulm parish of the Evangelical Regional Church in Württemberg. Its 161.53-metre tower was the world's tallest church tower for about 135 years, until the unfinished Christ tower of the Sagrada Família passed it on 30 October 2025. The climb is normally 768 steps to a gallery at 143 metres; work closed everything above the first platform in March 2023, and by 2025 visitors were going as far as the second level, 520 steps up at 102 metres.