The tower of St. Peter’s Church has been an institution for centuries when Munich residents want to know what time it is. The fact that the hands are no longer moving could be a chance.
When Karl Valentin was once asked why eight huge dials were hanging on Alter Peter, the comedian was not at a loss for an answer: “Yes, my, so that eight people can look at the clock at the same time.” It’s a pity that you can’t ask him anything anymore today. The climate, the Putin, the main route, Great Britain – there is so much to explain. But my And one would love to hear from Karl Valentin why all eight clocks on Alter Peter are set to midday. Or are they into midnight? May depend on lighting conditions. Or from the inner attitude.
Munich’s oldest parish church was also the first building in the city to have a public clock attached, in the 14th century. This happened only a short time after such a precise time display was even invented. Hours and minutes according to today’s understanding did not exist before that, what a blissful life that must have been. People met after the first cockcrow or arranged to meet at sunset. It couldn’t have been much more precise until the mechanical movements came along and at some point in their wake came the stress. Why it was mostly churches of all things that first attached such devilish stuff to their walls can be explained on the one hand by their tendency to have fixed prayer times, but on the other hand also by: prestige. In Munich, people knew about it early on. The clocks became more and more, everywhere and also at the Old Peter. If you stroll through the old town today, you don’t need a wristwatch if you want to know what time it is.
Time is advancing inexorably – and has now come to a standstill. It’s twelve o’clock, 24 hours a day frozen moment of time. Eight times the whole thing, so is it 96 o’clock? What if the temporal frost slowly creeps down the church tower, spreads over the Petersbergl to the Marienplatz and from there to the whole city? Everyone knows the song about Old Peter and the “coziness in the Munich district”, which will not die out as long as it is still there. Maybe it can be preserved a little longer that way. No one at City Hall is interested in this. A message mentions a defective pointer drive and that the repair should be carried out “as soon as possible this week”. One goodness suggestion: could you wait until one minute past twelve to do that?