Parish Church of St. Anthony

The Catholic Church St. Anthony Located in the Bebelsberg district of Potsdam, between Plantagenstrasse and Turnstrasse, the church, consecrated in 1934, is the parish church of the Babelsberg parish.
For the Catholics who moved to Nowawes and the neighboring village of Neuendorf in the 19th century, only the Church of St. Peter and Paul in Potsdam's city center was available. Due to the increasing number of parishioners and the distance, the current church property was purchased in 1891. For financial reasons, construction of a rectory with an integrated, spacious chapel could not begin until 1905. The chapel was consecrated on October 7, 1906. A priest was appointed later that same year, and in 1909 St. Anthony's became an independent parish.
For the Catholics belonging to the parish in Berlin-Wannsee, St. Michael's Church was built in 1927. Two years later, a convent for the branch of the Sisters of Mary of the Immaculate Conception, which had opened in 1923, was added to the Babelsberg rectory. On July 30, 1933, the foundation stone for the present church was laid. On April 15, 1934, Bishop Nikolaus Bares of Berlin consecrated St. Anthony's Church.
The church's architect, Wilhelm Fahlbusch, had previously worked for the parish on St. Michael's Church in Wannsee. While he created expressionist pointed arch forms there, he designed St. Anthony's as a rectangular hall church with an apse spanning the entire width of the space. Due to the site's orientation, the worship space faces south. The chancel is defined by lateral transverse pillars, suggesting a triumphal arch. The church interior features a flat wooden ceiling, with two parallel beams forming a cross above the central aisle leading to the apse and across the space at the transition to the chancel.
The church interior is illuminated by ten narrow, high-set windows each in the west and east walls, framed on the outside with red bricks. Two further narrow windows behind the transepts illuminate the chancel and the apse mosaic.