The largest bell in the Frauenkirche’s peal is Isaiah (Jesaja), the Peace Bell, weighing 1,750 kg. Every weekday after the hour is struck at noon it calls out, evoking a “flickering longing for peace” (Christian Lehnert, 2004) and calling visitors to the church for midday prayer.

On the bell, the artist Christoph Feuerstein recreated a second of global terror in visual form: the moment when on 11 September 2001 an aircraft flown by terrorists hit the symbol of America, the World Trade Center – a moment of destruction.

“And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares” (Isaiah 2:4) – this Biblical hope will light up all dark corners of the modern world. Every time it sounds out like “a dark pulse”, the Isaiah bell reminds us that out pleas for peace extend to peace throughout the world.

When the bell was unveiled, the author Christian Lehnert wrote this poem on Isaiah, the Peace Bell:

   The sound of bells, a dark pulse
   drifts over gaps, seeps deeper
   through cellars,
   through layers of rubble under grass and asphalt.

   The sound of bells,
   blurring tenses:
   Night in a city,
   lit by darting rocket flashes,
   Night
   of blazing pyres,
   Night
   in the glow of candles by the bones of a church,
   flickering with longing for peace.
   Isaiah, the bell is named,
   Bell of peace,
  distant voice of the prophet:
  “And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares.”

  Calls to prayer drifting over Baghdad,
  Shofars sounding in Jerusalem,
  Buddhist temple bells in Tibet…
  I hear a sound made of many sounds:
  Peace,
  Peace,
  where God resides.