Matthias Strejc gets weak at the knees at high altitudes. So it's somewhat ironic that the mayor of Bad Frankenhausen (population 9,000), a man who has such a fondness for solid ground, will perhaps soon enter the history books as the savior of a local landmark.

That landmark is the shaky tower of the 14th-century Church of Our Beloved Ladies by the Mountain, which the vertiginous Strejc will probably never climb himself. The building, which is a protected landmark, has been in a precarious state of decline for some time. The bulky stone tower leans exactly 4.3 meters (14 feet) to the east. Not even its cousin in Pisa boasts the same degree of tilt.

From a distance, the 56-meter-high church tower looks like a giant beater stuck crookedly in a lump of dough. Salty groundwater has eroded the gypsum bedrock under the structure, leaving hollow spaces that cause the tower to tilt. The ground upon which the stone building, which weighs thousands of tons, presses down has become "as crumbly as toast," a representative of the local parish council complains.

Observers noticed the church tower leaning sideways as early as the Thirty Years War in the early 17th century. Then during the 1930s, the courageous intervention of an expert from Dresden temporarily slowed the decline of the sacred tower. The engineer used sleeves of flat steel to brace the colossus and stabilized the creaky rock.

But the effect of this feat soon wore off. The tower leaned over even further, and several stone bricks broke inside the walls. Then, in the early 1980s, the local authorities of East Germany's then-governing Communists, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), ordered the Baroque church spire to be dismantled, citing an acute danger of collapse. Since money to carry out the project was lacking, party officials fell back on a cheaper alternative: They wanted the town's volunteer fire department to subject the wood and slate spire to "controlled combustion" for "a hundred marks and a few cases of beer," as one witness recalls. But even that plan remained a pipe dream.

Locals have recently rediscovered their affection for the crooked curiosity. While church services have only been held sporadically in the adjoining nave since the 1960s, the German state of Thuringia recently provided €900,000 ($1.2 million) for the conservation of the aging relic. Mayor Strejc is insisting, however, that it would be best to begin the work immediately.

Setting Things Straight

But straightening the tower completely would probably mean eliminating not just the spectacular slant but the tower itself. The granite rock has settled into its current position and "the tower would probably break apart if it were to be lifted entirely," architect Volker Trautvetter says. Trautvetter has been dealing with the precarious case for decades and is now trying to unobtrusively correct the slant. "The tower can survive quite well with a 3.8 or 4 meter tilt," he believes.

The project director is more concerned about swiftly stabilizing the porous gypsum beneath the church by injecting concrete. The tower's tilt currently increases by an additional 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) every year. After the procedure, "it will be about 1 centimeter," Trautvetter hopes.

Whether injecting concrete into the soft bedrock beneath the monument can really save it remains a controversial idea. "It doesn't work that way," says German engineer Bernfried Sudbrack, cautioning against the planned rescue attempt. "The method might be cheap, but it cannot be controlled. There will be cracks -- and then the whole thing will topple over."

Sudbrack once worked for German coal-mining company Ruhrkohle AG in western Germany, where he lifted and straightened hundreds of buildings that had slumped in mining areas. "I'm the pope of lifting at Ruhrkohle AG," Sudbrack says proudly. The restless tinkerer has since expanded his services to include churches, chapels and castles. He even came up with a plan to stop the Leaning Tower of Pisa -- which has in the meantime been saved from collapse -- from toppling over.

If he had his way, Sudbrack would force the church tower in Bad Frankenhausen into a tight "corset" and then affix it to a steel plate, locked into the ground by poles. Using the hydraulic presses he developed for Ruhrkohle AG, he could then carefully straighten the off-kilter tower by a few centimeters.