For years, a dispute has been raging in the university town of Wittenberg in Saxony-Anhalt over an anti-Jewish relief on the façade of the town church. Now the Federal Court of Justice is hearing.
The “Judensau” of the town and parish church of St. Marien zu Wittenberg.
The “Judensau” from Wittenberg has been around for more than 700 years. If one wants to get an idea of how long the societies of Europe marginalized and despised the Jews, one has only to attempt to evoke that vast period of time in one’s mind. The controversy over the relief has only existed for a few years. All the centuries before, it was a work that people in the pretty little town in Saxony-Anhalt took no offense at. You were no exception. Dozens of such sculptures and illustrations have survived to this day. And that’s how it should stay, at least according to the previous will of the judiciary.
This Monday, the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe is hearing about the Wittenberg relief. Most recently, the Higher Regional Court in Naumburg, Saxony-Anhalt, decided in February 2020 that the sculpture on the facade of the town and parish church of St. Marien zu Wittenberg may remain where it is.
The 79-year-old plaintiff, a pensioner from the Rhineland who claims to have converted to Judaism, wants to “use all legal avenues” if necessary to enforce the removal of the relief. It offends members of the Jewish faith, he says. An obvious conclusion. What the relief shows could not be more vulgar and dull. A rabbi is looking into the anus of a sow, and under the animal piglets and Jews are hanging together by the teats. “Rabini Shem HaMphoras” is above it, a corruption of the explicit name of God in Judaism. Your holiest thing – according to the message of the Wittenberg Christians – is in the buttocks of an animal which, according to your Torah, is unclean.
Can you clean public space historically?
The judges from Naumburg declared two years ago that the plaintiff has no right to the sculpture disappearing because the sculpture in today’s context does not have an “offensive character”. Of course, in the past it was different. The relief “indisputably pursued the purpose of making the Jews despicable”. Today, however, it is part of an ensemble that “shows a different direction”. An information board, according to the judges, clearly expresses the fact that the Church distances itself not only from the sculpture, but also from the persecution of the Jews in general and from Martin Luther’s anti-Judaist writings; The reformer once published his 95 theses in Wittenberg, which is why people there proudly see and market themselves as “Lutherstadt” today.
At first glance, the judges’ decision sounded as if it could be inspired by a spirit of Solomon: Yes, the sculpture is evil, but by revealing the evil it transforms its essence. The old message is transformed through contextualization. Or something like that.
One thinks of the debates raging in many places about streets that are named after victorious generals or other historical figures whose work is considered offensive today. Can an enlightened society really free its public spaces from the ballast of centuries? Isn’t the image of man behind such striving a bit authoritarian? Are people unable to place names and pictures? Can’t a classification of the stone evil – and thus back to the south facade of the town church in Wittenberg – neutralize this evil?
Theoretically yes. In practice, however, there can be no question of a neutralization of hatred of Jews in Wittenberg. Because what could be a classification needs an information board itself. A bronze plate embedded in the floor in 1988 reads: “God’s real name, the reviled Shem Ha Mphoras, whom the Jews held almost unspeakably holy before the Christians, died in six million Jews under the sign of the cross.”
A dry explanation
And indeed, since 2017 there has been a label in German and English next to the record. Then the “Judensau” is characterized in two sentences as a “shame plastic” typical of the German Reich at the time, which was supposed to prevent Jews from settling in the city. That’s all. The passers-by do not find out why this animal represents a particular insult. The lettering also remains in the dark. The rest of the text explains the base plate.
In an interview with the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, the Wittenberg pastor Johannes Block pointed out shortly before the most recent verdict was pronounced that there was also a cedar next to the plaque, “as a sign of peace”. One does not quite know which assumption is more absurd: that a visitor recognizes a cedar or, if he does so, that he knows its symbolic meaning.
Pastor Block sees the anti-Jewish sculpture in his church as part of a total work of art, the elements of which just need to be “even better” linked together. “My idea would be a light band that combines warning panels, cedar and abusive plastic,” he said at the time. The fact that the plaintiff turned down the invitation to participate in such a concept had “a certain tragedy” for him. After all, it’s all about the fight against anti-Semitism.
How a tree, a bit of light art, a floor panel that is difficult to understand and an incomplete sign are supposed to fight anti-Semitism and ensure that the hate message on the church wall is “neutralized” remains a mystery.
Can such a motif remain in public space? There is no clear answer to this question. But the only form of classification that would make a yes at least plausible would be an unequivocal one. It could take the form of a written board or a video screen, but it would have to explain what is on this facade. In every hideous detail. Instead of an enigmatic aestheticization with tree and light, the church should place its own hatred, which it has only admitted after a very long time, at the center of its classification. Until that happens, it would be better to dismantle the relief and place it in a museum.