Mocking Genocide

The court's [Federal Court of Justice] decision was an "underestimation of the real danger" of the sculpture.

"You can't neutralize it just by putting a simple plaque alongside it of what it means. [Such] propaganda [can be found in more than 30 churches across Germany today]."

"The Judensau isn't only an insult, it's so much more -- it's a call to murder the Jews."

"No institution besides the church, and no single person besides Martin Luther, did more to prepare the German people for Auschwitz. Auschwitz came not from a vacuum. It was the result of centuries-long agitation against the Jews."

"I'm very concerned about the situation here and I think the intellectuals and those in politics are underestimating the dangers. They are willing to make concessions to the right wing."

"It's my will go to to the Constitutional Court and to continue to fight this and if I lose I will go to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg." 

Michael Dietrich Düllmann, 79-year-old retired psychiatric nurse, Wittenberg, Germany

A thirteenth century anti-Semitic sculpture is displayed at St. Marien church in Wittenberg, Germany. REUTERS/Annegret Hilse

"[The ruling was] understandable [but] neither the base plate nor the explanatory slanted display contain an unambiguous condemnation of the anti-Jewish work of art."

"Both the Wittenberg church community and the churches as a whole must find a clear and appropriate solution for dealing with sculptures that are hostile to Jews."

"Defamation of Jews by churches must once and for all be a thing of the past."

Josef Schuster,  president, Central Council of Jews, Germany

Germany has strict laws against Holocaust denial, against incitement to hatred, against displays of antisemitism, against symbolic depictions of its Nazi past. And it generally enforces those acts when they occur. Despite which the ugly vitriol of antisemitism is once again blossoming its noxious stink in the country that went to great ends to stretch its rare resources during a world conflict, in formulating a solution to the presence of Jews whom fascist Germany officially declared sub-human. The 'final solution' of genocide resulting in the Holocaust.

 

In the last decade, despite these measures at stamping out the mass psychosis that generated a level of hatred against Jews that made their mass murder inevitable, acts of viral antisemitism have been spiraling upward in Germany. Much of it resulting from a more recent inclusion into German society of refugees and economic migrants emanating from the Middle East and North Africa. Where now in Germany, another million Muslims have been added to the already-present five million. A number equaling those of the murdered Jews of Europe.  

During the Gothic and Medieval eras, Church architectural was replete with gnome-like sculptures, sculptures of fantastic creatures, chimeras, half-man, half-beast, frightful carvings originally meant to declare to the devil that the Church had its own defenders against evil. Yet evil lurked within the Church's own shadows. Among the goblins and the witches, the gargoyles and grotesques, were mockingly cruel images meant to caricature and belittle Jews.

The religion of peace, goodwill to all, was not beneath spreading contempt in influencing the faithful to detest and avoid any contact with repugnant Jews that might live in their midst. One such depiction of the Church's virulent contempt for Judaism was a carving on a 13th Century Wittenberg Stadtkirche Catholic church, which boasted a "Jews' Sow" (Judensau), a sandstone carving of a rabbi lifting the hind leg of a pig, with two Jewish children suckling its teats.

Michael Düllmann found the contemptuously hateful depiction so offensive he applied time and again to the courts to force the church to remove the insulting carving. Which represented a curse on Judaism with a double meaning since in Judaism, it is forbidden to eat swine; they are unkosher and offend religious strictures. Whoever the skilled craftsman of the time was to whom the idea of having a rabbi enable Jewish children to suckle from a pig implied both that Jews are hypocritical and children of pigs, might have felt it amusing.

The complainant's appeal to the German courts went nowhere, until the appeals court ruled with his complaint that the sculpture was indeed hugely antisemitic. Irrespective of which the court would not order the church to remove the image. Judensau could remain where it was. The church did earlier resort to an explanation on a plaque, placing the image in the context of medieval art, once acceptable, in the current milieu no longer so.

An assault on the sensibilities and sensitivities of any ethnic/religious/cultural group is still a slander and an insult. Were it to have been directed against any other group of numbers and influence in society consideration might have been given to removing it as unsuitable for the times. There is also the coinciding of history, where Martin Luther in 1517 in Wittenberg spurned the corruption of the Catholic Church and its indulgences to bring in its Lutheran replacement as a stricture version.

His loathing of Jews was such that he incited to violence against the Jewish population in Germany. His book, "On the Jews and their Lies" precipitated the genocide that erupted during World War II. History continues to influence the present. And the present looks back on history, prepared to repeat it. A repentant Germany may be eager to make amends, but how can one amend the most colossal genocide in history?

A group of Jews, including a small boy, is escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers in this April 19, 1943 photo. The picture formed part of a report from SS Gen. Stroop to his Commanding Officer, and was introduced as evidence to the War Crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1945.  AP Photo