Download RESEARCH OF THE MURAL: EARLY BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION

RESEARCH OF THE MURAL: EARLY BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION IN GERMANY PAINTED BY WERNER TÜBKE
BETWEEN 1983 AND 1987 LOCATION: PANORAMA MUSEUM. BAD FRANKENHAUSEN GERMANY (THE
TÜBKE MURAL)
Firstly I will explore the Tübke mural through the material forces, i.e. the relationship
between the social, material and ideological conditions determining the phenomena, and
secondly through its aesthetic specificity of form and content. However much they may differ
from each other as disciplines of essence, evolution and value, art history and criticism in
common with one another, isolate their subject to the point of abstract purity, and try to locate
their foundation in an immanent manner as a relatively autonomous aesthetic structure. By
contrast, consideration of the empirical and material basis extraneous to art, their conditions of
production and consumption enables one to account for the concrete particularity of each work,
the interaction of ideologies with each other, art’s influence upon that basis and its link to the
history of ideas. This is not to equate aesthetic value solely with political worth. I shall argue
that the complex allegorical density of the Tübke mural, which through pointers in the unstable
content of allegory opens the window of interpretation to its absent outside the frame, combined
with the indexical mode of many of its signs and an unavoidable theatric experience when
confronting the mural, shifts interpretation indeterminately between functions of ideological
complexes and logonomic systems. Hence in addition to its properties of form and content, I
shall also investigate its historicity and cultural context, and the relation that obtains between the
relative autonomy of the ideological domain of the art and its dependence upon the fundamental
facts of social life. I do so with a view both to pose and to answer those problems concerning its
cultural specificity and ideological forms, which, I will argue, are insurmountable in idealist
theory.
Specialized disciplines, such as those embodying idealist theories, aside from refusing to
recognize their own perspective and interests are not ‘innocent’ and untainted by the facts of
social life. Theorists such as Terry Eagleton argue that traditional criticism does not arise as a
spontaneous riposte to the existential fact of the text, originally coupled with the object it
illuminates but it has its own relatively autonomous life, its own laws and structures; it forms an
internally complex system articulated with the system rather than merely reflexive of it and it
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emerges into existence and passes out of it again on the basis of certain determinate conditions.
As in the case of literature, art criticism is practised by particular, institutionally located
members with specific orientations and ideologies, using the resources of its assembled structure.
Edward Said echoes these arguments by describing a system of separation of fields that has
emerged in which a specialized ethos governs the intellectual disciplinary divisions. Members of
the field operate within a principle of silent exclusion at the boundaries of the discourse. He
argues that members of the field are identifiable as belonging to a guild and for whom words like
‘expert’ and ‘objective’ have an ‘...important resonance’ (172). Members are involved in the
formation of principles, what he terms a ‘canon’ and which is a ‘blocking device’ for self
questioning. “Hidden beneath the pieties surrounding the canonical monuments is a guild
solidarity that dangerously resembles a religious consciousness” (173). The expertise within
these specialized fields is supposed to be unaffected by its institutional affiliations with power,
but it is exactly these affiliations (hidden but assumed unquestioningly) that make the expertise
possible and imperative.
He provides the example of journalism and reporting serving as an adjunct to the
National Security council. He argues that this institutional weight precludes a systematic
examination of the correlation between the literary and the social which is where, he suggests,
that representation ‘...from journalism to political struggle, to economic production and power’
(176) plays an important role. Literary criticism for example minds its own business and is ‘free’
to do as it wishes with no community responsibility. Other specialised fields fill the same
function. The specialised field is a sort of ‘disciplinary ghetto’ removed from the community of
human beings which does not bring ‘proven truth’ to the world but instead barricades itself with
its privileged discourse in a domain where a tiny number of powerful oligarchies control most of
the world’s information and communication flows. Hence at the same time that they
systematically obscure and deny social conditions and determinants it is not the ‘expert’ or
‘objective’ quality of their opinions but their grouping with dominant centres of power that
invests their opinions with authority.
His comments are worth repeating: ‘This domain staffed by experts and media
executives...is affiliated to an even smaller number of governments at the very moment that the
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rhetoric of objectivity, balance, realism and freedom covers what is being done. And for the most
part such consumer items as the ‘news’ – a euphemism for ideological images of the world that
determine political reality for a vast majority of the world’s population – holds forth, untouched
by interfering secular and critical minds who are not hooked into the systems of power’ (182).
He calls for a reconsideration of these blocked systems which will posit an audience which is not
a closed circle of a limited number of professional critics, but ‘...the community of human beings
living in society’ (182).
The locality of these specialised fields as academic theories very often neglects to
account for socio-cultural and historically situated meaning that remains precluded from
consideration in the very arenas where it most urgently needs to be not merely heard but
permeated with enough momentum to overturn the mechanisms that attempt to silence it and
perpetuate its invisibility. One such example is the argument complicating signification by
creating an experience outside of authorial intention; it is a comfortable middle class privileged
argument that fails to recognize the benefit that direct involvement in politicized art has for
people who are placed in a position of real painful oppression daily.
With the disappearance of the ‘grand narratives’, an art work can no longer be described
as opus perfectum et absolutum which was possible before the contemporary period. Derrida
remains the thinker most sensitive to the paradox of meaning (the denial of essence relies on its
presence) by announcing the impossibility of all possible conditions. Through the insistence that
‘the signified always already functions as a signifier’ – forever preventing and unsettling the
moment of closure which never quite arrives through the structural play of difference,
deconstruction may be described as the mobile but disruptive and contingent moment of every
structure of meaning, and of every concept. Yet it would be wrong to suggest that the endless
blurring of the distinction between signifier and signified proposes an indefinite number of
meanings; rather than an indeterminate number, which in itself is determinate, there is not just
one. Given the strength of Derrida's convincing arguments for the continuous nature of
supplementarity, of the workings of différance, it would be equally misguided to assert their
insignificance as doing so mistakenly invokes the "myth of the transcendental signified" and
ontological closure of meaning. My argument is that by accepting Derrida's assertions I am in a
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position to interrogate the type of meaning capable of manifesting in contexts that are contingent
upon social and political factors, drawing attention to these same constraints that then may
impose closure through oppressive, disciplinary forces impacting on meaning that serve to curtail
and reduce signification.
Tübke’s mural formed a substantial component in the formation of collective
identity and ideology in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and represented a high-point in
the legitimation of its revolutionary heritage; however its interpretation in idealist theory
subsequent to the demise of the GDR has been unable, I will argue, to surmount problems
concerning the specificity of its cultural and ideological forms and has left the mural suspended
in an indeterminate orbit. The mural, entitled “Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany” is
housed in a purpose built cylindrical panorama located on the southern slopes of the Kyffhäuser
Mountain, overlooking the little town of Bad Frankenhausen, in the German state of Thuringa.
The museum, designed to form a unified object with the mural, has been sited on the slopes of
the mountain precisely where during the Reformation on 15th May, 1525 peasant insurgents
under Thomas Müntzer were defeated by the allied troops of the Duke of Saxony, Landgrave
Philip 1 of Hesse and Duke Henry the V of Brunswick-Lüneburg in one of the last battles of the
1524/26 peasant uprisings. Hence, it is located on historically significant land in the nature of a
memorial to the events contained within its soil.
The foundation stone of the main building of the panorama was laid on the 8 th May 1974.
On the 15th May 1975, 450 years to the day since the battle occurred, a topping out ceremony
took place on the completion of the main building, a rotunda, with a height of 17.85m and an
external diameter of 43.72 m. The structure is made of 54 cylindrical concrete shells and
cantilevered shell roof elements designed by the architect Herbert Müller. The building was
designed by the East German state owned planning company from Quedlinburg and built by the
state owned VEB Wohungsbaukombinat, Halle. The canvas, measuring 14 x 123 sq m, , woven
by the Soviet textile company Textilkombinat Sursk, arrived in Bad Frankenhausen in the
summer of 1978. Günter Hohlstamm a local upholsterer sewed together the two ends of the
canvas. He also prepared the long sides for hanging. In May 1982, fifty four men hoisted the 1.1
tonne canvas and secured it with 576 metal clamps to the close to 40 metre diameter upper steel
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ring. The canvas was then tautened using the equally large lower ring. In November and
December 1982 a soviet specialist team primed the canvas with secret recipes from ancient
Russian icons.
Perched on top of the steep Schlachtberg hill, where approximately 5000 peasants had
been slaughtered in 1525, and towering over the surrounding countryside, the gigantic Panorama
Museum certainly has the appearance of a sacred sarcophagus. Within its walls Tübke’s
imposing kaleidoscopic illusionary painting is stretched like a membrane around its interior. On
the 16th October 1987, Werner Tübke signed his painting, which was then ceremoniously handed
over to the Minister of Culture of the GDR. During 1988 and 1989 final structural, technical and
organizational modifications to the building complex, were made, including safe guarding the
painting from the effects of temperature change and installing the best possible lighting system.
On the 14th September 1989 the Peasants War Panorama was ceremoniously opened to the
public, just eight weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall on the 9th November 1989.
It is my argument that these performative actions, the signature, the event and context
aimed at cementing a dominant ideological construction of collective identity of the GDR, have
failed to provide a singular assurance of meaning; not least from the uncertainty over the
authorship of the mural (the terms of the commission for the painting are indecisive; the
interacting functions of the mural and the panorama building are indecisive), shifting
interpretations within official quarters of the GDR of the respective roles of Müntzer, Luther and
the Reformation from the beginning to the end of the state of East Germany, uncertainty
regarding the role of Tübke (both when viewed through the eyes of the Politburo and through his
own eyes), and the political context had shifted radically between the start and end of the concept
for the panorama. Yet despite these slippages the political grounding and intent of the painting
interlocked it and its museum home into the idealism of the collective revolutionary heritage and
its status as an iconic convention of the culmination of Marxist revolution within the specificity
of East Germany was assured to take hold through practice and the authority of the power of the
politburo had Germany not been reunified shortly thereafter.
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The decision to produce a public site of collective German communist
identity,
ideological formation and aesthetic form resulted from the newly emerged GDR’s aim of
cementing the authority of the discourse of revolutionary heritage through the public portrayal
of the German Peasant Wars and the priest Thomas Müntzer as the German people’s first radical
attempt to transform society. The political and social significance of the Reformation, Thomas
Müntzer and the Peasant War tradition in German socialist history cannot be understated.
Although the Peasant War had ended in defeat the GDR invoked the idea that the sixteenth
century peasants’ aims of building a free, just and peaceful society had eventually been realized
with the founding of the new state in 1949. While many of the key events of the Lutheran
Reformation and the German peasant wars had occurred in the Saxon-Thuringian territories
which were now enclosed within the borders of the GDR, geographical proximity alone does not
account for the intense interest that was displayed by the GDR in sixteenth century history. That
interest is located firmly in the interest taken in events during the Reformation by the pioneer of
Marxism, Frederich Engels. It may seem ironic that a Marxist state which accepts history from a
historical materialist perspective and rejects all notions of the supernatural and divinity should
link itself to the Reformation; however in his 1859 study, The Peasant War in Germany, Engels
was the first to assert that the real motivating force behind the16th-century peasant wars and the
Reformation was that of socio-economic class conflict. He dispelled the interpretation of the
Reformation as merely religious and drew attention to the actual conditions of the peasants.
In the so-called religious wars of the Sixteenth Century, very positive material class-interests were at play,
and those wars were class wars just as were the later collisions in England and France. If the class
struggles of that time appear to bear religious earmarks, if the interests, requirements and demands of the
various classes hid themselves behind a religious screen, it little changes the actual situation, and is to be
explained by conditions of the time.
Engels argued that according to conditions of the time, revolutionary opposition to
feudalism was alive throughout all the Middle Ages and appeared either in the form of
mysticism, as open heresy, or of armed insurrection. The century was haunted by the spectre of
death. Added to epidemics of the plague and of dysentery there were the ravages of war and the
extractions of a “hysterical justice”. For instance in 1589, no less than 133 witches were burned
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in a single day at the convent of Quedlin-burg/Harz not far from Bad Frankenhausen. Engels
provided a graphic description:
At the bottom of all the classes, save the last one, was the huge exploited mass of the nation, the peasants. It
was the peasant who carried the burden of all the other strata of society: princes, officialdom, nobility,
clergy, patricians and middle-class. Whether the peasant was the subject of a prince, an imperial baron, a
bishop, a monastery or a city, he was everywhere treated as a beast of burden, and worse. If he was a serf,
he was entirely at the mercy of his master. If he was a bondsman, the legal deliveries stipulated by
agreement were sufficient to crush him; even they were being daily increased. Most of his time, he had to
work on his master's estate. Out of that which he earned in his few free hours, he had to pay tithes, dues,
ground rents, war taxes, land taxes, imperial taxes, and other payments. He could neither marry nor die
without paying the master. Aside from his regular work for the master, he had to gather litter, pick
strawberries, pick bilberries, collect snail-shells, drive the game for the hunting, chop wood, and so on.
Fishing and hunting belonged to the master. The peasant saw his crop destroyed by wild game. The
community meadows and woods of the peasants had almost everywhere been forcibly taken away by the
masters. And in the same manner as the master reigned over the peasant's property, he extended his
willfulness over his person, his wife and daughters. He possessed the right of the first night. Whenever he
pleased, he threw the peasant into the tower, where the rack waited for him just as surely as the
investigating attorney waits for the criminal in our times. Whenever he pleased, he killed him or ordered
him beheaded. None of the instructive chapters of the criminal code, Carolina, which speaks of "cutting of
ears," "cutting of noses," "blinding," "chopping of fingers," "beheading," "breaking on the wheel,"
"burning," "pinching with burning tongs," "quartering," was left unpracticed by the gracious lord and
master at his pleasure. Who could defend the peasant? The courts were manned by barons, clergymen,
patricians, or jurists, who knew very well for what they were being paid. Not in vain did all the official
estates of the empire live on the exploitation of the peasants.
The early bourgeois-revolution thesis remained crucial for the GDR regime, since it
helped to define systematically a Marxist, materialist approach to history that was distinct from
the bourgeois, idealist interpretations that were dominant among its Western rivals in the Federal
Republic. Religious history was especially useful in sharply defining the differences between
historical interpretations in the two Germanies. Instead of examining the Reformation from a
traditional Western theological perspective, the GDR historians focused on the economic and
social dimensions of religion. For the East Germans, the Reformation was not a theological
struggle but a socio-economic conflict. The Peasant War was also employed to endorse specific
state policies, especially those concerning agrarian matters. Edwin Hoernle, head of the
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Agriculture and Forestry Administration, justified the Regime’s policy of ‘democratic’ land
reform and the formation of collective farms by making references to early modern history. He
claimed that, as far back as 1525, the Thuringian peasants, led by their radical priest Thomas
Müntzer, had fought against large-scale landed property ownership by the ruling classes.
According to Hoernle and other high-ranking state bureaucrats, the freedom from servitude that
was sought by Müntzer and his peasant rebels was being successfully accomplished for the first
time in Germany’s new Workers and Peasants’ State.
It is my argument that the text (the painting) embodies in its themes and images the
threads of these scholarly ideas and observations, which together form an internalized historical
particularity of both the ‘art’ and the ‘artist’ and the ideologies and interests implicated in its
production and interpretation. This was certainly the case when the mural was completed under
the GDR. However, and following Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘aura’, which is connected
to the non-reproducible authenticity of a unique original, the specific effect of a work may be
subject to strong fluctuations because of shifting socio-political coordinates. This contention is
no where better illustrated than in the radical transformation of the mural following the
reunification of Germany. Its primary effect of socio-economic conflict, founded on historical
research and Tübke’s studied models, and of being a very expensive and powerful reference to a
political event, has been shifted by the new authority of art historians, curators and critics
encouraged by a political interest aimed at negating its link to class struggle, from its
particularity into a representation, powered by visionary zeal, of ‘universal themes’ such as
‘Human nature’ or the ‘futility of idealism’ (somewhat paradoxically given the ideological home
of the interpretation). In this vein the Panorama curator, Gerd Linde, summing up the
commissioned contract in a speech delivered on the 18th September 1999 at the Panorama
conference in Lucerne on the tenth anniversary of the day that the museum opened its doors,
avers that Tübke brought an independence of thought and concept to the work in creating an
artistic vision free of political interference, thus: “The originality of Werner Tübke’s painting,
lies in its clever and subtle deviation from the commission’s dictates…That the artist Werner
Tübke was ultimately able to set forth entirely different premises is a testament to his will power
and imagination”. It is my argument that the coordinates underpinning the coding of the mural in
the reunified Germany display the mural through idealist readings from a vantage point coercing
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its own distinctive interests and fail to account for its historic-political particularity. I shall
elaborate on these arguments later when discussing the question of the ‘classic’ text.
In discussing the peasant wars in the (then) present context, Engels found cause to
diachronically link them to one another:
Three centuries have flown by since then, and many a thing has changed; still the peasant war is not as far
removed from our present-day struggles as it would seem, and the opponents we have to encounter remain
essentially the same.
During the 1950s the Russian historian, Moses M. Smirin produced an influential study
of Thomas Müntzer and the ‘People’s Reformation’, which remained close to that of Engels,
both of whom gave prominence to Thomas Müntzer as the main revolutionary protagonist
throughout the German peasants’ struggle. Müntzer was perceived as the true embodiment of the
revolutionary impulse of the common people. While in Marxist writings such as Smirin’s,
Müntzer was honoured as a revolutionary hero, it is not surprising that little attention was
focused on Martin Luther, the historical personality who had unleashed the Reformation
movement. After all, Luther had savagely condemned the peasant rebels in his tract, Against the
Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants (1525), and had ultimately sided with the ruling
princely élites. In these writings Luther condemned the peasant’s violence as the devil's work,
and called for the nobles to put down the rebels like mad dogs:
Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be
more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel ... For baptism does not make men free in body and
property, but in soul; and the gospel does not make goods common, except in the case of those who, of their
own free will, do what the apostles and disciples did in Acts 4 [:32–37]. They did not demand, as do our
insane peasants in their raging, that the goods of others—of Pilate and Herod—should be common, but
only their own goods. Our peasants, however, want to make the goods of other men common, and keep
their own for themselves. Fine Christians they are! I think there is not a devil left in hell; they have all gone
into the peasants. Their raving has gone beyond all measure.
Luther used three arguments to justify his opposition to the rebels. First, in choosing
violence over lawful submission to the secular government, they were ignoring Christ's counsel
to "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's"; St. Paul had written in his epistle to the
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Romans 13:1-7 that all authorities are appointed by God and therefore should not be resisted.
This reference from the Bible forms the foundation for the doctrine known in the German case,
as the divine right of the princes. Second, the violent actions of rebelling, robbing, and
plundering placed the peasants "outside the law of God and Empire," so they deserved "death in
body and soul, if only as highwaymen and murderers." Lastly, Luther charged the rebels with
blasphemy for calling themselves "Christian brethren" and committing their sinful acts under the
banner of the Gospel. Without Luther's backing for the uprising, many rebels laid down their
weapons; others felt betrayed. Their defeat by the Swabian League at the Battle of
Frankenhausen 15 May 1525, followed by Müntzer’s execution, brought the revolutionary stage
of the Reformation to a close. Thereafter, radicalism found a refuge in the Anabaptist movement
and other sects, while Luther's Reformation flourished under the wing of the secular powers.
The kind of popular sovereignty Smirin gave to Müntzer as the great champion of the
masses, superior to his communist followers, not by philosophical gifts and organisational
talents, but by his revolutionary and combative energy, and, first of all, by his statesmanlike
mind found its fruition in the GDR. This again followed the footsteps of Engels who argued that
in the revolutionary movement of the Sixteenth Century, Martin Luther was a middle class
reformist and the representative of the coalition of the middle-class and the nobility. He
compares him unfavourably to the plebian revolutionary Thomas Müntzer, whose political
doctrine followed his revolutionary religious conceptions very closely. As Müntzer’s theology
reached far beyond the current conceptions of his time, so his political doctrine went beyond
existing social and political conditions. He argues that as Müntzer’s philosophy of religion
touched upon atheism, so his political programme touched upon communism, a programme less
a compilation of the demands of the then existing plebeians than a “genius's anticipation of the
conditions for the emancipation of the proletarian element that had just begun to develop among
the plebeians”, which demanded the immediate establishment of the kingdom of God, of the
prophesied millennium on earth. This was to be accomplished by the return of the church to its
origins and the abolition of all institutions that were in conflict with what Müntzer conceived as
original Christianity, which, in fact, was the idea of a very modern church. By the kingdom of
God, Müntzer understood nothing else than a state of society without class differences, without
private property, and without superimposed state powers opposed to the members of society. All
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existing authorities, as far as they did not submit and join the revolution, he taught, must be
overthrown, all work and all property must be shared in common, and complete equality must be
introduced. And to realize this programme, a union of the people was to be organized not only
throughout Germany, but throughout entire Christendom.
When he wrote his 1850’s study Engels was convinced that the agrarian workers’
struggle constituted a revolutionary attempt rather than a fully-developed revolution and based
this assessment on his conviction that progress in the economy was insufficiently advanced and,
therefore, that sixteenth-century Germany had not experienced the dramatic transformation in the
modes and relations of production that were necessary for a revolution in the Marxist sense.
Towards the end of his life, Engels’ subsequent studies had convinced him that in early
sixteenth-century Germany, dramatic economic progress had actually been made, especially in
mining, smelting and the textile industry. By the 1880s, Engels argued that the developments
which had occurred in sixteenth-century Germany’s productive forces were extremely rapid and,
therefore, the Reformation era constituted a decisive event in early modern Europe’s transition
from feudalism to early capitalism. Engels characterized the German Reformation as the first in a
series of revolutionary attempts, culminating in the French Revolution of 1789, in which
Europe’s bourgeoisie aimed to throw off the shackles of feudalism and transform society along
capitalist lines. These ideas formed the basis of a broader theme within East German scholarly
interests during the early 1960’s: the revolutionary significance of the Reformation rather than a
narrow view of Müntzer and the peasant war. The incorporation of these ideas into official GDR
government policy was confirmed at the 1960 Wernigerode Conference, where the main issues
for discussion were the thirty-four theses proposed by Max Steinmetz, a leading medievalist. He
argued that the events between 1476 and1535 constituted an early bourgeois revolution and that
its two essential components were the Reformation and the Peasant War:
The first great action of the rising bourgeoisie (as per Engels) in Germany reached its highpoint in the
Reformation and Peasant War (1517–25), the most significant revolutionary mass movement of the
German people until the November revolution of 1918 . . . The Reformation and Peasant War as the kernel
and highpoint of the early bourgeois revolution in Germany, from the posting of the Theses in Wittenberg
to the defeat of most of the peasant armies in 1525/6.
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For Steinmetz, Luther’s attack on the clergy’s sale of ‘indulgences’ so that people could
obtain remission of sins signalled the commencement of the revolution, because it created a
national movement that unified social classes against the feudal, Catholic Church. The Peasant
War became the climax of the struggle: in1525 the popular masses waged an offensive against
the rulers of the feudal princely states. Finally, Steinmetz suggested that Müntzer’s attempt to
establish popular sovereignty — a people’s Reformation — constituted the most mature political
expression of the revolutionary movement. While Steinmetz still gave prominence to Müntzer
and the Peasant War and did not deviate from Smirin’s paradigm, he included and acknowledged
the contribution of Martin Luther’s Reformation to the revolutionary process. Steinmetz
suggested that the Reformation was an essential component of the early bourgeois revolution and
was inextricably linked to the Peasant War. This helped to widen Marxist historical perspectives
and compel historians to begin to pay more attention to the Lutheran movement.
Steinmetz’s Theses corresponded closely to the teleological historical assumptions of
Marxism with its emphasis on class conflict as the motivating force, and revolutions as the
locomotives of historical development. The early bourgeois-revolution notion also gave pride of
place to Germany as the first country to have experienced this type of Marxist transformation —
something that a German communist state could only view with great pride and satisfaction. The
early bourgeois-revolution thesis remained crucial for the GDR regime, since it helped to define
systematically a Marxist, materialist approach to history that was distinct from the ‘bourgeois,
idealist interpretations that were dominant among its Western rivals in the Federal Republic. The
notion was still being used to characterize the Reformation era in 1989 with the Tübke
monumental Peasant War panorama painting that was given the official title: ‘The Early
Bourgeois Revolution in Germany’.
It is necessary to place the elaboration of the Theses briefly and specifically in the context
of East-West German relations and the subsequent articulation of a clear, precise East German
national identity. The Federal Republic denied the legitimacy of the GDR and actively
encouraged its isolation. It stood by the Hallstein doctrine. Named after Walter Hallstein, state
secretary of the foreign office it was a key doctrine in the foreign policy of the Federal Republic;
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it provided that the Federal Republic would not establish or maintain diplomatic relations with
any state that recognized the GDR.
After 1969, Chancellor Willie Brandt of the Federal
Republic aimed at achieving German reunification through dialogue and negotiation.
Consequently the Federal Government recognized the GDR de facto emphasizing that the two
states should not be foreign to one another. Hence the Hallstein doctrine became obsolete and
was abolished around 1970 to which East Germany retorted by claiming that it alone represented
Germany’s lawful, genuine state.
West Germany was perceived by the GDR as aggressive, capitalist, imperialist and
counter-revolutionary, while its own East German territory was portrayed as the first socialist
state on German soil. On the 13 August 1961 the GDR’s borders were sealed and the Berlin Wall
was erected. While a climate of repression initially prevailed, from the mid 1960’s a broadening
of the political atmosphere influenced writings on reformation history especially assessments of
Martin Luther; he began to be viewed in a more positive light. Luther’s rehabilitation was closely
connected to the regime’s growing desire to enlist significant individuals from Germany’s past
and to incorporate them into its own distinctive socialist historical heritage. Luther, the
reactionary and princes’ lackey, does appear an unlikely choice of candidate for inclusion in the
GDR’s ‘Hall of Fame’. However, at the Wernigerode Conference, Steinmetz had acknowledged
the reformer’s role as the instigator of the early bourgeois revolution; Luther had accomplished
this by undertaking the dramatic act of posting his theses against Indulgences and criticizing the
papacy.
The 450th anniversary of the German Reformation in 1967 provided the state with an
ideal opportunity to integrate Luther into its revolutionary tradition. Gerhard Zschäbitz’s
biography of Luther, which was produced to coincide with the Reformation Jubilee, offered a far
more positive and rounded assessment of the reformer than that of previous Marxist scholars
such as Smirin. Zschäbitz portrayed Luther as a representative of the educated bourgeoisie who
acted within the constraints of his age, displaying both conservative and progressive attitudes.
Not only did the reformer’s rehabilitation help to enhance the GDR’s historical prestige, but it
also served a more pragmatic political purpose: the reconciliation of the substantial Christian
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Lutheran community with the secular, Marxist state. The notion developed of ‘the Church within
Socialism’ whose main purpose was to serve society and not work against the Marxist regime. A
harmonious relationship developed between state and church. The state’s appropriation (as part
of its cultural heritage) of the many key historical Reformation sites that were situated within its
borders also helped to articulate further a clear, precise East-German national identity. Millions
of Ostmarks were spent on renovating the main buildings associated with the Reformation, in
order to further East Germany’s cultural prestige. During the 1983 celebrations to mark the
quincentennial anniversary of Luther’s birth First secretary Erich Honecker described Luther as
‘one of the greatest sons of the German people’ and ‘one of the most significant humanists who
strove for a better world’.34 This was a far cry from the 1950s Marxist assessment of Luther as
class traitor and coward. Luther was not the only famous German historical figure to be co-opted
into the service of the GDR’s progressive cultural tradition. Goethe was given similar accolades
to Luther, and was also recruited into East Germany’s humanist heritage. He was described by
Honecker in an almost identical manner to Luther as ‘the brave champion of a militant
humanism, for a just and enlightened social order’. The East German historian Gerhard Brendler
was one of the main authors of a series of fifteen Theses Concerning Martin Luther, aimed at
articulating the GDR’s assessment of the reformer to a wide audience. Luther was situated, of
course, in the GDR’s progressive tradition, and great stress was placed on his positive
contributions to issues such as education and welfare:
In the social sphere Luther’s activity was directed chiefly towards providing for teachers, clergymen,
vergers and the universities, and dealing with the question of the beggars and the poor. The appropriation
of ecclesiastical and monastic lands was seen as a way of achieving these aims . . . The reformation also
had a significant influence on the development of formal education. Luther himself stimulated the growth of
elementary schools . . . Luther also stimulated the development of a humane social ethic [sic] by drawing
attention to the obligation to serve one’s fellow-men, the urge to engage in productive and purposeful
work, the necessity to abolish the exploitation of human labour for profit, the need to preserve and protect
the family, and the indispensability of virtues such as diligence, industry, thrift and a sense of duty.
The final sentence suggested that, by the early sixteenth century, Luther had already
prescribed all the essential qualities required of Marxist citizens.
14
Müntzer had not been entirely ignored by the regime in the years following the
construction of the Wall. He was specifically celebrated in 1975 during the 450th anniversary
commemoration of the German Peasants War. As a tribute to the revolutionary leader of the
sixteenth-century common people, the city of Mühlhausen, where Müntzer had resided during
the rebellion and created his radical ‘Eternal Council’, was renamed Mühlhausen ThomasMüntzer-Town. A Peasant War museum and memorial were also opened in the town on 14
March 1975, and this building became a kind of secular shrine to Müntzer and the sixteenthcentury popular struggle. The museum contained weapons, models and documents associated
with 1525. Significantly, it was housed in a former church, the Kornmarktkirche, where loyal
GDR citizens could make a secular rather than a religious pilgrimage to learn more about one of
their country’s greatest heroes. This building seemed a particularly suitable location, for it was
rumoured that ammunition for the peasant rebels had been cast from the church’s melted-down
bronze bells.
In December 1972 the Basic Treaty was signed, improving communications with the
Federal Republic, and in September 1973 the GDR became a full member of the United Nations.
The 1975 Peasant War celebrations occurred in the more relaxed, open political climate that also
marked the subsequent 1983 Luther anniversary. The 1975 Peasant War celebrations can be seen
to have provided the first real opportunity for some kind of scholarly dialogue to be established
between East and West, and clearly marked the end of the GDR’s academic isolation. A more
open general political climate continued throughout much of the 1980s, as East–West German
relations were rapidly normalized. An exchange of ideas occurred between east and West
German historians and academics. Some historians from the Federal Republic, such as Peter
Blickle, demonstrated that they were receptive to East German notions. Unlike most of his West
German colleagues, who were reluctant to consider a socio-economic perspective because of its
association with Marxism, Blickle was willing to embrace such an approach and endeavoured to
bridge the gap between the rival interpretations in both states by considering seriously issues that
had been explored primarily by Marxists, such as the question of the possible connections
between Reformation religion and popular revolt.
15
While East–West Germany appeared to be drawing closer together, the GDR’s ruling
ideology was none the less based on Marxist-Leninism and the notion that the party ruled and
represented the interests of the working classes. During the late 1980s, significant tensions can
be discerned between the doctrinaire political orthodox views demanded by the party élite, and
the historical interpretations of those scholars influenced by less rigid, Western approaches. This
was most apparent during the 1989 quincentennial Thomas Müntzer celebrations when, in some
historians’ interpretations, the radical priest’s status as revolutionary hero and progressive
socialist began to be revised. Significantly, at an East-German conference held in August 1989,
Professor Adolf Laube emphasized that Müntzer was a ‘genuine theologian’ and preacher. Laube
went on to argue that, at the beginning of his career, the basis of Müntzer’s thought and personal
programme had been religious rather than political and that, like Luther, he was concerned to
find the right way to correct faith. It was only much later, at the height of the Peasant War in
April 1525, that Müntzer proposed that the common people should resort to force against the
ungodly authorities.51 Similar views were expressed by Vogler, who argued in his biographical
study of the radical priest that Müntzer’s primary objectives were concerned with theology,
rather than social liberation.52 These interpretations were far closer to those conventional
Western approaches that had regarded Müntzer as a religious visionary rather than a social
revolutionary. Paradoxically, by 1989, many East-German Marxists were focusing more on the
theological aspects of sixteenth-century history, while their counterparts in the ‘bourgeois’ West
were increasingly concentrating on the Reformation’s sociological and economic dimensions.
However, traditional views on Müntzer were still present; the official governmental orthodox
view was embodied in the fourteen Theses Concerning Thomas Müntzer, published in 1988,
which focused on Müntzer’s revolutionary heritage, and on his anticipation of the working
classes’ historical destiny. Müntzer was perceived as:
The] outstanding representative of the extreme left wing of the early bourgeois German revolution . . . At
the beginning of an era of social transformation he strove for radical changes in society in favour of the
exploited and oppressed people in conformity with his revolutionary interpretation of Christian teachings.
He developed a theology of revolution with the aim of overcoming any kind of class rule. As he saw it, this
revolution was to be accomplished by the ordinary people by means of revolutionary action.
16
The Theses also stated that:
The GDR pays tribute to the theologian and revolutionary Thomas Müntzer as the exponent of those
traditions of the early bourgeois revolution which stressed the struggle of the oppressed masses for a better
life in social equality and security. With the renewal of the socialist society these traditions are being
jointly continued by the working classes, the class of cooperative farmers, by all working sections of the
population in our republic, by their parties and mass organizations.
It can be seen therefore that the Reformation, the Peasant Wars, figures connected to the
wars such as Müntzer, Luther, and significant historical figures such as Goethe constituted
important foundation stones for the GDR and were more than just a topic of historiographical
interest. Indeed it has been argued that more than anything they constituted a foundation myth,
an accessible, simplified historical narrative that transmitted information about the origins,
meaning and political destiny of the regime aimed at firmly entrenching a collective identity.
Although significant changes had occurred by 1989 in the GDR’s understanding of Müntzer,
older views that harked back to those of Smirin in the 1950s had not been completely renounced.
The disparity between the more recent perspectives and more traditional ones was indicative of
the wider chasms opening up within the GDR. These exploratory, yet ambivalent and
contradictory and hence variable outcomes of the historical research are no better reflected than
in the developments following the decision to construct a museum containing an illusionary
painting dedicated to Müntzer and the peasant battle on the Frankenhausen Schlachtberg, in
which the difficulties in building a collective heritage were no more apparent.
The project had its origins in the autumn of 1971 during the promotion of art in the name
of Breadth and Diversity (Weite und Vielfalt) when, in anticipation of the 450th anniversary of
the peasant uprisings, the East German Communist Party (SED) leaders in Halle decided to erect
a memorial on the Frankenhausen Schlachtberg, to be dedicated to “the German Peasant War
and the revolutionary work of Thomas Müntzer”.
From its inception the project wobbled
through these ideological variants as a result of which the museum building was nearing
completion in April 1975 and yet the terms of reference for the proposed socially binding
17
contract for the painting had not been resolved nor had a painter been commissioned to execute
the work. It was only much later in April 1975 that Cultural Minister Hoffmann offered the
Leipzig painter Werner Tübke the commission to execute the painting. The battle to be depicted
had occurred on the 15th May 1525, on the Schlachtberg hill at Frankenhausen and was the scene
of the bloody suppression of one of the most important Thüringian peasant uprisings. During this
battle more than 6,000 armed peasants gathered under the leadership of Thomas Müntzer.
However most of the insurgents came to a cruel end in the merciless slaughter.
East German scholarly analysis rested on an interpretation of the peasant war as an early
bourgeois revolution, which was perceived as part of a uniform historical process within a
general revolutionary cycle. Three successive sections were defined in the explanatory model,
the first being an ascending line starting with the impact of the Bohemian Hussites on Germany
around 1476, secondly the reformation and the peasant war as the climax of the early bourgeois
revolution from the posting of Luther’s thesis in Wittenberg (1517) to the defeat of the peasant
uprisings in 1525/6 and thirdly a descending line of revolution ending with the demise of the
Kingdom of the Anabaptists in Muenster in 1535. Initially the SED wished to portray a historical
moment in the confrontation with some suggestion that this might be achieved by reference in
chronicle form to the situation before the battle or the developments of events in the
Frankenhausen camp. The Leipzig art historian Ernst Ullman presented a thesis paper proposing
a number of variants. One such proposal was that the panorama should depict the battle scene on
the Moscow model in the Borodino Panorama. The Borodino Panorama Museum was
inaugurated in 1962 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the battle fought between the
massed French troops of Napoleon and the Russian soldiers under Field Marshal Kutuzov, which
took place in August 1812 just 129 kilometres outside Moscow. The museum is built on the
historic site of the village of Fili, where legend has it a council of war was held in a small
peasant hut. The museum features an extraordinary 115-meter long circular painting by the
Russian artist Franz Roubaud, depicting a particularly dramatic and crucial moment in the battle
painted in the style of realism. Ullman’s second proposal was for a panorama with two scenes
depicting the gathering of the peasants and Müntzer’s last sermon; yet a third proposal was the
abandonment of a self contained panorama instead dividing the painting into eight sectors
18
separated by observer stands and expanding the theme to the entire social, economic, political
and ideological issues of the early bourgeois revolution to every stage of the peasant rebellion
movement against European feudalism. While the possibility of executing the last of these
proposals seems optimistic in the extreme, it did expand the debate on the terms of reference of
the commission. Hence later that year in July 1974 a proposal was put forward suggesting that
the painting should embody the interpretation of the processes of revolutionary development
through a sequence of scenes thematically and formally linking various revolts and revolutions
from the 14th century through to the liberation of the German army from Fascism by the Russian
army in 1945, and which would include the peasant uprising on the Schlachtberg hill on most of
its surface.
Much of the analysis of the Peasant War rested on the theory of an early bourgeois
revolution in Germany founded among other writings on those of Wilhelm Zimmermann (The
History of the Great Peasant War), Kautsky (Forerunners of Socialism), and most importantly
on Karl Engels’ The Peasant War in Germany. In this work of 1859 Engels produced an analysis
of the 1848 and the 1525 revolutions in Germany in which he attributed the failure of both these
revolutions to the bourgeois/burgerdom, thus underscoring the contemporary need for an alliance
between the working proletariat and the working peasantry. Engels advanced his analysis of the
conditions of the time by describing the middle Ages as having developed out of “raw
primitiveness”. It had done away with an old civilization, philosophy, politics and jurisprudence,
in order to begin anew in every respect. The only thing which it had retained from the old
shattered world was Christianity and a number of half-ruined cities deprived of their civilization.
As a consequence, the clergy retained a monopoly of intellectual education, a phenomenon to be
found in every primitive stage of development, and education itself had acquired a
predominantly theological nature. In the hands of the clergy, politics and jurisprudence, as well
as other sciences, remained branches of theology, and were treated according to the principles
prevailing in the latter. The dogmas of the church were at the same time political axioms, and
Bible quotations had the validity of law in every court. Even after the formation of a special class
of jurists, jurisprudence long remained under the tutelage of theology. This supremacy of
theology in the realm of intellectual activities was at the same time a logical consequence of the
situation of the church as the most general force coordinating and sanctioning existing feudal
19
domination. Under such conditions, all general and overt attacks on feudalism, in the first place
attacks on the church, all revolutionary, social and political doctrines, necessarily became
theological heresies. Hence, in order to be attacked, existing social conditions had to be stripped
of their “aureole of sanctity”.
Following further debate the Central Institute for History at the Academy of Sciences
submitted a proposal to the Ministry of Culture on 21 October 1974. This proposal rejected in
principle all previous suggestions and proposals. Instead, it proposed the planned panorama as a
memorial to the German Peasant War and that, following Engels the role of Thomas Müntzer in
Thüringia and Saxony and the culmination of the Peasant War in Thuringia should be
specifically highlighted. This could be achieved with a series of five to six scenes which would
clearly depict the social causes of the early bourgeois revolution and the character of the social
classes in conflict. The Reformation should also be taken into consideration in order to confirm
the Marxist concept linking the Reformation and the Peasant War. The focus should be
concentrated on actual scenes from the Peasant War itself and the work of Müntzer. The
statement furthermore recommended that the museum section of the memorial should emphasize
the historical significance of the early bourgeois revolution. In April 1975, Cultural Minister
Hoffmann personally decided to adopt this proposal, which subsequently formed the foundation
for the project’s final concept and aimed to expand the subject to the whole theme of early
bourgeois revolution in Germany with specific focus on actual scenes from the Peasant war and
the work of Müntzer.
At its first meeting on 28 April 1975, the central planning staff, newly appointed by the
Cultural Minister, agreed that the aim of the project had shifted from the original suggestions
centered around the Borodino model; rather the aim now was to create a monumental work of
great generalizing nature in form and content as opposed to a naturalistic narrative and
documentary illustration. The committee acknowledged that in principle, this agreement changed
the character of the mural from that of the Party resolution which declared that the design of the
Panorama should correspond to that of Borodino. At the same meeting the Leipzig historians
Siegfried Hoyer and Manfred Bensing, upon the recommendation of the Academy of Sciences,
20
were chosen to work out the binding scholarly concept, the painter Werner Tübke the artistic
concept, and a member of the Ministry of Culture the museum concept.
The definitive scholarly concept was officially approved early in 1976. Starting from the
original political and ideological aims of the project, the purpose of the facility was outlined and
formulated in general terms as an artistic attempt with the panorama painting to treat the Peasant
War as an integral part of the early bourgeois revolution in Germany, ‘specifically focusing on
the events in Thuringia under the leadership of Thomas Müntzer as well as in Frankenhausen’,
thus fulfilling the Politburo’s desire for a panorama ‘dedicated to the heroic struggle of the
peasant movement led by Thomas Müntzer…’ The lack of detail of subject matter that these
paraphrased and generalized descriptions expose, a consequence of the entrenched disagreement
as to the specific imagery that would best encapsulate the concept, did not provide Tübke with an
open hand for self expression; this possibility was overcome by the committee drawing Tübke
into the framework of the project’s working group aimed at finalizing the scholarly, artistic and
museum concepts. Somewhat surreptitiously, however, the committee circumvented the central
authority’s failure to agree on the imagery required to enforce its vision, by handing over the
responsibility for doing so to Tübke, accepting at the same time his right to fulfill the
commission in his own idiom.
In April 1976 Tübke signed the contract for the creation of a ‘monumental mural’ for the
‘Schlachtberg Panorama at Bad Frankenhausen’ whereby he undertook to deliver an “artistic
concept” and an “executable drawing” (a 1:10 version of the painting), for approval. After being
released from his position as Rector of the Leipzig Academy for Book Design and Graphic Art in
order to fulfill the commission, he started the first artistic groundwork in July 1976, according to
his work method, first for the drawings, and in the same year, the prints and painting as well.
This initial phase of exploring and familiarizing himself with the subject matter of the painting
lasted up until the beginning of 1979 and resulted in a multitude of original paintings, which,
together with his extensive forays into source studies, produced the necessary clarity for
underlying questions of form. (10 oil paintings, 5 watercolour paintings, 142 drawings 13
lithographs the long phase of preliminary research and exploratory works after which Tübke
produced a 1:10 scale version of the work forming the visual component of the artistic concept).
21
On 16 May 1979 Tübke presented a written text of the artistic concept. The text made
unmistakable reference to historical dialects, ‘the fullness of the process of change as well as
their simultaneity’ as follows:
“Unlike
the
hitherto
well-known,
conventional
form
of
panorama
paintings,
in
which only a decisive moment is taken from an historical event and documented in a temporal and
spatial plane, the painting here will also indicate the complexity of the historical processes. The scenic
development of the monumental painting, the symbols and allegories employed therein will document
the dialectics of the historical process in the era of the early bourgeois revolution in a compositionally
closed
form.
The
logic
of
this
concept
precludes
a
chronological
sequence….
It will be necessary to discover or invent signs, allegories, and symbols near and amidst the concrete,
factual plots in order to vividly recreate the event, wonderfully enriched with associations that reveal the
complex intellectual course of events and the fullness of the processes of change as well as their
simultaneity. The painting will not be subdivided into simulated frames; one scene will overlap into the
other. Overall, it will be a painting of simultaneous images filled with extremely graphic
events. Only an unconditional, figurative realism can accomplish this task. I intend to fill this panoramic
scenery with a swarm of figures moving and acting in unison and in opposition. The surface of the
painting will be completely covered, from top to bottom…”
Within the framework he described as “the metaphorical interpretation of an entire epoch,
the economic, intellectual, religious ideas of the period in general” he went on to emphasize the
relation of the Reformation to the Peasant War, including the social structures of that time, as
well as issues in ecclesiastical history, the Reformation to humanism, Roman law, the
significance of Müntzer, Luther and Phillip Melanchthon, (a key leader of the Lutheran
Reformation, and a friend and associate of Martin Luther), the relations between the uprisings in
the Thurinigian region extending to Gaismair in Tirol, satanic cults and witchcraft, and much
more. Noticeably absent from his descriptions and from the mural in its preparatory and final
forms is any reference to graphic depictions of blood and battle cruelty; the emphasis is on
intellectual and academic associations
In the years following reunification Tübke declared himself artistically independent of
political influence in executing the panorama mural, despite the unambiguous identification with
the spirit of revolutionary dialects contained in his artistic concept; yet despite this disavowal and
despite readings ascribing historiographical interest only to the content of the mural, the fact that
22
the mural embraces the Reformation, the Peasant Wars, Müntzer, Luther, Goethe and much
more, quotations and iteration of reformation themes, imagery and style, those very conceptual
elements which the Politburo wished to distribute as an integrated signifier for the foundation of
East German Communism, simply reinforces the authority of those power structures within the
GDR that mediated the distribution of knowledge. Clearly the Politburo was satisfied that within
this orbit, the conjoined museum building and art work would sufficiently construct a visual
mythology of the historical authority of revolutionary power and arouse or even create
nationalist and patriotic feelings in the audience. The supposition advanced by critics that Tübke
somehow shifted the concept away from the Borodino model is simply naive. Aside from
embracing the reformation as the origin of the peasant revolt against class domination (the
peasants against the feudal lords), the mural contains details that promoted the GDR vantage
point which these critics have either overlooked or chosen to ignore. For example, unlike many
other Panoramas’, the Borodino for example, the portrayal of violence in the Frankenhausen
museum is confined to narrow limits. An orgy of blood and carnage centred on the slaughter of
the peasants, in which a panoramic immersion would have trapped the audience, would be
counterproductive and made no contribution to the strengthening of national pride. Also it would
have been damaging to the careful mise-en-scène of a superior German art form. Nor should
Tübke’s remarks, made after the fall of the Wall, that he followed his own vision and idiom,
release him from the historical particularity associating him with the mural. His words give him
away: “I am familiar with the fine arts of the 15th and 16th centuries, which has always been an
important inspiration for my work. Since the necessary compositional scheme was as I imagined
it given from the outset, I only needed to paint as I usually do, as if it were the most natural thing
in the world.” The East German politburo had consistently sought a reading of historical
revolution that stood it apart from and was independent of the USSR, and it is no less than
reasonable that it would be quite happy for its artist to paint in a style distinctly German and
hence independent of soviet socialist realism. The idiom itself is in the tradition of German
medieval painting, so closely resonating it that it is not uncommon for any one first seeing the
mural or paper copies of it to exclaim: When was this painted? Simply, his painting does not
contain images that disturb interpretation, images of protest, resistance and dissent that replace
those of 'normality' and subjugation."
23
A present day visitor to the thousand-year-old town of Bad Frankenhausen will
undoubtedly be impressed by its location in the state of Thuringa in the Kyffhäuserkreis district
of Germany. Described in tourist brochures as the green heart of Germany, in reference to its
agricultural richness, Thuringa is not solely reliant on its physical memorials for its tradition. In
Bad Frankenhausen, one such memorial is the Frankenhausen Castle, still standing on its original
14th Century foundations which served as a residence for the House of Swarzburg. It was
severely damaged during the Peasants’ War of 1525, and rebuilt in Renaissance style following
the war. Today it houses a museum of local history; there is also the church of Our Dear Lady at
the Mountain, colloquially called Oberkirche (Upper Church) built in 1382, known for its spire
which as a result of sinkholes of the nearby salt mines has, since the 17th Century precariously
inclined to the side, presently lying at 4.5° increasing by 6 cm each year, more angular than the
Tower of Pisa and the second most leaning tower in Germany. The town is well known for its
spa baths which date from 1818, when a saline water well that for centuries had been used to
extract salt was converted for use for medical purposes and as saline baths. As part of an Urban
renewal programme, a core area in the town around the central square has been laid with
cobblestoned pedestrian paths and stone and timbered architecture restored and preserved. It is
worthy of note that in 1972 Bad Frankenhausen was established as a garrison town for the
motorized infantry regiment of the National Peoples’ Army of the GDR. Since 1990 it has
housed the 13th mechanized infantry division of the German Army which was formed in 1990
after German reunification and integrated the troops of the former National Peoples’ Army into
the new unified military of Germany. This division has seen action on the Balkans during
numerous deployments, including one deployment to Kosovo and troops of this division have
been deployed during large natural disasters such as the floods in 1997.
The presence of the armed division echoes its central location for the gathering of feudal
armies during the peasant wars and the use of armed forces to protect economic resources; the
salt works are a reminder of the salt mine workers who took up arms with the peasants. Of more
significance than these contextual references, however, the green heart is the source of German
conflict over the distribution of capital produced by Thuringan labour. It is unquestionable that
the peasant wars resounded in conflict over the appropriation by the feudal lords of the commons
and the subsequent impoverishment of the peasants. The religiosity of the struggle for return of
24
their farming land, in a manner suited to the ‘conditions of the time’ (Engels), this being their
‘God given right’, found its fulfilment in the return to common ownership under the GDR. Since
reunification this position has been reversed. The materiality of this foundational conflict leads
irrefutably to the interpretation of the Müntzer - led uprising as one of class conflict. It similarly
leads irrefutably to the revolutionary tradition indexed in Tübke’s mural, dialectically
interlocking material and intellectual production
The developments around the mural – the dissolution of the GDR, the amalgamation of
East Germany into Western capitalism, the idealist readings attributed to the painting, the
freezing of state funding, the conversion of the Panorama into an art gallery with artefacts for
sale, results in its absorption within monopoly capitalism. It is no longer viewed as a
communitarian project. Capitalism is characterized by individual creation in private studies;
(contemporary biography’s of Tübke say he spent years in private research, to have dedicated his
private creativity to the painting, and fail to describe the effect of the community of scholars,
artists, architects, technicians, artisans and politicians involved in the work), the products of
which are sold in a free market, (through tourism in this case), where speculative interests and an
avidity of new sensations prevail. Capitalism is also characterized by trade in art objects, now
become personal possessions, and by the museum system, i.e. by a strict separation between the
privately owned and the publicly owned ‘mortuaries’ in which works of art lie ‘embalmed’ (Max
Raffael); there is also the confused, vague connection between idealism and business. It is quite
predictably therefore that Tübke should be classified within the class conditioned illusion of
absolute individualism. However, to properly do so would require a precise specification of the
type of artist who belongs to this classification and the societal function of art, which has not
been forthcoming.
Tübke was a figurative visual artist strongly swayed by social involvement. His work
covers a broad spectrum, from historical and socio-political topics to religious motives, portraits
and self-portraits. A brief list of the subject matter of his better known works is revelatory: 1958,
Hiroshima; 1958/59, The Five Continents; 1960/61, On the History of the German Labour
movement; 1961/64, The soviet Union; 1965/67, Fascism (The memoirs of Dr. Schulze);
1967/68, Beaches; 1970/73, Working class and intelligentsia; 1971/75, Italy; 1974/76, Man-the
25
measure of all things; 1976/87, the early bourgeois revolution in Germany. By the middle of
1990, his work comprised approximately 5,500 drawings, 400 water colours, 300 paintings (oil,
tempera and mixed method) and 200 prints (mostly lithographs, but also etchings and wood
engravings. In his art the human figure has predominated. He was born on the 30th July, 1929. In
1948/49 he studied at the Leipzig School of Design and Book Production (HGBL). From 1950
to 1952 he studied art and psychology at the Ernst Moritz Arndt University, taking his state
examination in art. 1952 to 1954 he was assistant lecturer at the centre for Amateur art, Leipzig.
Subsequently he went free lance and became a member of the GDR Association of Artists
(VBK-DDR). During the years 1955-57, he was a junior lecturer for foundation year students at
the HGBL, during 1962/63 Chairman of the GDR Artists Association (Leipzig) and from 1962 to
1973 first as lecturer, then from 1964 as senior lecturer and finally from 1972 as Professor at the
HGBL. From 1973 to 1976 he was the Rector of the HGBL and in 1974 was appointed director
of a master class for painting. From 1976 he began work on the Panorama painting while
remaining on the staff of the HGBL (master class from 1986 onwards). In 1985 he received an
honorary doctorate from the University of Leipzig. He died in Leipzig on the 27th May 2004.
Werner Tübke was a highly respected and dedicated East German citizen. Along with
Bernhard Heisig and Wolfgang Mattheuer, he was one of the founders and most important
representatives of the Leipzig School, which had a significant influence on an entire generation
of painters. Their realistic style of painting combined technical and artistic skill with social
analysis and made Leipzig the focus of German painting at the time. He appears to have enjoyed
a number of privileges and frequently travelled to Italy where he was influenced by aspects of
Italian painting. Tübke also did paintings of individual figures, including bizarre harlequins and
jesters, and also beach themes and Italian motifs, such as featured in the painting "Death in
Venice", which shows the influence of his travels. In 1971 Tübke travelled to Milan for the first
time for his first solo exhibition outside Germany, which gained him international renown. On
one occasion, in Berlin he was offered the opportunity to defect to the West. He declined and
insisted on taking a taxi back home to Leipzig. East Germany would have proved more enticing
than the West because it seemed (probably rightly so) as if painters/artists and the time needed to
producer masterpieces were being properly valued.
26
A significant feature of architecture is to mark out separate domains, whereby settings
exert a coercive force on the meanings that can be produced or received within them. The
Panorama setting is quite clearly a classified domain where its specific meaning of revolutionary
collective identity can be expected to prevail. The domain is not simply a site of difference, but
rather of conflict whereby one group is excluded from the other. This clearly emerges in the
reaction to the Panorama. Unsurprisingly, the enormous cylinder-shaped museum building was
soon derided and was nicknamed the ‘elephant toilet’ by cynical visitors. Many GDR citizens
seem to have resented the cost of erecting such an immense structure that had little meaning for
them, and that appeared merely to display the grandiose illusions of an aloof, remote ruling élite.
Disillusionment with the Panorama Museum was succinctly expressed in a letter written by a
worker from Görlitz in typical anti-language to the Minister of Culture, Hans-Joachim
Hoffmann:
I am only a simple worker, but one perhaps who has eyes to see and ears to hear. And a gob to says what it
thinks . . . We are supposed to be the greatest country and yet we have built this crazy thing [the Panorama
Museum] . . . We are a socialist country and don’t need a pilgrim site like in Jerusalem. That is only for
believers and they should only build it if they need it, but not with our money . . .
This worker cynically inverted the GDR’s historical mythology and raised the awkward
question of whether a religious kind of veneration was appropriate in a secular, atheist state. The
letter made it obvious that, for one worker at least, Tübke’s painting failed to instil a sense of
pride in the Peasant War as the starting point of a proletarian-revolutionary tradition that the
party hierarchy still wished to promote to its citizenry. Instead of sustaining loyalty to the state,
the Panorama Museum seems to have induced anger and consternation at the cost of the colossal
project (some 54 million marks) which seemed to bear no relation to the economic situation.
The Battle of Cable Street mural painted on the gable end of St. George’s Hall, North
Junction Street, in the East End of London, provides an interesting comparison with Tübke’s
mural the Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany. The Cable Street mural celebrates the victory
of the working class. It references the conflict that took place on Sunday 4 October 1936 in
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Cable Street between the British Union of Fascists (BUF) led by Oswald Mosley and anti-fascist
opposition including local immigrant Jewish and Irish residents, and working class political
groupings, Socialist, Anarchist, and Communist. The East End Community was made up
primarily of immigrants and has a specific history of immigration and opposition to immigration.
Mosley planned to send thousands of marchers dressed in uniforms styled on those of fascist
party Blackshirts through the East End. Despite the strong likelihood of violence, the
government refused to ban the march and a large escort of police was provided in an attempt to
oversee the march. However, the demonstrators erected roadblocks in an attempt to prevent the
march from taking place. The police were unable to clear the road, and after a series of running
battles between the police and the BUF marchers with the protestors, the BUF marchers were
dispersed towards Hyde Park instead. However, a violent clash erupted between the protestors
and the police.
The Cable Street mural depicts that specific violent clash and hence resonates with the
history of the area; it occupies an environment pertinent to its cause of anti-racism and
immigration control; this ideology has been conditioned by the social actions of its collective,
dormitory community. The mural is painted in the style of figurative realism; the figures are
recognizable as 20th Century protagonists typical of the era of the incident, so that form and
content have an accessible dialectical exchange. Tübke’s mural on the other hand is markedly
dissimilar from the organic substance of the Cable Street Mural. For one, it is indoors in a
museum. Although it was intended to reference a tradition of revolution, and was theorized as
being a spontaneous expression of that tradition, instead the politburo has structured the reality
on which the social action was based from its vantage point. One wonders whether, had it been
painted in 1526, it might well have received a different reception.
Today, there are different approaches to the mural. One such approach, relying upon the
fact that the battle of Frankenhausen ended in defeat, suggests that Tübke painted an allegory of
the failure of proletarian revolution, and by necessary implication the failure of the GDR. Just as
Thomas Müntzer witnessed the failure of his vision for a better future for the peasant rural
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population so also the vision of the East German leadership was witness to a failed socialist state
wrongly founded on the assumption that ‘man is the measure of all things’. The art critic and
journalist for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Eduard Beaucamp, one of the early supporters
of Tübke in the West wrote:
The Thuringian Peasants' War Panorama (1976 to 1987) is not a major didactic illustration, but a
historical parable of human errors and confusion, with relevance to social unrest, upheaval and religious
strife in the modern world, a world in upheaval ... World history is arranged as a world court. All the
images show deep disagreement with the ideological programme of the GDR. … Tubke’s historical
imagery does not unfold progressively in the GDR’s image, but skeptically views history as a recurrence of
the same, but never the same. (FAZ, May 29, 2004)
Victory over the peasant rebellion becomes apparent from the Bundschuh flag that
Müntzer has let sink to the ground. The Bundschuh movement was a loosely linked peasant
confederation of localized peasant rebellions in Southwest Germany during the 15th and 16th
centuries. It was so called because of the peasant shoe (Bundschuh – shoe of brotherhood) the
rebels displayed on their flag.
The Bundschuh symbol appears in an earlier sequence in the mural on a banner depicting
the crucifixion with the shoe intriguingly attached to Christ’s feet. The banner is held aloft on a
wooden pole by a man seated among a gathering conspiring rebellion. The Bundschuh is linked
to Providence and the Sovereignty of God through the flames emerging above their heads. It
points to the writings of Engels:
If the class struggles of that time appear to bear religious earmarks, if the interests, requirements and
demands of the various classes hid themselves behind a religious screen, it little changes the actual
situation, and is to be explained by conditions of the time.
A crowd has formed out of a cosmic turbulence in the upper regions of the mural;
messengers emerge from the crowd moving off into a wilderness, reminiscent of the 14th Century
English theologian and early dissident in the Catholic Church, John Wycliffe’s preaching to live
according to the ways of the apostles through the example of the crucified one; hence Tubke
captures these motifs in their juxtaposition with the banner. Below this scene a figure in a loin
cloth with a blue ribbon tugs at a wooden tree stump.
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GL in his book Vision and Reality writes that:
Below the group of conspirators, a naked figure with a blue ribbon reaches for a (dead) tree trunk. In
allusion to a copper cut by Sebald Beham from 1549, which equally depicts a man trying to rip out trees,
the figure can stand for the pointlessness of an action. Starting from the parallel between the tree and the
crucifix on the flag, the symbol of the impossible refers — in its attribution to the Bundschuh gathering
clearly to the peasant rebellious movement of that time, which against the background of the weaknesses of
the human character had to be without a chance of success in its utopic-social objectives [aims/ literally:
goal setting]. This also explains why, in Tübke’s painting, Christ succumbs to the devil’s temptation and
jumps head-first off the rock [cliff], seduced by all the power, riches and splendour of the world [all the
earthly power, riches and splendour]. The fact that this not only applies to the authorities is shown in
many places in this painting. Müntzer, too, had to realise this in the end, as this also brought him—in his
last confession recorded shortly before his execution and under torture—to the disappointed conclusion
“that each and every one was seeking his own gain more than justification of Christianity.
Hans Sebald Beham, his brother Barthel, Georg Pencz, all from Nuremberg, and Heinrich
Aldegrever and Albrecht Altdorfer were leading members of a group of German printmakers
known as the The Little Masters ("Kleinmeister") who worked in the first half of the 16th
century, primarily in engraving. They specialized in very small finely detailed prints, some no
larger than a postage stamp. Pencz, the Beham brothers and a woodcarver Hieronymus Andreae
were imprisoned in 1525 for spreading the radical views of Müntzer and for asserting disbelief in
baptism, Christ and transubstantiation. The three were pardoned shortly afterwards.
Aspects separating the Bundschuh and Beham’s Impossible are best illustrated by
exploring their various priorities and the concepts mediating them; hence avoiding methods of
induction and deduction. Collaging together images (as EB and GL have done) fails to attend to
the historical significance and specificity of their meaning; instead trips into the trap of searching
for examples which measure up to the rules and precepts of the genre of the self contained
museum painting.
A closer look at the "Masters of the Little Engraving" reveals how the radicalized politics
and theology of the Reformation influenced artistic practices and forms. Sebald Beham’s 1549
miniature copper engraving referred to by GL shows a muscular man trying to pull a tree trunk
from the earth. It is entitled – Impossibile and contains text, which reads: (Niment vnder stesich
groser ding die im zv thvn vnmvglich sindt) “No one dares a greater thing than attempting to do
the impossible.” Such a statement confronts the viewer with a morass of paradoxes: how does
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one undertake that which cannot, by definition, be done? Moreover, who would ever attempt
such a thing? The rhetorical statement answers itself: no one. However on closer scrutiny new
meanings and meta-meanings spring from its internal tensions and open the way for a cautious
hermeneutics of emerging Reformation morality. My argument is that Beham’s tiny engraving
does not only present the viewer with a conundrum. Rather, more broadly viewed, it reveals a
dominating concern of Reformation Germany, namely the discourse concerning the freedom of
the human will, its role in salvation and an embittered fluctuation between necessity and
freedom.
The Renaissance print is tied to the debates surrounding its physical production: namely,
a volley of Christian writings about human agency, freedom, arrogance, salvation, and indolence.
After the Roman-Catholic humanist intellectual Erasmus published On Free Will, in 1524, it was
viciously counterattacked by Luther’s On the Bondage of the Will, in 1525. The exchange
continued, and the controversy over human agency produced multiple splintering factions.
Although Erasmus and Luther began as mutual admirers, each relaying compliments of
learnedness and humanity, they remained at loggerheads over the issue of free will, which
dissolved their relationship irreconcilably. The latter’s radical reforms would create, as Erasmus
suspected, a spiritually underwritten justification for the peasant uprising throughout Germany,
foment Anabaptist disturbances, and initiate a wave of iconoclasm.
The art critic Merback suggests that it is exactly this last point—iconoclasm—where an
image such as Sebald Beham’s enters a new interpretive dimension. Images produced by a
number of Reformation-sympathetic engravers, painters, and sculptors become symbols for the
artist living through these conflicted times; that is, they are allegories of group identity affecting
a group of Reformation-age German artists whose artistic identities were formed by dissent. He
has discussed in detail the work of several German artists he considered to have aesthetically
formalized the Reformation’s radicalisms: Jorg Ratgeb, Jörg Pencz, and the brothers Barthel and
Sebald Beham. Each of these artists in their various ways, Merback says, “embraced a radical
dream of ‘Christian liberty’ that was at first Lutheran, and then anti-Lutheran, but then soon
retreated from both, disillusioned and searching.” In so doing, he argues, “they adopted, in a
strikingly modern fashion, a kind of disenchanted conservatism in which a compensatory ‘artistic
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freedom,’ and a newly liberalized conception of the image, encouraged them to put forth novel
interpretations of biblical, classical, and vernacular subjects.” It is within this ethos that the
Kleinmeister, those masters of the small, exemplified in the Impossible work of Sebald Beham,
helped to etch out a new cultural and psychic space, allowing a new sort of self-reflexivity to
blossom. In so doing, Merback says, they privileged “an attitude that preferred paradox over
moralizing; game-playing over decorum; cynicism over social satire; and ethics over theology.”
Far from doing the impossible, a generation of German Renaissance artists, then, placed
invigorated, individualized invention into closer reach.
However, the search for examples points to an unresolved conflict in the mural which is
to be found between the associative invention that Tübke brings to the signifiers of the past and
the development that he builds into the mural. The Signs and the themes are mostly indexical;
they stand unequivocally for the Reformation, the relationship is not based on mere resemblance.
In certain respects the signs are iconic – they are ‘like’ the signifier-reformation; the mannerisms
of the figures, e.g. dancing skeletons dragging away the living, resemble it and are used as a sign
of it. Tübke associates the thematic substance of the mural with the imagery of the Reformation.
Many of the significant themes arise in shorthand transcriptions from the blockprints, pamphlets
and paintings of Albrecht Durer, Cranach, Bruegel, the Beham brothers, Hieronymous Bosch,
and others. Where he does draw on images from these master artists he structures his own
inventive associations around themes which were prevalent during the Reformation. In one
instance he has used a woodcut by Hans Schaüfelein, a student of Dürer’s, The Way to Heaven
and Hell, showing a peasant begging at the roadside. Tübke has used this idea by placing a
peasant alongside a dining table for the nobles and feudal lords. A snobbish woman looks back
with derision at the peasant. This typifies a simple associative invention which Tübke has
developed illustratively and successfully. The signs and the themes are indexical; they stand
unequivocally for the Reformation, the relationship is not based on mere resemblance. In certain
respects the signs are iconic – they are ‘like’ the signifier Reformation (the mannerisms of the
figures, e.g. dancing skeletons) resemble it and are used as a sign of it.
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The sheer brilliance of the technical skill, combined with the complexity of themes, a
breathtaking visual confrontation that demands a reassessment of approach from the general to
the particular, tends to blind one to its academic dryness. The mural has been executed in dense
and intricate illustrative and graphic figurative realism; it contains intense narrative detail with
the figures, their dress, appearance, expressions, life circumstances, social specificity, all
conveyed in minute and accurate detail. Although in general the mural has a narrative quality it
is problematized by its allegorical content, which is non-narrativizing, yet it is the multifaceted
detail that draws the viewer into participation with the protagonists and the events confronting
them, woven in such a manner that the characters develop the complex dimensions witnessed for
example in the scene of the peasant and the woman dispensing scorn rather than food.. It
However the mural as a whole has been oddly plotted. The opening view is a scene of
magnificent painting; however it is driven through with an antic disposition and inordinate
length; by the end of the ‘tour’ the mind fixes not on detail but on generalized and containable
concepts. The glue binding these concepts is the Reformation as the prime signifier; the visually
compelling battle scene underlines the uprising as the component which saturates the signifier.
Its thematic substance, although strong, is not obviously defined; where it appears to make a
statement, with images which appear to be familiar through conventions of interpretation
founded in such themes as the biblical scenes and the numerous crucifixions, and commonplace
images such as the figure of justice with scales and a sword on the globe, it is often crowded out
by a multiplicity of overlying images only to re-emerge somewhere else in the mural.
Hence the theme of justice is presented with the female figure of justice, armed with
scales and sword, resting on the globe. Below her Pontius Pilot washes his hands; below that two
hanged victims hang from a post while figures dance at their feet; this is placed alongside the
peasant begging at the feudal dining table. One is then swept along a huge enclosure containing a
teeming multitude leading up to a printing workshop; above this is the animal scene . One is then
brought into contact with the hanging monk and papacy. A few pivotal scenes such as these
bring a sense of homogeneity, if not all too successfully.
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A prominent feature of the mural is a translucent Globe positioned above a hill
overlooking a large meadow. Various groups are gathered in the meadow including the Ship of
Fools. The Ship of Fools: The overworked symbol of satire of vices and follies, in Tübke’s
painting found on bare ground; having its origins in a direct quote from Albrecht Durer’s copper
engraving in Sebastian Brant’s book ‘Narrenshiff’ (ship of fools); a metaphor rather than
metonym, immediately reductive; consequently contained by the epoch which spawned it and a
signifier that has lost all meaning other than its meaninglessness. Hence its presence in the mural
is merely an indexical mode of reference. The ship is grounded in the meadow on dry land. It is
full of inflexible old men. It is propped up on planks. In doing so, Tübke introduces the
inflexibility to change that might have challenged the Reformation. They appear not to recognize
their ridiculous situation and take no notice of events of importance around them – the
Bundschuh alongside the boat, the mother with her child, the musicians behind the boat. Tübke’s
inventive association of the indexical pointers to the Reformation clearly are intended to not only
reflect back upon the age of the Reformation but more so to revitalize our understanding of the
Baroque world and in so doing strategize the viewer into an implication with the work.
The motifs in the meadow are derived mostly from polemical pamphlets published at the
time of the reformation by the Cranach workshop and others sought to undermine the authority
of the pope and the Catholic Church with vulgar humour. In the meadow in the lower end of the
mural a monk, a purveyor of indulgences, has been strung up on a tree and is being mocked; the
scene does not depict an historical incident but is an image of Tübke’s invention dramatizing
criticism of the Catholic Church; alongside the monk is an effigy of the pope depicted as an ass.
This fabulous animal with the body of a woman and the head of a donkey is wearing the papal
crown. In the higher reaches of the mural, a connection is drawn to Luther, who with one face is
observing a public burning of books, in reference to his condemnation of the Roman Catholic
Church codex of Canon Law. With a second face he observes the falling St Anthony, a hermit
who was tempted (unsuccessfully) to reject the true faith. In falling he looks towards Luther.
Down at the lower edge of the mural alongside the hanging monk, is a group of figures with
animal heads. They are identifiable figures from the Reformation – Johann Eck, Luther’s
principle adversary whom Luther called a pig (hence caricatured as a pig), Thomas Murner (cat)
and Jacob Lemp (goat), the papal inquisitor Jakob van Hoogstraeten, the king of rats and
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Johannes Cochlaeus whose name has been lampooned through his depiction with a cooking
spoon and a snail on his head. The group are playing the game of nooses, where each ties a noose
to the other and pulls until one topples over. The group is stylistically based on the descent of the
cross. The pope is playing the role of Christ. He is losing this battle and is slumping to the
ground in imitation of Christ’s descent. Luther is tied into the group but has raised the crucifix in
defiance.
Tübke’s imagery is not particularly vivid when compared to its source material. For
example his globe has been modelled on the globe which Hieronymus Bosch painted on the
exterior panels of his famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. Bosch’s Garden is a
powerful and surreal transportation of the world from the third day of its creation through the
tranquillity of paradise contained on the left panel, the dissipation of earthly delights on the
centre panel into the terrifying realm of hell on the remaining panel, sometimes described as one
of the seven most frightening pictures on earth.
FOOTNOTE:
The exterior wings have a clear position within the sequential narrative of the work as a whole. They show an
unpopulated earth comprised solely of rock and plant, contrasting sharply with the inner central panel which
contains a paradise teeming with lustful humanity. As with Bosch's Haywain triptych, the inner centerpiece is
flanked by heavenly and hellish imagery. The scenes depicted in the triptych are thought to follow a chronological
order, flowing from left-to-right they represent respectively, Eden, the garden of earthly delights, and Hell. God
appears as the creator of humanity in the left hand wing, However, in contrast to Bosch's two other "true" triptychs,
The Last Judgement (after 1482) and The Haywain (completed in 1490), God is absent from the central panel.
Instead, this panel shows humanity acting with free will and engaging in various sexual activities. The right hand
panel is believed to show God wreaking vengeance for these sins in a Last Judgement hellscape. The left panel
depicts a scene from the paradise of the Garden of Eden commonly interpreted as the moment when God presents
Eve to Adam. The painting shows Adam waking from a deep sleep to find God holding Eve by her wrist and giving
the sign of his blessing to their union. God is shown asyounger-looking than on the outer panels, blue-eyed and with
golden curls. His youthful appearance may be a device by the artist to illustrate the concept of Christ as the
incarnation of the Word of God. The skyline of the centre panel (220 × 195 cm, 87 x 77 in) matches exactly with
that of the left wing, while the positioning of its two central pools echoes the lake in the earlier panel. The center
image depicts the expansive "garden" landscape which gives the triptych its name. The panel shares a common
horizon with the left wing, suggesting a temporal and spatial connection between the two scenes. The garden is
teeming with male and female nudes, together with a variety of animals, plants and fruit. The setting is not the
paradise shown in the left panel, but neither is it based in the terrestrial realm. Fantastic creatures mingle with the
real; otherwise ordinary fruits appear engorged to a gigantic size. The figures are engaged in diverse amorous sports
and activities, both in couples and in groups. The numerous human figures revel in an innocent, self-absorbed joy as
they engage in a wide range of activities: some enjoy sexual pleasures, others play unselfconsciously in the water,
and yet others cavort in meadows with a variety of animals, seemingly at one with nature. In the middle of the
background, a large blue globe resembling a fruit pod rises in the middle of a pond. Visible through its circular
window is a man fondling his partner's genitals, and the bare buttocks of yet another figure hover in the vicinity. The
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right panel (220 × 97.5 cm, 87 x 38.4 in) illustrates Hell, the setting of a number of Bosch paintings. Bosch depicts a
world in which humans have succumbed to the temptations of the devil and reap eternal damnation. The tone of this
final panel strikes a harsh contrast to those preceding it. The scene is set at night, and the natural beauty that adorned
the earlier panels is noticeably absent. Compared to the warmth of the center panel, the right wing possesses a
chilling quality—rendered through cold colourisation and frozen waterways—and presents a tableau that has shifted
from the paradise of the center image to a spectacle of cruel torture and retribution. In a single, densely detailed
scene, the viewer is made witness to cities on fire in the background; war, torture chambers, infernal taverns, and
demons in the midground; and mutated animals feeding on human flesh in the foreground. The nakedness of the
human figures has lost all its eroticism, and many now attempt to cover their genitalia and breasts with their hands.
When the triptych's wings are closed, the design of the outer panels becomes visible. The
outer panels are rendered in a bland green–gray grisaille, a common practice found on
Netherlandish altarpieces serving to highlight the splendid colour inside. The outer panels are
generally thought to depict the Creation of the world, showing greenery beginning to clothe the
still-pristine Earth. God, wearing a crown similar to a papal tiara (a common convention in
Netherlandish painting), is visible as a tiny figure at the upper left. Bosch shows God as the
father sitting with a Bible on his lap, creating the Earth in a passive manner by divine fiat. Above
him is inscribed a quote from Psalm XXXIII reading Ipse dixit, et facta sunt: ipse mandávit, et
creáta sunt—For he spake and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast. The Earth is
encapsulated in a transparent sphere recalling the traditional depiction of the created world as a
crystal sphere held by God or Christ. Refracting light, it hangs suspended in the cosmos, which is
shown as an impermeable darkness, whose only other inhabitant is God himself.
Tübke’s global is fractured but holds the crucifixion, an indiscernible human throng and
the eye of God. Seen through the fracture is a splendidly coloured landscape, but otherwise the
globe blurs the interior. Tubke has painted the hill holding the cross red. This and a splash of red
below the rainbow are the sole indications in the mural of blood. The fracture unhinges the
insulation of the reality within the globe structured around these iconic images and shifts to an
existential concern in the form of the figures fronting onto the globe. They are an angel and a
rough and grubby man dressed in a baroque tunic, cap and with a green halo above his head.
The angel, wizened and unpleasant if not of death then of the profane, kneeling and carrying
palm leaves (a traditional symbol of martyrdom) clearly frightens the man receiving it. There is a
rather obscure reference to the annunciation that Tübke has rescripted in this scene.
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The conceptual leap from the model emerging in Bosch’s painting—paradise, the
ruination of the world through humankind’s Fall and the condemnation, surface in Tubke as the
recognition of oneself as creaturely and the transcendental source of all knowledge; it will hear
nothing of the voice of revelation. The grubby man is the investigator and thinker who fixes
himself upon and intensely scrutinizes the domain of objects. The world has left the globe and
become a text where social relationships will be based on materiality and not based on the Word.
He looks down on the profane world as does that of Dürer’s Melancholy. The halo around his
head draws attention to the inner life of the mind which is where the melancholic resides.
Paracelsus, whose investigations into astrology are investigated by Tübke in the fish image
further along the mural, described Adam as the first born, who possesses ‘creaturely
mournfulness’. Similarly the world of the baroque is god forsaken; it is no longer sustained by
the insulation that the globe once provided. There is a revelatory vision of the misery of mankind
in its creaturely condition.
He is alone gazing at the profane world in the valley below; there is a direct conceptual
link to the materiality of human effort. Müntzer in the battle scene, stands alone as does this
figure outside the globe. Müntzer is not surrounded by angels or devils but by the materiality of
conflict and the implications of social organization. There is hence in the Tübke mural the
possibility of a conceptual identification with fate, melancholy, historical time, allegory,
ruination. These links help to give the work a contemporary meaning. However, seen purely as
an illustration of events and motifs of the middle ages, and even allowing for the occasional
twists of irony, it has lost its agency. It does not reify the reformation in the present, whereby the
medieval morality emerging from the many motifs resonate in the present. Hence according to
the CD produced by the Panorama’s curatorial staff (which is swamped with presupposition,
notions formed in advance) the fracture in the globe is rhetorical, possibly indicating the split in
Christianity between Catholicism and Protestantism, or possibly the split between the rich and
poor. It is suggested that the globe represents the dogmatic world of the middle ages (this
because of the replication of colouring with the meadow – green and ochre seen in the globe
again seeking meaning by looking at structure), the grubby man is described as an artist who is a
visionary, creative and able to bring change, This rhetoric resides in banal symbolism. Symbol,
however inheres in the unity and immediacy with which it expresses an idea – it is not dispersed
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across a plethora of disparate referents as we find in the mural, but is concentrated intensely on a
single image as a ‘momentary totality’.
The theologian Philipp Melanchthon, a collaborator with Martin Luther and intellectual
leader of the Lutheran reformation was an influential designer of educational systems. Together
with Luther they both denounced what they saw as the exaggerated cult of the saints, the
idolatrous adoration of the Host, and the coercion of the conscience in the sacrament of penance
that nevertheless could not offer certainty of salvation. He established anatomy in arts courses in
line with the protestant emphasis on the relation between body and soul. He set out to replace
magical practice with the doctrine of Providence. However, he also theorized an acceptable
notion of astrology, in spite of its heathen associations, to assert the providence and sovereignty
of God and to counter the radical enthusiasts who, listening to the spirit speaking within them,
threatened the Lutheran revolution by making themselves the authority before God.
Theophrastus Paracelsus, more properly Theophrastus Phillippus Aureolus Bombastus von
Hohenheim, astrologer, alchemist and physician pioneered the use of chemicals and minerals in
medicine. His hermetical views were that sickness and health in the body relied on the harmony
of man (the microcosm) and Nature (macrocosm). As a result of this hermetical idea of harmony,
the universe's macrocosm was represented in every person as a microcosm. According to the
insights at the time, there were Seven planets on the sky, Seven metals on Earth and Seven
centers (or major organs) in Man - seven was a special number. Everything was heavenly and
closely interrelated. Diseases were caused by poisons brought to earth from the stars.
Tübke incorporates the medieval fascination with astrology in the large fish or whale
painted to the side of Müntzner and the Tower of Babel, emerging from the winter scene and the
pit of the seven deadly sins. The mural’s fish has a human being in its belly. The sun and moon
shine on the surface of its skin. The symbols of the planets are visible. At the moons lower horn
one sees Jupiter, Mars, the constellation of the planets. The selection of place for this theme
appears to relate to the emergence of Müntzer who has not appeared before in the mural. Ernst
Bloch, philosopher has commented that the old prophesy which hung over Müntzer appeared to
be coming true ‘...the fullness of the waters was approaching’. In 1524, the prophetic year of
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disaster, the planets were all sucked into the constellation of Pisces. However Jupiter was in
conjunction with the peasants star (the morning star). Having failed to gain the support of the
rulers for his reform plans, Müntzer grasped the seething discontent among the peasantry to lead
the rebellion.
This conception of the whale is not the original way of seeing it. Jonah is the
prototype of the prophet whose personal visions are subservient to a higher order. Biblically
(Jonah 1), God sent Jonah to preach at Ninevah, but rather than do so he took a ship to Tarshish
to ‘flee from the presence of the Lord’. The Lord sent a storm; the other sailors rightly attribute it
to Jonah’s presence. They throw him overboard where he is swallowed by a large fish (presumed
to be a whale). After three days and nights Jonah acknowledged to the Lord that salvation is of
the Lord whereupon the fish vomited out Jonah onto dry land. This is quite different from ‘the
bottom line’ that is never ideological but human; is not ‘in’, ‘of’ or ‘unto’ itself but is for people.
The discourse around human agency and the role of authority was also present in the
pamphlet literature produced by the Cranach workshop and others of the Reformation. These
pamphlets became an influential vehicle of propaganda and a stimulus to the defiance of church
anachronism and exploitation. Luther himself had placed a distance between himself and the
peasantry and like the church itself appeared to be more in harmony with the undeservedly
affluent rather than the poor. This further marginalized the impoverished against which the
pamphlet literature reacted. Further intensity was provided by the eschatological perspective
widely adopted in the protest literature. A powerful atmosphere of expectancy was created in
which the multiple traumas of present existence and the hardship of starvation and deprivation
constituted a final test pending the day of judgement and return of a beatific age. Short tracts
containing prophecies concerning astrological phenomena were a potent element in the popular
pamphlet literature. The title page comprising a lengthy and ominous title, together with a large
woodcut burgeoning with lurid symbolism constituted an instrument of propaganda in itself.
These pamphlets were the Prophesies, prognostications or Practicas. Tübke has modeled his fish
rather exactly on the woodcut print by an unknown artist on Leonhard Reymann’s Practica About
the great and diverse conjunction of the planets which shows the ideal world being born from the
fish and prognosticated upon by clerics, kings and peasants alike. Tübke has altered its context,
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however by removing the prognostications of peasants and others and moved the eye to the
figure of Müntzer addressing the peasants below the Tower of Babel
Rather than the iconic symbolism so easily transferred to this signifier, allegory will
enliven interpretation through a proliferation of absence. Hence, by way of illustration, decay
may constitute the discrepancy between ideology and actuality; on one hand the fish is a
religious symbol. It is also a symbol for the subconscious mind and subterranean levels of
awareness not usually manifest in ‘waking’ reality. Then there is pollution and ‘dead’ matter.
Fish smell and rot, as do religious/political ideologies (locally and globally). It is through
allegory’s multiple possibilities that the discrepancy between ideal and actuality becomes
discernable.
The physicality of war is depicted dramatically with figurative realism, although not
brutally. The materiality of this scene provides a telling contrast to the cultural demands which
otherwise dominate the mural. The hanging of the catholic priest and the papacy is likewise a
powerful material image. They may be contrasted with the depiction of the Tower of Babel that
is sometimes read (Michael Wollenheit) as a hen linked to the egg randomly placed nearby in the
snow This egg was invented by Tübke, who is reported as saying he had no idea why he painted
in the egg, he simply had an urge to do so. According to this reading the birth of the ideal that
the hen would lay cannot occur because the egg lies in frozen snow. This reading is founded on
the vague resemblance the Tower has to a chicken; it is a reading drawn from an imaginary
likeness and built up around the form like a magician pulling a trick from a hat.
The Tower of Babel has biblical origins quite different from these readings: Biblically,
Genesis 11, ‘Therefore is the name of it called Babel, because the Lord did there confound the
language of all the earth’. Walter Benjamin contends that the Fall is the descent from the purity
of Adamic naming into the ‘empty word, into the abyss of prattle’ With the Fall and the
multiplicity of language begins history as the profusion and confusion of signs i.e. Babel. Tübke
has positioned Müntzner below the Tower addressing a seated crowd raptly listening to him. He
is not preaching – there is no bible to be seen. For Benjamin writing post the Fall, human beings
continue to name things, but they do so arbitrarily, without reference to the Word. Silent nature
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is designated and is subject to the ‘prattle’ of human beings, and the plethora of human
languages results in a multitude of ‘names’ with things being misnamed and ‘overnamed’.
Hence, the search for ‘truth’ is the search for proper naming wherein name and thing correspond
perfectly. Certainly Müntzer and the peasant rebels were seeking change, and not simply a
renaming. To me the juxtaposition of Müntzer with the Tower of Babel is a confusing mix of
signs. The ‘change’ rhetoric is useful in the ironic sense of it being contingent upon the system it
sustains; hence change is obedient to the vicissitudes of the ruling systemic structure rather than
people actually grasping hold of the structure and changing it.
Müntzer’s sermons are peppered with quotations from the apocalyptic writings of the Old
Testament, the prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah. He, the revolutionary, is organizing social change
according to the conditions of the time (Engels). After all this is the peasants rebellion resulting
from their impoverishment, not from ideological cultural demands. A mistake in reading is made
when the insurrection is ascribed to Müntzer and its cause to the content of his apocalyptic
sermons.
The spirit of resistance invested in Tübke measured through a negative impulse to the
commission is arguably obscure. The reductive symbolism of contemporary readings constitutes
a direct challenge to the control of authorship and content of what is a public text, and in so
doing intrudes upon the text by appropriating it as an object of the claimants. Hence
contradictions in the ideological complex are exploited - the loss of the battle is read as the
inevitable failure of proletarian revolt (hence bourgeois democracy is validated) and resisted.
The cultural capital found in these contemporary interpretations transport the mural from
the classic text to an art canon for the elite – through modes of realized sets of assumptions. This
clearly emerges from reviews of the work. For example, GL writes:
Werner Tübke fashioned a genuinely autonomous, subjective artistic universe which depicts
archetypal human behaviour during a conflict-laden social upheaval; his is a universe that argues
mainly in religious and anthropological terms, abounding with contradictions, apocalypse, and internal
dialectics, and is solely indebted in its visual form to the painter Tübke’s high-mannered artistic world,
which itself received unmistakable stimulus from this project. In face of this magnificent vision of the
eternal recurrence of the same, Golo Mann confessed after visiting the panorama in 1987 that the
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painting had nothing to do with revolutionary history, class struggle, and historical propaganda, nor with
nineteenth-century historical paintings, but that the sponsor apparently had nonetheless been wise
enough to give the artist free rein. Indeed, it was even quite possible that “Werner Tübke with his
Peasant War Panorama succeeded in saying farewell to the ideal of revolution”, conjectured the Essen
historian Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner as early as 1988.
In the end, with amazing perseverance and drive, the artist achieved his goal, relentlessly pushing
ahead with this chance-in-a-lifetime commission to engender a unique work of art (and ultimately his
own museum) worlds removed from a traditional battle panorama, whose standard is not the degree of
its correspondence to the actual course of history but to its own artistic laws.
Similarly the critic Tillman writes:
An escape into the world of beauty. A defiant eye closed to social reality, an anachronistic attachment to
the painting style of the good old days. The ironic reflection from a distance of centuries. That is Tübke’s
own.
Romantic notions, which further entrench the art as canon, emerge in reviews likening
Tübke to the jester and the renaissance wanderer.
There is an element of harlequinism and self portraiture in the imagery – however the imagery read as a
whole has not been sublimated into an autobiography. It is nothing other than a plea for the individuality
and independence of the artist and the primacy of the imagination over all systems .GL
A similar view is expressed by art historian Christina Tilmann:
It is a carnival, masquerade, but also a deeply pessimistic ‘Totendanz’ on the ruins of civilization. The
Werner Tübke stage is filled with admiration for the championship of the ancestors, but also steeped in the
melancholy awareness that this flowering of civilization is long gone, replaced by a barbaric age.
These reductive interpretations effect a disconnection from its origin and reinvent the
mural and the panorama museum as a modern art work in an art museum. Tubke is likewise
displaced from his historical particularity and transposed into a rebellious innovator. This new
context establishes new syntagms, new meanings but also suppresses the original semiosic
context which made it a classic text. Scholars know where it originally stood but seem not to
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know why it mattered or what it might have meant. This is the typical transformation achieved
by the traditional museum. Tübke, i.e. the artist, the mural, the panorama, the commission, the
contract, now appears in isolation from its dialogical context. It is only legible for those who
know the gist of the discourse which once surrounded it. Without this cultural capital, the text is
opaque and incorporated into the ‘new’ version of the constituting dialogue, a different version
of history. Hence:
Thanks to the artist a very special kind of art museum finally emerged with a work at its centre. Aside from
the comparative dimensions and the basic rotunda form, this art museum bears little resemblance to a
traditional panorama and is far removed from any sophisticated illustration of some prescribed scholarlytheoretical, historical concept.GL
The reunified German re-contextualization of the mural and the panorama into a form
intended to resonate with a contemporary audience fails on a simple semiotic basis to recognize
that on the contrary the mural explores a set of cultural texts, which represent the past to the
present. This is achieved denotatively through the adaptation of the medieval style of painting
and the indexing of commonly recognized symbolism (example the Ship of Fools; Jonah and the
Whale; The Tower of Babel; The Seven Deadly Sins; Pontius Pilot washing his hands; Icarus). A
number of artistic styles are deployed, such as late-medieval German as well as Mannerism, and
relies on an imaginative use of historical visual sources, such as the woodcut illustrations found
in sixteenth century broadsheet pamphlets. The style and much of the content by association
shows the influence of artists such as Dürer, Cranach, Barthel and Hans Sebald Beham, Bruegel,
Hieronymous Bosch, Goltzius and El Greco, and thinkers such as Luther, Sebastian Brant and
the Cranach workshop. The battle scene forms the principal visual focus of the mural. It is
dominated by Müntzer and the peasant battle which forms the mural’s central argument. In this
scene, Müntzer is prominently silhouetted against an open field. He is arched by a rainbow. I
visualized the mural without the rainbow – which brings the battle scene and its impact strongly
into focus. The rainbow is unfortunate and kitsch and out of keeping with the tone of the mural;
it is a distraction and I wonder as an aside whether Tübke has incorporated it because without it,
after all is said and done, the mural is fundamentally a battle scene.
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Below the battle scene in line with the central figure of Thomas Müntzer, we see a group
of twenty figures, separated from the combatants by a wall of shrubs standing around a
Renaissance fountain. These figures in this strangely peaceful oasis on the edge of the raging
battle are the great men of the era, the giants of the time from church and religion, literature and
art, philosophy and science, business and manufacturing. A central trio stands out: Albrecht
Dürer, Martin Luther and Lucas Cranach; others include: Hans Sachs, Sebastian Brant, Philipp
Melanchthron, Erasmus von Rotterdam, Ulrich von Hutten, Nikolaus Kopernikus, Paracelsus,
Christopher Columbus, Johann Gutenberg, and Jakob Fugger.
The battle scene re-scripts the classic text of the Reformation. There are severe limits on
the ability to invent classics. They may be endlessly re-edited, reinterpreted and submerged by
commentaries, but a moments inattention is sufficient to give some group the opportunity to let
their meanings irrupt into the present with meanings the more potent the longer they have been
suppressed; this is precisely what the GDR accomplished by displacing the Reformation from the
classic convention of religious engagement. For the GDR the Reformation was a complex
signifier of revolution of which the mural provides visual recognition. This is achieved firstly by
means of the medieval style deployed, which by invoking the art of the Reformation, opens a
Foucaultian meta-epistemic window into the underlying arrangements that make knowledge of
the Reformation possible; secondly the content of the mural is imbued with a revolutionary
necessity that emerges from the overall sense of unresolved turmoil that is contained in the
overlapping multitude of depicted events. This transformational framework establishes a
dialogical relation with the classic convention
On the headphones provided to visitors a guided tour of the mural is provided by the
curatorial staff, on which reference is made to the compositional structure of the battle scene. An
imaginary axis forms a line from the rainbow’s apex through Icarus and Muntzer disappearing
into the centre of the bottom fountain and across which an arch is formed behind Muntzer by the
field’s edge iterating the rainbows arch over Muntzer and over the battle; an arch is likewise
formed below by the hedge above the great figures of the Reformation, who likewise form an arc
in front of the fountain which completes the circle anticipated by the rainbow’s arch. The
fountain echoes the form of the circle surrounding Icarus. The inclusion of Icarus above the
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figure of Muntzer is likened in the commentary to the failure of pursuing ideological ambition
recklessly. The reductive structuralism of this argument as Derrida has warned, runs the risk of
giving deficient attention to force—the creativity of that under analysis: ‘Form fascinates when
one no longer has the force to understand force from within itself; that is, to create’, and also
necessarily neutralizes content, or the ‘living energy of meaning’ (5). Practices of excessive
schemetization Derrida identifies as ultra structuralism — the attribution of essence to the
structure as an internally unified assemblage. This occurs principally when meaning is confused
with its metaphorical model thereby attributing more interest to the figure itself, which
compromises the play of meaning within. Furthermore, the structuralist attempt to protect the
internal, inherent meaning of the work and its absolute simultaneity slots in to the conventions of
meaning making characterized by logos and often results in a rejection of the historicity of the
work. This rejection not only disregards the history of the work existing as that which is
immediately perceptible prior to interpretation, but also denies the internal historicity and the
existence of meaning in the present since it remains fixed—devoid of the play of signification.
Aside from suppressing the history of the work doing so runs the risk of disguising the
representations that control its meaning.
The Federal German Republic has absorbed the mural into its socio-political fabric
through the notion of Wende (Turning). Wende, capitalized as a proper noun and conceptualized
as peaceful revolution in history books and school curricula has gained currency in the Federal
Republic to describe the transition to democratic capitalism within the former territories (Länder)
of the GDR during the period 1989 to 1990 in particular. In 2001 the Federal Government
revised its Blue Book, to include a list of ‘nationally significant cultural institutions in the new
Länder’ (former East German territories of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania,
Saxony, Saxon-Anhalt and Thuringia). The Blue Book is published as a ‘cultural identifier’ of
Germany, its 2001 update stressing the importance of the ‘East German cultural landscape’ for
the pan-German and European cultural heritage. It includes a number of museums, the so-called
"Lighthouses" as well as important German personalities. The Frankenhausem Panorama has
been included as one of twenty Cultural Memory Locations in the new Länder. It is perhaps
ironical therefore, that the Frankenhausen Panorama in its totality (including Tübke’s mural),
whose dominant ideological construction was an iconic representation of German proletarian
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revolution should become the site inspiring cultural identification with the transition from
communism to democratic capitalism through ‘revolution’. Quite clearly the editing of
revolution out of the Reformation (and hence out of the mural) and its re-contextualization has
neutralized its previous authority and pasted in a different cultural and ideological hegemonic
fabric,
With its historicity deleted, the mural has been catapulted into a new orbit. It is therefore
not surprising to find the mural absorbed into the main stream of German (west) highbrow
culture, such as when the ARTS.21 team of the Deutsche Welle Culture Magazine, lists a
retrospective of Tübke’s work second among its top three ‘cultural picks of the most exciting
offerings in the fields of art, music, film, literature, stage, design and architecture’ (July 2009).
Coming in second behind the German premiere of Quentin Tarantino's new World War Two
movie, "Inglorious Basterds" and ahead of “Backstage in Bayreuth”, a new book by Katharina
Wagner with photos by Enrico Nawrath which reveals what happens backstage at Bayreuth
together with a re-launched festival website offering new podcasts every day – ‘the latest one is
about cleaning the theatre and making the costumes... rather profane views of Wagner's magical
mythical realm’, the project of investing a revolutionary cultural heritage in the GDR has now
simply disappeared under Tubke’s mantle:
A major retrospective of the artist Werner Tübke is on in Leipzig. Tübke was born in 1929 and died in
2004. He lived in Communist East Germany and was an important figure in the Leipzig School of
representational art. But he also had a strong sense of self-irony -- painting himself as king, for example.
Another exhibition marking his eightieth birthday can be seen in Bad Frankenhausen, at the museum
housing his monumental oil painting "Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany" from the 1980s. It took him
and a large team of assistants eleven years to complete.
Early in 2008 the museum was privatized by an Association including the Land of
Thuringia, the Kyffhäuserkreis and the cities of Bath, Frankenhausen and Sondershausen and the
Panorama Museum e. V. incorporated. The museum has been promised a provisional sum of 1.3
million Euros federal state assistance until 2012 wherafter is expected to be self sustaining. It
attracts about 120,000 visitors annually and aside from a collection of Tübke’s works now holds
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an extensive collection of pictorial and graphic art works from other artists including Albert Leo
and Fabius Gugel.
A visitor enters the Panorama Museum into a large reception area. It has a service desk
for the purchase of memorabilia, postcards, videos and foldouts of the entire mural. There is a
counter where coats, cases and cameras are collected from visitors. There is a first class
restaurant - Café P. which offers tour groups a wide range of food and beverages and can seat
87 guests (plus an outdoor terrace with 30 seats during the summer months). One then ascends a
steep and long staircase to the first level located below the rotunda where a number of paintings
and other art works are displayed in conventional lighting. From this level one ascends darkened
and carpeted stairs to the rotunda vault containing Tubke’s mural. The central area of the rotunda
is blacked out. Ascending the stairs, the first thing to appear at the very top of the field of vision
is a narrow crescent of shapes and colours. With each further step, this swells to a sea of figures,
finally opening up into a riotous festival of brilliant painting. The effect of total immersion in the
depicted scene is enhanced by the panorama's skillful manipulation of perspective and most
importantly by the lighting directed at the all consuming painting. There is a marked similarity to
the experience in a theatre as the curtain rises. The effect of entering the Bad Frankenhausen
panorama is no better described than in the words of a visitor entered in the Panorama’s visitors
book:
Entering the huge vault, one’s eyes are drawn upward; then dizziness. One tries to orientate themselves;
one hour can never be enough. It is a world which opens up there; human world in the first third of the 16th
Century. Had the painter master models; was he just a painter of that time, not a historical painter of the
19th Century, which if so were also not bad, but which prohibits any comparison. Yes, but that also. One
sees the executioner hanged. You can see the lush life, lust and lasciviousness new rich have become
middle class. There is also a print shop with the Lot: Reality and symbol of the new superpower.
On the 17th June, 1787, Robert Barker patented a process under the name of “la nature à
coup d’oeil” (Nature at a glance). Using empirical methods, he developed a system of curves on
a concave surface of a picture so that the landscape, when viewed from a central platform at a
certain elevation, appeared to be true and undistorted. By these means a panoramic view could
be depicted on a completely circular canvas in correct perspective. The application of this
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invention became known a few years later under the neologism ‘panorama’. The phenomenon
has its foundations in a largely unrecognized history of immersive images, beginning in antiquity
with image spaces of illusion, found mainly in private country villas like the Villa dei Misteri in
Pompeii, the Gothic fresco room, and the many examples of Renaissance illusion spaces such as
the Sala Della Prospettive. Illusion spaces also gained importance in the public domain, as
evidenced by the Sacri Monti movement and the ceiling panoramas of the Baroque churches.
These explorations into the virtual are technically not comparable with the illusions now possible
with the aid of new techniques for generating, distributing and presenting images, by which the
computer has transformed the image and now suggests that it is possible to ‘enter’ it, thus laying
the foundation for virtual reality as a core medium of the emerging ‘information society’. All the
same, each epoch has made extraordinary efforts to produce maximum illusion with the technical
means available and one of the most exceptional vehicles for painted illusionism is Robert
Barker’s patented panorama. .
The Panorama demands special consideration for two reasons: first this illusion space
represented the highest form of illusionism and suggestive power that used traditional methods
of painting; it is also exemplary in that this effect was an intended one, a pre-calculated outcome
of the application of technological, physiological and psychological knowledge. With the
contemporary means at hand, the illusion space addressed the observer as directly as possible
employing strategies for removing boundaries and psychological distance between observer and
image space. Immersion is undoubtedly the key to an understanding of the media. Immersion can
be an intellectually stimulating process; however, in most cases immersion is mentally
absorbing, a passage from one mental state to another. It is characterized by diminishing critical
distance to what is shown and increasing emotional involvement in what is happening. The
panorama, much like the majority of virtual realities, almost wholly visually seals off the
observer hermetically from external visual impressions, expands perspective of real space into
illusion space, observes scale and colour correspondence and makes use of indirect light effects
to make the image appear as the source of the real. The intention is to install an artificial world
that renders the image space a totality or at least fills the observer’s entire field of vision
integrating the observer in a 360° space of immersion offering a completely alternative reality.
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There is a great difference between the non hermetic effects of illusionistic painting,
such as trompe l’oeil where the medium is immediately recognizable, and from images and
image spaces that are delineated by a frame that is apparent to the observer, such as with certain
aspects of theatre and particularly television. In the delineated form, these image media stage
symbolically the aspect of difference, and leave the observer outside.
In addition to its journeys through space with its depiction of landscape, there are many
examples of journeys through time, to which belong the dozens of panoramas of historical
battles. The essence of the panorama is the assumption of being trapped in the real, intended as a
space of presence. This game of deception is its chief fascination, whereby the illusion lies not so
much in the actual quality of the panorama's realistic representation of a particular place as in its
technological illusionism. The other senses were addressed through sound effects such as noises
of battle, artificial wind and smoke. Interestingly, the panorama’s claim of authenticity was
based on painstaking research, often with scientific pretensions, of the locations and epoch’s
involved. With the development of the panorama, the themes became available to a large
audience; pricing policies were adjusted to ensure that a large audience was attracted while at the
same time protecting the upper classes from rubbing shoulders with the workers.
The paintings on all sides evoked more than that of which theatrical scenery was capable
because the spectators, captivated and transfixed as in a magic circle and removed from
distracting influences, believe they are actually surrounded by the landscape. The panorama
proved to be an enormous financial success with the construction of simple wooden rotundas
parallel to the erection of permanent circular buildings. With technological advances panorama
paintings were reproduced rapidly through de-individualized methods – in short the methods of
industrial, profit oriented production. As early as 1798, panorama production in London was so
well organized that Robert Barker was able to exhibit several new paintings each year. Barker’s
invention very quickly became a favourite medium for art education, political propaganda and
most importantly, entertainment which replaced the notion of art as beauty. Share market control,
licensing procedures, marketing and the use of technology kept the entertainment content of the
Panorama ahead of competition from competitors such as the wax museum and film by
incorporating them; and through appearances in amusement parks and world fairs. Variations of
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technique were adapted such as the unrolling of a canvas-backed scroll past the viewer in a
moving panorama, in a manner reminiscent of the hand-held landscape scrolls of Song China.
The step from using the panorama as an instrument of education to sharpening its mass
appeal and suggestive power in the direction of mass propaganda is not a big one. Military
leaders in England and France were certainly aware of its possibilities; Barker wrote: “I was
introduced ... to Lord Nelson, who took me by the hand, saying he was indebted to me for
keeping up the fame of his victory in the battle of the Nile a year longer than it would otherwise
have lasted in the public estimation” (OG 65).
The suggestive and emotional effect of
immersion is the hallmark of the Panorama’s aesthetics as a medium, and this has reached its
zenith in the genre of the battle Panorama. In later years there have been many examples,
confined not solely to Europe and within the more recent past widespread throughout the globe.
Besides the Borodino panorama, The Battle of Stalingrad, 1962, USSR, The Battle of AlQadissiyah, 1968, Iraq, the Panorama of the Liberation of Plevin, 1977, Bulgaria, The Battle at
Teschou, Pjongjang, (after 1987), North Korea, The Panorama of the Arab-Israeli War, Cairo,
1988, Egypt, The Battle at the Bridge of Lo Gou of July 1937, Peking 1988, China, are
Panorama’s deployed to glorify military action as significant for national policy and history. In
view of the differing forms of the political systems that have employed and continue to employ
it, equating the symbolic form of the configuration of the panorama with a specific intellectual
position is untenable, such as that adopted by G L, director of the Panorama Museum who codes
the mural through its circularity. He severs the mural from its fundamental facts: the painting is
no longer concerned with the failure of the peasant uprisings, but rather is concerned with
depicting the circularity of all social processes; hence the mural reflects the failure of the
eschatological concept.
I think the work is timeless … In a nutshell one could say it shows the eternal recurrence of the same, the
basic social problems remain the same, that is the basic message of the image displayed in a complete
form, i.e. in a circle without beginning or end, so that history appears as a continuum, without linear
higher development, which is in flagrant contradiction to the official history of the GDR.
Rather the medium has the power to endow the imagery with an enduring effect,
irrespective of the social system of the society that exhibits it. The attribute of a specific
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intellectual position with reference to the panorama dissolves away when Michael Foucault’s
analysis of the Panoptican is considered. The design of Jeremy Bentham’s model prison –
Foucault called it “powers laboratory” – arranges the cells in a panoramic circle around a central
observation tower. Behind bars, the prisoners are subject to total observation by the prison
guards, and this total control, according to the theory, would be the means of their reformation.
In the panorama, the prisoners are replaced by the picture but this offers nothing more to the
observer than an illusionary total view: Boundaries between picture and observer are blurred
within a controlled and structured situation in order that the image will form an indelible
impression. The situation of Bentham’s Panopticon is reversed in the panorama and the observer
becomes the object of political control.
Tübke’s mural painting Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany however, is not a
panorama in the strict sense of an illusionistic, temporally and spatially homogenous picture,
although it contains many similarities. These similarities acted to support the GDR in its aim of
establishing national pride while the dissimilarities have undermined that aim.
Aside from the obvious 360° panoramic space, its similarities reside in the suggestive
and emotional effect it achieves through an astounding spectacle; the painstaking research
involved; it installs an artificial world – through strategies that expand perspectives of real space
into illusion space, observes scale and colour correspondence and makes use of indirect light
effects to make the image appear as the source of the real; a diminishing critical distance to what
is shown and increasing emotional involvement in what is happening; it’s political aim of
encouraging patriotism. Dissimilarities that set it apart from the absolute transformation from
illusion to immersion are primarily its theatric quality. At once it invites interaction and enquiry
(of symbolic meaning) but not distanced (contemplated) viewing. All possibility of distraction is
not hermetically sealed off (the entrance is visible, the ceiling does not form part of the mural)
resulting in the presentation of a framed illusion; its primary quality is its figurative realism and
not its technological illusion. Clearly there is not a simple relationship of ‘either-or’ between
critical distance and immersion, and certainly not so in the example of Tübke’s panorama. The
relations are multifaceted, dialectical, in part contradictory and highly dependent on the
disposition of the observer. Coupled with Tübke’s interest in his private (as opposed to public)
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art activity, these characteristics complicated and obfuscated the aim of the GDR’s politburo of
achieving an ideological saturation through the use of the panorama.
(Footnote this paragraph) - The visual experience, the immersion in an artificial world and the
entertainment to be had in a panorama is perhaps no better illustrated than in The Polyforum in Mexico City.
This multiple forum, housing various cultural, political and social activities, has several autonomous spaces
such as a theatre with a capacity for 500, galleries, offices and the Universal Forum, which is a huge 900
square meters vault and a museum in itself. The 12 exterior panels of the building and the 2,400 square
meters of the mural paintings of “The March of Humanity” provide a total of 8,700 square meters making it
the largest mural in the world. This environment is the setting for the sound and light show “The March of
Humanity” narrated in the voice of David Alfaro Siqueiros. The rotating forum platform, which has a
capacity for 1,000 spectators, moves across the mural while the lights, voices and music create an amazing
environment.
The huge Frankenhausen museum should be contrasted with the more humble, modest
Peasant War Museum located in the Kornmarkt church in the nearby Thuringian town of
Mühlhausen. Although this museum was partly reorganized in 1983 to take account of the Luther
Celebration, and again in 1989 for the Müntzer Jubilee, the essential elements of the exhibition
had remained intact since its opening in 1975. The museum presented the Peasant War in a very
traditional manner: a series of relevant exhibits (primarily copies rather than originals) were
mostly housed in glass cabinets that were placed close to the walls of the former church
building’s high interior. At the start of the exhibition the focus was, in conformity with Marxist
orthodoxy, on the ‘economic base’ and the ‘materialist’ aspects of the late Middle Ages, e.g. new
productive developments, agrarian feudal relations. It then moved on to a consideration of the
Peasant War itself. Finally, Müntzer and the Peasant War tradition in twentieth-century socialist
history was considered. Photographs were displayed of the German Communist Party’s jubilee
celebrations in 1925 commemorating the 400th anniversary of the struggle. The last display
focused on socialist transformations in agriculture, particularly the collectivization of land from
1945 onwards. Proud peasants were shown, industrious and content in their agricultural
cooperatives. Needless to say, Mühlhausen’s cooperative was named symbolically after Thomas
Müntzer. For East German visitors to the museum the message was clear and unambiguous: the
aspirations of Müntzer and his peasant army had found their realization in the GDR state. To
drive the point home, a quotation from Müntzer, made in Mühlhausen on 9 May 1525, was
inscribed high up on a wall facing the museum’s entrance: ‘Power shall be given to the common
people’ (‘Die Gewalt soll gegeben werden dem gemeinen Volk’). A large picture painted in 1956
by W.O. Pitthan hung on the wall below the proto-socialist slogan, helping to reinforce it. This
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painting, produced in a Socialist realist style, depicted an intense-looking Müntzer haranguing a
crowd of armed, militant peasants. The immediacy and certainty of interpretation to be found in
the displays and art work in the Mühlhausen Peasant War Museum is clearly absent from
Tübke’s complex panoramic painting. It has been observed that historical myths need to be
transmitted in an easily comprehended, emotionally moving form and this, obviously, did not
apply to Tübke’s work, particularly the painting’s capacity to be plainly understood.
Similarly one may contrast the Frankenhausen museum with its original model, the
Borodino Museum. The Borodino is a huge painting on the scale of Frankenhausen; painted
however in a social realist style and depicting a particular dramatic and crucial moment in the
battle. With the aid of authentic sound effects played at high volume visitors are immersed in the
painting’s world. There are numerous exhibitions charting the origins of the Napoleonic Wars
and the course of the campaign of 1812, displays of copies of original uniforms, banners and
weapons as well as paintings and drawings featuring various scenes from the battle. Just outside
the museum visitors will find a bronze bust of Field Marshall Kutuzov who led the Russian
troops, a former museum chapel to commemorate the centenary of the patriotic War and an
obelisk marking the grave of some 300 Russian soldiers. Directly in front of the museum visitors
cannot fail to see the enormous monument built in 1973 to commemorate the heroes of the war
of 1812 with an impressive equestrian statue of the Field Marshall.
My argument is that the possibility of a clear unobstructed interpretation of the peasant
uprising through Tübke’s mural, has been absorbed into a post modern heterogeneity of texts
such that the image is not necessarily privileged, unique, symbolic, visionary, but rather is a text
that is already written, allegorical, contingent, and open to synthetic contradictions. This clearly
emerges from developments surrounding the Mühlhausen museum. In 1995, following public
debate and discussion, the decision was taken in Mühlhausen to dismantle the GDR display after
2000 and create an entirely new Peasant War exhibition as part of Germany’s urban renewal
programme. The exhibition remained a GDR “time capsule” until 2002. However, by the
summer of 2004, the commemoration had transformed into street theatre when each year in May
Mühlhausen is home to the “Müntzer Games”, which in official festival literature are described
as conceptually and performatively completely different to the usual medieval festivals in the
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region. These sorts of medieval enactments are popular in Germany. There is a medieval walled
city called Zons not too far from Cologne; they have a medieval market every year. In one reenactment two fat priests go round selling Indulgences and hassling young unmarried couples for
their immorality.
The festival runs over two days and follows a programme choreographed by a
professional theatre director and taking in theatre settings of mercenaries and knights camps,
farmer’s encampments, historical markets, medieval knights in armor, farmers in costumes, the
farmer Mühlhäuser camp wagons, knights in battle, medieval music, stage games and jesters, a
theater workshop 3K a game action with small theatrical performances, taverns, bars and food in
a fun filled atmosphere, where the visitor is offered two turbulent days of medieval fun, games
and education in the merry month of May. Examples from the 2009 programme:
Saturday, 16.05.2009
11:00 Play music with the people’s "charlatan"
11:15 Holzstraße - Music by "Duo Obscurum
11:30 Market Opening / Presentation of the trades
12:00 Gaukelei with "Raduga"
12:30 Holzstraße - Gaudium with Max Gaudio
12:45 Knights camp – struggle with "Mus Rusticus"
13:00 Play music with the people’s charlatan
13:15 Music by "Duo Obscurum"
14:00 History Game
Of the amorous adventures of a priest, a fragile preacher and a rebel in the City
14:30 Wohnhof Güldene corner - 3K-Theatre Workshop presents a theatrical performance with
audience games
15:00 Holzstraße - Interlude
From a beer crier, an absurd story and a few thirsty patrons
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15:15 Play music with the people "charlatan"
16:00 History Game
From all sorts of injustice, a false prophet and a man named Bertold Schlampamp
16:30 Wohnhof Güldene corner - 3K-Theatre Workshop presents a theatrical performance with
audience games
17:00 Interlude
From a wedding with obstacles, a mayor and rude music with" Duo Obscurum "
18:00 Knight’s struggles with "Mus Rusticus"
18:30 Wohnhof Güldene corner - 3K-Theatre Workshop presents a theatrical performance with
audience games
18:45 Music by "Duo Obscurum"
19:00 St. Mary's Church - History Game
From a sermon, with a rainbow flag, and a doctor Leisetritt, with music by the people’s
charlatan
19:30 Gaukelei with "Raduga"
20:30 Big Game Tavern
A great spectacle and game with all sorts of tavern fires, madness, and music is offered on
Saturday evening at 20.30 on the stage in the Peasants Holzstraße. The crowning touch will be a
fire show against the historical backdrop of the Mühlhäuser wall.
A similar fare of entertainment and enjoyment is offered on the following day, including
extra games with labels such as: From a wedding with obstacles, and an ill mannered mayor
with rude music and From a dream of mice, a rainbow and a departure for the war. There are
History Games and a Farewell Concert and the visitor is offered a memento of the war engraved
on their very own replica penny thanks to the “bank employees of the festival’s main sponsor the
VR-Bank West Thuringia”.
Professional actors play the roles of Thomas Müntzer, Heinrich Pfeiffer, Captain
Eberhard von Bodungen and others, and give “life like shape” to the events and the characters
portrayed. Thomas Müntzer is described in festival documents as the prominent reformer who
stood up for the plight of the "common man", the spiritual leader of the radical wing of the
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Reformation German Peasants' War, but not a peasant leader. In these documents, Heinrich
Pfeiffer is described as a Cistercian monk who like Müntzer vigorously preached against the
ruling orders, and who joined with Müntzer in Mühlhausen to lead the peasants at
Frankenhausen. Their sermons and their capture and execution are re-enacted by the role players.
Also provided is fun for the children and reenactments of fairy tales such as the three little pigs.
Since 2008, the festival has been renamed “The Peasant war Spectacle”.
For Silke Hüge, a Mühlhausen municipal employee, the whole spectacle is ‘simply
brilliant. It is as if you open a door, enter and it closes behind you’. For this municipal employee
the spectacle is a total immersion in the medieval age. For Angelika Bergmann, festival director
it is important that the games should refer to the town’s history through theatrical representation
telling of the life and work of Müntzer and Pfeiffer, two men who supported the peasants and for
which they paid with their lives, in an entertaining manner. For Silke Hüge the educational
content should be tempered with fun. This serves as a means of transmitting popular culture and
harks back to the public house which served as a site for the performance of carnival plays inside
and outside Nuremberg during the 16th Century and shown in Beham’s kermis prints.
“The most elemental process of modern times is the conquest of the worlds as images”.
Martin Heidigger’s concern with the superficiality of modern life and the forcefulness of
imagery is echoed in the writings of Guy Debord who argues that the spectacle is not as one
might think a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship that is mediated by images
which have supplanted genuine human interaction. Never before has the world of images around
us changed as fast as over recent years, never before have we been exposed to so many different
image worlds. The workings of this contention can be seen in events surrounding the Tübke
mural following the reunification of Germany. Prior to reunification, the initial idea for the
mural’s imagery was a depiction of a battle scene modelled on the Borodino panorama; this idea
ultimately manifested in Tübke’s painting and a few postage stamps depicting images from the
mural. The new issue that stands comparison is the transformation of Tübke’s painting into the
profusion of imagery that is found at the Müntzer Games, the You Tube, Thomas Müntzer video
games, the top three picks of DWTV’s cultural pick, the fragmentation of images found in
postcards, brochures, fold outs, google images, slides, selected images chosen by critics and in
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its subversion under the impact of Wende. This multiplication of signifiers, is a convenient
strategy for mediating social relationships in the new Germany whereby the mural is wrenched
from the political commission coding the mural and projected as a work of singular vision by the
artist.
With the abandonment of the Borodino model and its concomitant, the figurative realism
of a particular battle scene, the illustration of historicism inevitably was squandered. Part of what
makes Tübke’s mural so inscrutable is that the relationship of many of its images to history are
only ever allegorical, in the sense that they present fragments and broken shards of history
without narrativizing them. It neither plunges us back into the midst of the historical periods
depicted nor does it speak of memory of the events. The images, far from being hierarchically
ranked, are piled up in a seemingly haphazard way one on the other. There seems to be neither a
beginning nor an end with no totalizing in mind; a ‘painful attempt to restore a continuity to
heterogeneous, disconnected instants’, (F Jameson) as though the resuscitation of historical
objects and facts is absolutely impossible. Hence one finds the GDR historians struggling with
this foggy representation by finding it accurate yet difficult to comprehend: “The accuracy in
detail is astonishing”, noted the historians Bensig and Hoyer in their appraisal of 6 May 1981,
“…it has a strong proximity to the actual historical event”. But viewers will not always be able to
comprehend the work, qualified one comment, because of the heavy use of symbolic visual
language and allegory, “so that the ideas, contemporary criticism of existing relations, and
psychology that lie concealed behind the picture will need to be broken down”.
Werner Tübke’s observations on the process and execution of the mural must be
accounted for. At a conference in 1985 he commented that in retrospect, “For three long years,
constantly pondering historical facts, contexts and fundamental structure, I surrendered myself to
visions of the moment. I had absorbed countless historical impressions and could, was compelled
to work on a very personal level. The twelve-metre-thirty (meant here is the 1:10 version of the
painting) became a diary. The work proceeded effortlessly.” In his address to the Panorama
conference in Lucerne, the museum curator Gerd Linde observed that the final version in the
format 14 x 123 metres, differs only insignificantly – chiefly stylistically – from the scaled-down
version. “It appears half Great World Theatre á la Calderón and Hofmannsthal, half intimate,
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nightly medieval mystery play, whose iconography is indebted foremost to the pictorial fund of
early modern art, yet remains ambiguous in its interpretive expression , subjective, open. History
here is mirrored as an eternally recurring cycle, dressed in the garb of the 16 th century like a
Shakespeare play, yet, like Shakespeare, open for every epoch. GL reports that “the artist, who
believes his art is too good for mere brainwashing,” had earlier, in 1984, professed: “Art for me
is by no means a kind of vehicle for ideas, etc. I produce art for the sake of art, which then has an
effect on society.” And in an interview from 1997 he reaffirmed: “My art is not enlightening nor
is it intended to waken an awareness. It is pure l’art pour l’art. Nothing could be more pure and
undefiled.”
In a general sense the mural is a modern painting painted in the olden style. Yet unlike
idealist art which, generally turns its back on society, and refuses to have any truck with the
degraded human condition, the themes of the mural are mostly exactly that – the degraded and
misguided carryings-on of the human race. In a sense this mural is the model of Adorno’s
modern art as one which offers us a frail utopian image of the world in which sensuous
particularity finally comes of its own, and as such resistance to an almost abstract, administered
world. Yet it must be observed that the revolutionary creates new vocabularies and procedures
and alternative modes of being, unlike Adorno, who despite his interest in political art
nevertheless strove to protect the aesthetic as a privileged space somehow set aside from the
world.
The mural would have been subject to many private comments by innumerable readers in
a continuous chain of discourse in which meaning could be assimilated or contested. However
the curatorial intrusion into the mural constitutes a specifically dialogical text in which its
reading of the original text is reclaimed and incorporated into the text itself. Hence Tübke –as
rebel is a necessary conjunct to these readings whereby he fits the myth and paradigm of the
artist who struggles against bureaucracy and authoritarianism and who, in the face of this
oppression is a free subject, one who penetrates the density of things to reveal meaningful truth.
Hence the mural is efficiently stripped of its historicity. It achieves a double blow – at once
destroying the efficacy of class struggle and simultaneously raising the profile of the ruling
bourgeois canon.
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Yet it is worth asking whether any creative act is capable of resisting the dominant forces
that so easily reject its fragile possibilities. Dominant forces unwilling to accept change simply
suppress resistance; or in the role of a benevolent dominant absorb reactionary acts. While mural
imagery has largely evaded the notion of property as commodification and reproduction, the
creative principles of muralism (as politically intentioned) expressed as artifact (the mural itself)
are problemetized by ownership and mediation. The divestment of authorship within the post
modern framework is seen as more relevant to an emerging culture founded on networks of
exchange, fluidity, transience and mutuality as it ultimately offers the prospect of self
organization in personal and interpersonal society. Within this framework of assumptions,
reference is no longer to the binding stylistic hierarchy responsible for ensuring that ‘modern’
will be defined, classified (and neutralized) by its relationship to the purportedly ‘eternal laws of
art’. It is not only a sense of ‘anything goes’, and a dialectic of compulsive progress and
individual style that prevails, but also an actively critical approach artists are taking to the
political and social realities of our world. In an environment of increasing media domination and
interconnectedness (and the subtle totalitarian pressure this generates), the motto l’art pour l’art
is hardly tenable anymore. The realization that all ‘art’ is dependent on society - dependent in
the sense that it is dependent on the relationships between people and not the sole product of any
one person, (is not an art that moves into abstraction and monadic encoding) is becoming
increasingly important in the shaping of future culture. Against this backdrop even an artist’s
solipsistic retreat, such as Tübke’s total absorption in the work is interpretable as a reaction to
the prevailing climate. Ideally commentary combines originality of invention with historical
reflection on the available range of artistic means, enabling the artistic medium to achieve a
validity that is a sign, not of centrality or enduring value, but of a borderline situation, the
expression of having established a successful, if fragile equilibrium, without harbouring any
illusion that, as Dostoevsky put it, ‘beauty will save the world’. The loss of the ‘Beauty’ of art –
the ability to express ‘goodness’ and faith in human existence and order, ideals of struggle,
equality, a ‘fine future’ have survived only as a metaphor, a chimera and distant memory – the
result of social processes of reification and perhaps dehumanization. Hence the mural, following
the force of its first appearance, the empowering act of muralism, transforms into de Certeau’s
‘mythical text’ – the city’s ghost of gestures and narratives within the life of everyday. Hence the
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peasant wars are absorbed by the Münzter Games (Peasant War Spectacle), and the ‘top three
cultural pick’. The interested observer will also find extracts from the mural as backdrops to
Carmina Burana broadcast on YouTube and a video game featuring Thomas Müntzer.
However, the notion of Tübke as the jester and the Panorama as a Teatrum Mundi is a
convenient counterbalance within the reunified German scholarly analysis to the structures of
power that would otherwise have mediated the distribution of knowledge of the GDR’s historical
heritage of revolution, and is illustrative of the pervasive dynamics of signification and their
(de)constitutive power on the history of knowledge. Hence symbolically weighted interpretations
continue to haunt Tübke as the art historians fail to escape the confines of their discipline. Gerd
Linde remarks that the panorama, originally planned as a memorial to help provide historical
legitimation for the East German State, is
Werner Tübke’s panorama which created a microcosmic ‘Theatrum Mundi’, packed with history yet
addressing timeless and universal themes. At the same time, these details continually suggest that
everything is true, that history has been objectively reproduced, and yet it is obvious that we are dealing
with a highly subjective, thoroughly invented world of art.
Art critic Karl Max Kober comments in like vein:
A theatrum mundi has been staged whose semantic content goes [far] beyond the material starting point.
One reason for this can be seen in the interpretative wealth of the numerous details. Sometimes they are
meant literally, at other times they take on a figurative meaning, and occasionally they can be subjected to
individual reinterpretations – including puns and ironic leaps of thought.
The interpretation of representations marks the start of the potentially restrictive
anchoring of the signified to closure. This emerges clearly with the framing of the panorama
(mural and building) in a Teatrum Mundi construct which lends the project a certain mystical
appeal and a convenient strategy for distributing the new knowledge. Allegory is conflated with
symbolism; thus Gerd Linde argues:
The substance of the painting, in the artist’s own words, arises not from a simple summation of the
individual motifs, rather from the power of expression and the dynamic relationships among the
simultaneous modes of creation. Symbols and allegories would admittedly tax the viewer’s ability for
making associations, but would ultimately allow the degree of artistic density necessary to cope with such
complex visual material.
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In similar vein art critic Eduard Beaucamp interpreted the work as a great "World
Theatre".
The 14 x 123 m large circular painting without beginning or end transcended the historical reality of the
peasant war into the timelessness of the apocalyptic creation of the world or of its demise. Beyond the
GDR-specific life experiences of the artist, the work became the mirror of a time of transition, disappointed
by utopias."
The analogy to a world theatre is inappropriate from two reasons. The medieval notion of
the world theatre is one of allegory, whereas these readings privilege the mural’s symbolic over
the allegorical content.
...packed with history yet addressing timeless and universal themes. At the same time, these details
continually suggest that everything is true, that history has been objectively reproduced.
Secondly these postulations fall into the trap of trying to think difference while positing
the unity it denies. One aspect of art is its power to present shadows of reality, which the
spectator may never normally confront, or may shun. In this lies its strength – to open the
Pandora’s Box smack in the middle of the gallery, the theatre, the street, and mobilize forces
through reaction that could lead to positive action and change. In this is also found its weakness the ‘formalized’ reality in which lurks the sanctuary for safe and easy evasion - that dark asylum
where art is apprehended as a formal structure in which the signs and symbols are credited with
an internal inherent meaning. By relating cerebrally and aesthetically to the structure, the
underlying element, the reality beneath the art activity is robbed of its potentiality for change.
One ‘avoids the act, which could be the answer’ (Grotowski). Hence, the skull loses its death
message and becomes an insignia – an easily achieved illusory cognizance with the world. ‘The
audience follows down those dark alleys, calm and confident. Culture is a talisman protecting
them from anything that could nastily swing back into their lives’ (Brook, 1968:11).In so doing,
not only is the experience robbed of reality, but also a superfluous barrier is erected between it
and the spectator. There is contained in this process the scientific fantasy of the impartial, totally
objective observer – constructing an unwieldy formal framework within which to assess, identify
and analyse.
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The ancient sense of man as spectacle for the gods is preserved in the Shakespearean
trope about the world being a stage, found in the famous monologue from As You Like It, spoken
by the melancholy Jaques, comparing the world to a stage and life to a play, and catalogues the
seven stages of a man's life, sometimes referred to as the seven ages of man: infant, schoolboy,
lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon, and second childhood, "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans
everything", except the motif is pre-Shakespearean, inherited and transformed by him. It is an
emblematic image that Shakespeare incorporates into his work only to hollow out and re-inflect.
The medieval trope of the world as a stage involves the sense that we unavoidably play roles that
we have not invented, and the sense of terrestrial unreality. It is inextricably bound up with a
view of the world where supernatural agents determine human destiny, and where the secular is a
place of illusion in contrast to a higher non-secular realm. The seven stages of man enacted on
this stage are enacted in our spite, unconsciously.
The ‘roles’ implied in this metaphor are ones we suffer, not create, comprehend or own.
All in all, the metaphor points to the limits of agency, the hubris and vanity of our projects:
emptiness, illusion, powerlessness. Understandably, the uses of the metaphor were religious,
homiletic. The affects corresponding to this metaphor are those of melancholy. But padlocked
inside this metaphor, however, is a rather more subversive set of ideas and affects. If you take the
metaphor rather literally in terms of the Shakespearean stage, what might it imply? The bare
stage can mean anything, can represent any other space from a wood to a court, it can assume
whatever meaning we impute to it through theatrical convention. The meaning of objects on that
same stage is likewise not fixed – a block of wood is now Lear’s throne, now a plinth for
Hermione. The stage is defined by semiotic instability or easy reversibility. There is, moreover,
an obvious split between actor and role. A commoner can play a king, a man can play a woman.
Identities that had seemed pinned to particular categories of person turn out to be transferable or
'put on'. Or as Susan Sontag observes, “The theatrical is the domain of liberty, the place where
identities are only roles and one can change roles”.
In Shakespeare the stage is not simply given over to the ‘liberty’ of the theatrical. As so
often in Shakespeare, the relics of the older world-view are still allowed a weak power.
Macbeth’s ‘brief candle’ speech, Jaques’ conventional plaint from As You Like It both fall into
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this category. But such conventional expressions are now inside the theatrical frame rather than
being the frame itself. In fact, everywhere in Shakespeare there are carriers of the old world
view, those in thrall to superstition, religious piety, feudal hierarchy, chivalry. And there are
those who, having cut loose from such ties, from the inherited roles which others venerate, are
drawn to and made capable of self-invention. This self-invention can involve, simultaneously,
the manipulation of those still bound by ancient bonds and pre-programmed roles. Iago and
Edmund are close to the ‘intriguer’ mentioned by Walter Benjamin in his dissertation on the
Origin of German Tragic Drama in which he analyses Reformation-era German politics and
culture through the Trauerspiel genre. The intriguer is the choreographer of himself and others,
whose manipulative practices are wholly without historical logic. The world presents itself as a
scene and as a series of possible scenes, on which the other human beings are to serve as
protagonists. For an Iago there is no inhuman presence watching or covertly guiding his actions.
He is himself an inhuman presence, standing outside the roles and attitudes others suffer
passively or readily internalise, changing and projecting roles and appearances as befits his
design.. He delights in his own stagecraft, or that a scenario has been well executed, that
someone has played his assigned role well. The actual protagonists, meanwhile, are unaware of
being instruments in this private theatre of cruelty. As well as a choreographer, the intriguer is a
consummate actor: Iago plays ‘honest Iago’ and plays it well. His appearance is controlled and
projected, not confiscated by a hidden God. And that projected appearance fails to coincide with
his essence. This definition of acting is what scandalised some Elizabethans about the profession
– pretending to be something that you were not, forging a self (pun intended). But that something
was capable of being forged cast doubts on whether it was so authentic anyhow. If a man could
so easily play a woman, or a commoner so easily mime the gestures and authority of a king, is
‘womanhood’ or ‘kingship’ a property of women or kings? Is womanhood or kingship not
simply rhetoric, gesture, habitus?).
Tübke’s allegories: The form or style that Tübke deploys by and large quotes the style of
the 16th and 17th Centuries. Yet the imagery of that time is largely allegorical. Benjamin observed
in his Trauerspiel:
I would have to be mistaken if the organic power of the allegorical realm were not to emerge vividly as the
fundamental source of the baroque.
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Hence reading the content of the mural with a strong slant on allegory reinforces the form
employed.
The 17th Century German play of mourning, the Trauerspiel forms the subject matter of
Walter Benjamin’s erudite and challenging critique, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, in
which he intended to correct two misunderstandings of the Trauerspiel form as he saw it: that it
was merely a feeble imitation of tragedy and that it’s key literary device, allegory, is inferior to
symbolism. For Benjamin the baroque play of mourning was to be distinguished from classical
tragedy because of its completely different grounding and purpose: rather than being concerned
with myth and the fate of the tragic hero, the Trauerspiel presented the dismal events of history
as they conspired to ruin the sovereign. It is not ennobling heroic action but human indecision,
which leads to catastrophe and melancholy. The Trauerspiel articulates a mournful, utterly
profane realm of creaturely compulsion and human misery. Benjamin’s immanent critique of
these scorned and neglected works, reinterpreted and redeemed them as the quintessential
expression of the frailties and vanities of God forsaken human existence, and the natural history
of the human physis as decay. In doing so, Benjamin argued for the importance of allegory as a
trope which renders and represents the world precisely as fragmentation, ruination and
mortification.
A melancholy human life in a world bereft of significance and grace is fundamental to
the Trauerspiel. The play of mourning portrays only the futile gestures and schemes of the brutal
tyrant and the treacherous courtier, ignoble actions which culminate only in ruin and death. In
this bleak context the bombastic language of the Trauerspiel takes on a particular significance as
the clearest indication of the dramatists understanding of the desolation of humankind. The
clumsy language of the Trauerspiel is overladen with and hollows out meaning; it exhausts itself
in convoluted metaphors, superabundance and overdetermination of meaning i.e. in
meaninglessness. Arcane emblems, signs and hieroglyphics proliferate and accumulate for their
own sake. Sorrow is translated not into meaningful speech but rather ‘evocative’ music. Thus,
the meaning of language in the Trauerspiel is paradoxically the absence of meaning – language
is sound or prattle.
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Benjamin’s investigation of the Trauerspiel contrasts allegory with the individual totality
of the transfigurative work of art – a contrast between the unreconciled and the reconciled. He
restores allegory from the denigration it has undergone at the hands of symbolism. He notes that
the allegory has been drained of immanent meaning – a pure ‘facticity’ under the manipulative
hand of the allegorist, awaiting such meaning as he or she may imbue it with. However the
process of signification in allegory is not a mere mode. Signifieds metonymically displace
themselves onto their signifiers, so that jealousy becomes as sharp and as functional as the
dagger with which it is associated. This process of signification may be subject to proliferation,
where meaning is irreducibly multiple. “Any person, any object, any relationship can mean
absolutely anything else”. It is liberated into polyvalence where allegorical discourse has the
doubleness of the death’s head: “totally expressionless – the black of the eye sockets- coupled to
the most unbridled expression – grinning rows of teeth”, and forms the line between signifier and
signified of the ultimate disjoining of consciousness and physical nature, which is death. Hence it
is a mode of ruination of (beautiful) appearance and the illusion of totality which characterize the
work of art and in particular the symbol for the sake of truth where the meaning of an object ebbs
out, scattered to ‘the manifold regions of meaning’. His aesthetics is linked to the non-affirming,
non-totalizing, allegorical nature of artworks and in the refusal of the materiality of the sign.
The purpose of Benjamin’s discourse on allegory is a concern with the ‘recreation of
criticism’ leading to the foregrounding of immanent criticism as an unfolding of the text, as the
continual (re)constitution of its meaning in the afterlife. This concept of criticism also prefigures
some important post-structuralist and post-modern principles. It seeks neither to rediscover some
privileged authorial purpose nor to impose the canonical aesthetic judgements of self appointed
expert arbiters of ‘taste’. Rather it recognizes that the meaning of a text is determined by the
critical constellation it enters into with the present. This involves both a decentring of the author
and a privileging of reading and interpretation, understood as historically specific situated
practices. Textual meaning is never fixed and finalized but always contingent, open to endless
interpretations, infinitely subject to Derridian deferral. As the notion of allegory suggests, textual
meanings are manifold and multiple, characterized by a radical ambiguity and indeterminacy.
This criticism opens up the possibility of challenging and disturbing the dominant, established
meanings attributed to artworks, literary texts and all other cultural products. Culture is not a
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sphere of eternal values, but is a domain of contested meanings. This contestation is not to be
understood as an arcane aesthetic debate but rather as a vital part of contemporary political
struggles.
For Benjamin, the melancholy human condition and the misery of over named nature are
the basis of the pitiful lamentation expressed in the language of the Trauerspiel. Melancholy is to
be understood conceptually not as ‘the emotional condition of the poet or his public’ (OGTD,
p.139), but rather as a historical sensibility, or cultural condition, a ‘particular way of seeing’, or
Weltanschauung. It involved a complex of attributes, associations and astrological connections
which fascinated the baroque.
In their emphasis upon allegory, the linguistic trope wherein one image or object comes
to stand for another or for a plethora of others, the authors of the Trauerspiel foregrounded the
arbitrary character of the linguistic sign and its imposition upon a sad, mute nature. He writes
that post Fall, the source of the sadness of nature is the fallen human language. Without reference
to the Word, silent nature is subject to the prattle of human language; the plethora of languages
results in a multitude of names. However, the conventional character of allegory and its ceaseless
hollowing out of meaning are not signs of aesthetic failure. Allegory is dialectical and reversible.
In the dialectical play of allegory, the profane world is cast down only for it to be raised up once
more. In the Trauerspiel, allegory’s concern with expressing the God–forsaken world tumbles
from one image to another in its descent into meaninglessness, yet allegory is not itself
immanent. It is a ‘mode of ruination for the sake of truth’ as Benjamin observes:
As those who lose their footing turn somersaults in their fall. So would the allegorical intention fall from
emblem to emblem down in to the dizziness of its bottomless depths, were it not that, even in the most
extreme of them, it had so to turn about all its darkness, vainglory and godlessness seem to be nothing but
self delusion.
Hence just as the fish is at once a religious symbol and a symbol of decaying ideology, so
allegories of decay and ruination reverse direction and transform themselves into those of
salvation and redemption. Benjamin writes:
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Allegory goes away empty handed. Evil, as such, which it cherished as enduring profundity, exists only in
allegory, is nothing other than allegory, and means something different from what it is. It means precisely
the non-existence of what it presents. The absolute vices, as exemplified by tyrants and intriguers are
allegories. They are not real.
Thus the mortified flesh of the corpse becomes the ‘allegory of resurrection’.
Symbol, however resides in the unity and immediacy with which it expresses an idea – it
is not dispersed across a plethora of disparate referents but is concentrated intensely on a single
image as a ‘momentary totality’. Full, complete, self contained, the symbol encapsulates ‘...
clarity...brevity...grace...and beauty’ (OGTD, p. 163). Its success relies not upon the recognition
of conventional associations, but upon its inspired originality. “It is like the sudden appearance
of a ghost, or a flash of lightening that illuminates the dark’ (OGTD, p. 163). The symbol
presents the eternal in the lightening flash of the mystical instant. Allegory portrays the transient
and ephemeral in the duration of sorrowful contemplation. It presents life subject to time, natural
history as decay and ruination. In the absence of eschatology, the allegorical gaze is fixed upon
the form in which man’s subjection to nature is most obvious’ (OGTD, p. 166), that is creaturely
death. Symbols,
My argument is that the instability arising in the multitude of motifs, the indexing of
signs and the repositioning of 16th Century imagery grounds the mural upon the allegorical
possibility that the mural as a whole stands for something else. That something else necessarily
includes its compelling conceptual references, those undercurrents within the epoch which
intervene in the hegemony of the preponderance of power and the material nature of that
intervention, as its primary possibility. This possibility enables the mural to find its rooting in
conceptual terms as affirmation of the belief in the possibility of progress in contemporary
discourse. By showing the absolute futility of raw historicism this may provide the grounding for
the disintegration of Tübke’s mural and its liberation from traditional interpretations and context,
its afterlife in the reunified Federal Republic, and permit its relocation and reconfiguration as
part of a wider pattern and the basis of a significant meta-epistemic, (Foucault) articulating the
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limits of the possible discourse of a German belief in political and historical progress through the
German people’s first radical attempt to transform society.
Thomas Müntzer as allegory – whereby he is neither the (symbol) figurehead of a
revolutionary heritage nor the tragic hero of the failed communist revolution; rather he is neither
the primary source of signification, nor a symbol of immanence, but he is a caricature of
individualism, the dismal events of history having conspired to ruin him. His ruin is neither
heroic nor tragic. The mural as a whole is concerned to reflect upon the Reformation and not
solely upon Müntzer. The political code driving its conception was not concerned solely with
Müntzer as a tragic hero. Its revolutionary heritage was not founded on tragedy. Tübke’s
academic positions in Leipzig clearly influenced his working idiom. This is manifest in the
systematic use of quotations from the middle ages and the intellectual academic developments
that he builds into the mural as though he were producing a textual thesis is visual form. This
method, while interestingly idiomatic does not serve to disturb conventionality but rather its
cultural hegemony strengthens the political code driving its creation. Without educated,
academic insight into the multitude of historical references, discovering a complexity of meaning
is unlikely. The suggestions found in readings by GL and EB and JH that the seeds of rebellion
that challenge the status of the political code that underpinned its commission and its creation are
evident in complex processes of interpretation, merely panders to the canon of the elite. Certainly
in his letter to the Minister of Culture, Hans-Joachim Hoffmann the worker from Görlitz did not
question the mural’s role in representing East German revolutionary culture; only the expense of
doing so is brought into issue. The Tübke process, if I may call it that, fails to provoke discomfit,
disorientate and sow doubt. It fits conveniently into a power structure that was supported by
scholarly analysis of the Reformation in general as the foundational beginnings of German
communism based on class struggle.
Realist and formalist aesthetics find themselves conjoined in Tübke’s work. Both the
perspectival relations of figurative representation and the formal relations of abstract painting
produce an organized visual space, which in Tubke’s mural are organized by relations of light,
line, plane and colour where relations are coded by perspectival or formal relationships.
Sensations are depicted or illustrated; the positions, movements and effects of the bodies are
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rendered with the realist coordinates of a social environment filled with objects, people and
human interaction. Realism is a paradoxical political form. Instead of provoking action, it merely
produces catharsis through identification. The fictional representation of an action, of an
experience generally stops us from carrying them out in reality and by ourselves. Realism creates
catharsis through vicarious experience. On the other hand formalism – modernist self reflexive
art- gives rise to catharsis through contemplation. Faced with the formalist work, the spectator
undergoes a loss of self and becomes a perception of the artwork. This is the antithesis of
revolutionary praxis, which is founded on the introduction of actual experience and which
destabilizes these traditional notions of the aesthetic. Tübke is hardly a pictorial X-ray of the 16
and 17th centuries. The mural is saturated with the breath of the past, conveying an overall
impression of didactic inevitability.
My argument is that the content is not immanent and cannot be so. Tübke’s mural does
not survive without its political origins. An idealist reading of the mural as a painting contained
within its frame for its purity of vision, as with all idealist readings, does not answer the poser of
the paragon (Derrida) and infinite deferral; but more specifically such a reading fails to answer
the role it plays in the shaping of reunified German culture, thereby failing to trace the
development, transition and declining sense of agency that it has undergone within the emerging
ideological framework. He is described on the website Germany.info politely as an artist who
stands outside of political involvement:
He never considered himself a modern artist, but rather executed his ideas according to his own artistic
conceptions, even if the work was commissioned by the ruling Socialist Unity Party of East Germany.
Because he was also willing to accept such commissions, some accused him of being a state artist. Others,
however, praised him as a critic of the system for his non-conformist stance. He himself refused to be
pigeonholed in either category, for his artistic self-conception fit neither of these extremes.
This apparently conciliatory explanation disguises the cultural code that categorizes the
artist as ‘apolitical’ and perpetuates a specific orientation and ideology (hence stripping its
historical ties to East Germany) by creating a privileged authorial purpose.
.
Tübke, in his role as harlequin and director, speaks of “artistically directing from the wall
with the aim of achieving the greatest possible magical effect on the viewer in the arena”, for
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which it is necessary to combine a “...triple parallel perspective, staggered and overlapping, with
a descending central perspective in the upper third part of the canvas as well as a semantic
perspective and a partially inverted colour perspective”. There is a distinct similarity to dramatic
theatre. Indeed the imagery “leaps off the wall like a spectacle” (Artaud). Assisted along the way
with supports, such as clever lighting techniques, a theatric ambience within the panorama, and,
on the canvas itself, colour contrasts of dark and white, stark red and grey and the vibrant
movements of groups of figures all importantly portrayed in life-size proportion, the drama is
played out in multifarious scenes simultaneously occurring on ‘stages' constructed on different
levels and at different angles, resulting often in vertical or diagonal visual axes. Variation of the
principles of composition, such as alignment, dispersion, concentration, creates suspense which
together with the changes of light and colour gives rhythm to the clusters of human figures.
However, the characters, events and historical quotations interweave in an ordered fashion within
the diverse visual perspective, so that the reader is not required to be a fictitious editor
periodically restoring order. The impression I gained when entering his ‘theatre’ was of a huge
vault; not a place of energy but a place of refuge. The figures are life-like; excursions into the
fantastic through magic-like figures, demons and devils provide a subterraneous involvement but
they too are studied, figuratively constructed, and placed in ordered contexts. The onlooker is
absorbed in a passive fashion. Even with the staggered and overlapping imagery there remains a
didactic element close to that of an academic text, arising through the structured control of the
signs and the innumerable quotations from the paintings and block prints of past centuries.
I tried to imagine the mural on the exterior wall rather than the interior. The mural is far
too intimate and confiding; its scenes and actions invite the sharing of confidences. It is not
declamatory and does not invite social action. However nor does it invite ‘distance’ and
‘disinterested’ viewing. There is a sense of participation through immersion which dispels
contemplation. One must walk the circularity of the panorama, pause to absorb a scene, move on
physically drawn into the incidents not merely as an eavesdropper but as a participant in
searching out the implication of the events as though joined with the characters portrayed. As
though staging a theatrical work, Tübke plays his game in a panorama hall with overlapping
scenic combinations, at the same time creating a connection between them and European
painting tradition. It is as though he is seeking voices - similar to seeing the image of someone in
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a photo and wondering how their voice sounds. Is it nasal, is it high, is it low? Were they
breathing heavily or easily? But the real question is: how does the ‘voice’ of the author sound in
this piece and who is the author?”
The uncertainty of the conclusion, the allegorical content and just the very number of
events illustrated, its complex and dense imagery permit a certain openness, an interference on
the part of the audience Rather, without information on the political grounding of the work,
meaning is generated through the physical engagement of the viewer in a dramatic theatrical
encounter which places the stage between players and audience. Not being an actual encounter,
the experience is meta-theatrical; acting as a safety valve rather than encouraging change and
hence supporting current discourse. I argue that because of its theatric quality and its quotations,
there is a sharing between the audience and the mural whereby the mural is presented rather than
interpreted. This sharing constitutes the possibility of meaning. The near physical engagement
with the past reified in 15th and 16th century quotations and style lends its subject a particular
note of authority.
However, the dialectical relationship linking the form of the mural to its content, in
contemporary, reunified Germany, is problematic. The mural was born in a political discourse
committed to class struggle; it has been revisited under another. Although some western
scholarly analysis has credited the peasant wars with an economic foundation, if not
revolutionary in force at least as an effect, prevailing discursive practice in the reunified
Germany continues the conventional interpretation of the peasant wars as primarily a religious
struggle. Contemporary readings as I have shown above try to locate their foundation in an
immanent manner. However, while it is possible to debate the content, the form by which the
style evoked by the old masters in a time appropriate to the conditions of the time, simply does
not resonate in the contemporary mind. The mural’s imagery is historically bound in the style of
late medieval Germany to such a degree that its ability to readily convert to the present day is
seriously hampered and without the assistance of political and ideological forces to help it along
it is stripped of its agency. The baroque world is a lamentable and lamenting world, god
forsaken, creaturely sorrowful, meaningless, verbose – where the allegorical imagination is a
form of melancholy redemption. Melancholy is present in a time obsessed with death and
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ruination. The idea of a hereafter in the course of modern history, with its progressive centurieslong tendency to secularisation, has become more and more diffuse, so that the phenomenon of
death at present is often now entirely repressed; a facade of outwardly life-affirming diversions
displaces the view to that area outside one‘s personal experience of time where the village of old,
of community and church has been displaced by the instant town and shopping mall. Böcklin‘s
“Islands of the Dead” is a suitable comparison here: what lies hidden beyond the shores of the
island, behind silence and darkness, is no longer a question of faith, but has become much more a
matter of imagination, of fantasy. The essential subject-matter is invisible. Hence the
contemporary mind does not relate to a style depicting an obsession with death and the
allegorical and symbolical treatment of the axioms or codes underlying salvation from death
such as sin, redemption and the Immaculate Conception, all of which Tübke manages to
incorporate in his mural.
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