Lübeck dance of death
The Lübeck dance of death was one of the best-known and most powerful dance of death presentations. It was completely destroyed during the British air raid on Lübeck on the night of March 29, 1942.
Origin and shape
The Lübeck dance of death was probably created in 1463 under the impression of the black death , the plague , in the Marienkirche in Lübeck , after a first dance of death was probably made in the Abbey of La Chaise-Dieu . It consisted of Middle Low German rhyming verses and associated pictures on canvas and was located in the dance of death chapel in the north transept, which was later named after him . The chapel served as a confessional when the dance of death was created and contained appropriate stalls with separate seats for clergymen listening to confession ; the frieze reminded those coming here for confession of their impermanence.
The work is generally attributed to Bernt Notke and traced back to a Central Dutch original. The frieze extended as a continuous wall of pictures above the pews in the chapel to a length of almost 30 meters and a height of two meters. Against the backdrop of the city of Lübeck and the surrounding landscape, it showed 2 times 12 life-size couples - each with a death figure and a status figure in the hierarchical sequence of the class society . In each of the verses the person addresses death. He answers and then turns to the next "dance partner" in the last verse of his answer.
The dance began with the Pope, followed by the Emperor and Empress (one of two female figures), the Cardinal and the King (on the west wall: 1 ).
On the north wall followed the bishop ( 2 ), the duke (removed in 1799 when the north portal was expanded), the abbot and the knight ( 3 ).
The most impressive series of figures consisted of a Carthusian monk , nobleman (since 1701: mayor), canon, mayor (since 1701: nobleman) and doctor in front of the silhouette of the city of Lübeck ( 4 ).
This was followed by usurers, chaplain, merchant (from 1701: bailiff), sexton, bailiff (in the sense of: member of an office , craftsman; from 1701: merchant) ( 5 ).
After an interruption by the Oldesloe Chapel, which no longer exists today, Klausner and Bauer ( 6 ) appeared on the north wall of the massive transept central pillar .
On the west side of the pillar, opposite the beginning, there was a young man, a young girl and finally the child in the cradle ( 7 ).
Except for the wall, the clergy and the secular usually alternate - the doctor and sexton are clergy.
Copy
In 1701 the dance of death was in such bad condition that the head of the Marienkirche decided to have the painting copied in full instead of further repairs. At the same time, the no longer understandable and only partly legible verses in Middle Low German were replaced by High German rhymes. Before that, the pastor and polyhistor Jacob von Melle copied the verses still preserved at this point in time " in memory and in honor of antiquity " and received them for posterity. The church painter Anton Wortmann created the copy of the figures, while the preceptor at the St. Anne's orphanage Nathanael Schlott designed the new High German verses as baroque Alexandrians . The verses were also given headings that identified the respective speakers. In contrast to the old dialogue, it was now death that addressed each person. In addition, there were apparently two changes: On the one hand, due to a misunderstanding of the Middle Low German word Amtmann (which means something like craftsman ), the inscriptions of this figure and the businessman were exchanged. The other change, in which the nobleman and mayor swapped places, which caused the mayor to move up two places in the social hierarchy, was due to political reasons, namely the increased self-confidence of the town patriziats .
In 1799 the north portal of the Marienkirche was enlarged. The Duke and the death that preceded him fell victim to this construction project.
Despite its character as a copy, the Dance of Death was widely famous and widely published. Like many other tourists, the British Thomas Nugent was shown the dance of death as an attraction, who reported on it in his Travels through Germany (1768).
In 1783, Ludwig Suhl , at that time a teacher at the Katharineum as well as head of the city library and later one of the founders of the Society for the Promotion of Charitable Activities , published a series of eight copperplate engravings with the dance of death and both verses.
In 1853, Carl Julius Milde cleared the dance of death and took this opportunity to make views that were published in 1866 as lithographs together with a text by the historian and librarian Wilhelm Mantels . This was the beginning of a historical-critical preoccupation with the work of art and its tradition. Mantels was the first to recognize the inconsistencies in the rendering of the Middle Low German verses in von Melle's work and made considerations that are largely accepted to this day.
At the beginning of the Second World War , the chapel and the dance of death were secured against the effects of high explosive bombs with massive wooden cladding , but it was not taken into account that this would not only help against incendiary bombs , it would even encourage destruction. The dance of death burned completely in the British bombing raid on Lübeck on Palm Sunday night 1942. Today only the photo documentation of the Lübeck photographer Wilhelm Castelli gives a more precise idea .
Two windows in the chapel designed by Alfred Mahlau in 1955/56 remind us today of this lost work of art.
The fragment in Tallinn
In the Nikolai Church of Tallinn , the fragment (about 1/4) of a similar dance of death with still 13 characters. Research has long debated whether this is a cutout, a fragment of the original Lübeck dance of death (according to the thesis of Carl Georg Heise , 1937). Today, however, there is a consensus that this is the fragment of a later (around 1500) replica Notke's handwritten for Tallinn . Since the mid-1980s, this dance of death has been set up again in the Antonius Chapel of the Nikolaikirche.
Reception and adaptation
literature
- The Redentiner Easter game from 1464
- Des dodes dantz (1489, 1496), incunabula of the Mohnkopf-Offizin of Hans van Ghetelen in Lübeck, 1496 in a modified second edition
- Dodendantz 1520, early printing of the Mohnkopf-Offizin with a controversial reference to the incunabula on the subject
- Suhl: The dance of death in the Marienkirche in Lübeck. Lübeck 1783
- Hans Henny Jahnn , (co-author: Werner Helwig ): New Lübeck Dance of Death ( drama ). Rowohlt. Hamburg 1954
- Werner Bergengruen , The Death of Reval (1939)
music
- Hugo Distler , composer and church musician, wrote an impressive setting as a cappella chorus based on a transcription by Johannes Klöcking and verses by Angelus Silesius under the impression of the Lübeck dance of death (first performance on September 29, 1934 in the Katharinenkirche , then in Kassel)
- Walter Kraft : Lübeck Dance of Death. A spiritual game of death, with dancing figures based on the old painting frieze of St. Mary's (1954)
- Yngve Jan Trede (1954) and Hans-Ola Ericsson (2009) wrote incidental music for Hans Henny Jahnn's play Neuer Lübeck Dance of Death .
- Thomas Adès : World premiere of his symphonic concert Totentanz for orchestra and 2 voices (mezzo-soprano and baritone) on July 17, 2013 on the occasion of the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall , London, UK using the 15th century music by Jacob von Melle . Original verses of the "Dance of Death" in Lübeck's St. Mary's Church, which have been handed down and which Nathanael Schlott presumably copied in 1701 in High German.
theatre
- Hans Holtorf : Totentanz , (1923–1925), theater adaptation in the expressionist style
Painting and graphics
- Herwig Zens: The New Lübeck Dance of Death. a "paraphrase"
- Tympanum window by Markus Lüpertz
- Aloys Ohlmann: 14 serigraphs from the Kirchzarten dance of death to the Lübeck dance of death by Hugo Distler by Aloys Ohlmann
In a broader sense, this also includes Horst Janssen's Hommage à Tannewetzel , which he wrote for the presentation of the book by Joachim Fest : The dancing death and gave a speech about his friend Hein on New Year's Day 1986 in the Marienkirche in front of 3000 listeners .
Video / film
- Eckhard Blach: The Dance with Death (1987).
- Herbert Link: Who dances with death
20th century
- One of the most momentous vaccination incidents in medical history in 1930 is also called the Lübeck Dance of Death.
literature
- The dance of death in the so-called death chapel of St. Mary's Church in Lübeck. Schmidt, Lübeck 1800.
- The dance of death in the Marienkirche in Lübeck. Drawn by CJ Milde and with text by Wilhelm Mantels , Lübeck: Rahtgens 1866
- Digital copy of the copy of the Lübeck City Library hand-colored by the porcelain painter JH Richter (Lub. 2 ° 3490)
- Reprint: Hartmut Freytag (ed.): The dance of death in the Marienkirche in Lübeck . After a drawing by CJ Milde , with an explanatory text by Professor W. Mantels . Reprint of the Lübeck edition: Rathgens 1866, with an afterword by Hartmut Freytag. Lübeck 1989. Second, increased and improved edition 1993. Third, again increased and improved edition 1997 ISBN 3-925402-26-8
- Hermann Baethcke : The Lübeck Death Dance. An attempt to produce the old Low German text. Berlin: Calvary 1873 ( digitized version )
- Hermann Baethcke: Des Dodes Danz: after the Lübeck prints of 1489 and 1496. Library of the Litterarian Association in Stuttgart Volume 127 Tübingen 1876 Digitized in the Google Book Search USA , reprint Darmstadt 1968
- Rolf Paul Dreier: The dance of death - a motif of church art as a projection surface for profane messages (1425-1650). Leiden 2010, ISBN 978-90-90-25111-0 , pp. 79-131. (Including CD-Rom: Directory of the Dances of Death, also on www.totentanz.nl). Especially for the dance of death in Lübeck (1463)
- Ludwig Suhl : Short message from the Lübeck Todtentanze. Lübeck 1783 (digitized version)
- Hartmut Freytag (ed.): The dance of death in the Marienkirche in Lübeck and the Nikolaikirche in Reval (Tallinn). Edition, commentary, interpretation, reception. (= Low German Studies Volume 39). Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 1993, ISBN 3-412-01793-0 .
- Maike Claußnitzer, Hartmut Freytag, Susanne Warda: The Redentiner - a Lübeck Easter game. About the Redentiner Easter game from 1464 and the dance of death in the Marienkirche in Lübeck from 1463. In: Journal for German antiquity and German literature. 132, 2003, pp. 189-238.
Web links
- Search for Lübeck Dance of Death in the SPK digital portal of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation
- Search for Lübeck Dance of Death in the German Digital Library
- Extensive collection of texts and images on the Lübeck Dance of Death (English and Danish)
- Representation of iconography and iconology in historical studies using the example of the Lübeck-Tallinn dance of death (created at the Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald)
Individual evidence
- ↑ digitized version
- ^ Digitized version of the autograph score, Lübeck City Library
- ↑ Source: BBC Proms 2013, Official Guide, p. 126, see also Dance of Death. In: The New Yorker . March 16, 2015, p. 15.