Convent student reading
The reading monastery student is a wooden sculpture by Ernst Barlach . It represents a seated figure sunk in a book lying on its knees. Barlach created the wooden figure, which is just under life-size and which is now in the Gertrudenkapelle in Güstrow , in 1930.
In Alfred Andersch's novel “ Sansibar or the Last Reason ”, published in 1957, a sculpture of the same name plays an essential role: In the fictional story, the protagonists save the sculpture, which was discriminated against and threatened by the National Socialists as degenerate, to Sweden. This sculpture, “barely half a meter tall” in the novel, is not simply identical to Barlach's figure.