German Joys

Onward Christian Leaders

You can bitch about German political chat-show hosts like Sandra Maischberger or Anne Will all you want.  But trust me, people -- they look like geniuses next to the oaf who shapes American political discourse, Tim Russert.  Here's how he moderates a Democratic Presidential debate:

"There's been a lot of discussion about the Democrats and the issue of faith and values.* I want to ask you a simple question. Senator Obama, what is your favorite Bible verse?"

When Obama finished his answer, Russert said to the other candidates, "I want to give everyone a chance in this. You just take 10 seconds." Predictable banality ensued. A foreign visitor unfamiliar with our presidential campaigns might have scratched her head and said, "This is how you decide who will lead your country?"

Alas, it is.  If only I were a famous journalist, I'd ask them for their favorite verse from the Bhagavad Gita.**

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* This "discussion" refers to the suspicion that Democrats (who are by and large anything-but-radical, mainstream church-going bourgeois reformists) do not openly discuss God and the Bible and their faith enough, and therefore may not be as devout as Republican politicians (claim to be).  For reasons that have always mystified me, this issue is considered important by many American voters. 

** An American presidential candidate who could actually name a verse from the Gita would, of course, be doomed.  By the way, my favorite Bible verse is Leviticus 14:14 -- as if you had to ask!

Richter's Confetti Windows

Over the weekend I dropped by Cologne to see Gerhard Richter's new windows in the south nave of the Cologne Cathedral.  My picture of them is here, although you can find better ones on the web.

Richter, who was born and trained as an artist in Dresden and came to West Germany in the early 1960s, flits from style to style like a dragonfly from reed to reed. Austere abstraction, mass-media quotation, black-and-white paintings based on blurry vacation photographs, giant, aggressively painterly canvases, microscope images, and even paintings which he himself unashamedly calls "beautiful" -- subjects such as a candles, a summer day, or clouds over open sea. As he once said -- in a phrase used as the title of a documentary about him -- "my pictures are cleverer than I am."

A few years ago, he was commissioned by the Diocese of Cologne to fill the windows in the south nave of that city's great gothic cathedral. The previous windows, installed after WWII, were featureless and almost clear. That blinded the faithful in the northern nave during winter days. At first, the Domkapitel (the cathedral's governing body) wanted windows that showed 20th century martyrs, but they couldn't settle on an appropriate design. They asked Richter, and he decided on complete abstraction. His model was a 1974 work called 4096 colors -- a painting composed of small squares painted completely at random in one of 72 different colors. The window has about 11,500 squares (G). Although the distribution of squares is random, Richter supposedly favored Mediterannean colors, which does come through in the shimmering wash of light which the windows produce.

The Cardinal of Cologne, Joachim Cardinal Meisner, is not pleased. To him (G), the windows are suspiciously ecumenical; you could find them in any place of worship, even (gasp) a mosque. Visitors have already dubbed them the "confetti windows." They also bring to mind a digital photograph blown up until none of the multicolored pixels forms a recognizable image.

I'm of two minds about the new windows. On the one hand, Meisner (gasp) sort of has a point, doesn't he? I'm not asking for bleeding-heart madonnas here, but something so aggressively abstract does have a bit of the airport ecumenical chapel about it. (For a different approach to church decoration look here). One the one hand, when the light shines through them strongly, the effect is real purty. Thousands of individual rays of multicolored light make the air visible.

Revelation in the Choir

Cologne, Germany has been an important Catholic bishopric since the 3rd century, and boasts many fine churches. The Cathedral of Cologne, that slightly menacing, spiky, monster crouching next to the main train station, is only the most famous.

Cologne also boasts a dozen nice Romanesque churches within its city center, built between 900 and 1200. I find Romanesque churches soothing. They're not intimidatingly huge, and the interiors are filled with pleasant, rounded forms like arches and cupolas, instead of Gothic gloom and pointiness. I usually try to visit one or two of these churches when I go to Cologne, which I did for New Years'. This time it was the St. Aposteln Church, located near the big Neumarkt transit hub.

St. Aposteln is kind of unusual because it's successully solved a tricky problems: tasteful modern church decoration. If you don't have any 16th-century frescos on your walls, or if the ones you did got bombed, what do you replace them with? Good old-fashioned pictures of conventional blond Christs with flowing locks and Marys with blue vestments seem anachronistic and stodgy.

But then again, a pure abstract composition will outrage the reactionaries, and just don't seem churchy enough. "See that floating field of red? That represents Joseph." The result, therefore, is usually some sort of unsatisfying combination of figural painting and abstraction. An example can be seen at the left, the altar of the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in the Roman suburb of EUR. A sort of horribly misguided arte povera mishmash that I calll The Redeemer of the Scrap Metal. Behold, and then avert your eyes!

But it can be done right, as St. Aposteln shows. During World War II, the 19th-century mosaics decorating the choir were severely damaged. The church authorities described this as good news, since the rather twee and saccharine mosaics looked extremely dated by the 1950s.

After what were probably dozens of  agonizingly long meetings and negotiations, the authorities finally decided to hire a 'church painter' named Hermann Gottfried to decorate the 3 conchas (or "half-cupolas") in the choir. Since the basic structure has been on this spot in Cologne for almost 900 years, Gottfried has to think about how people might view his work, say, 500 years from now. Assuming there aren't any more world wars during that time, of course. Gottfried started his cycle of modern paintings, which are based on the Biblical Revelation to John, in 1988, and finished five years later. Here's a page (G) with more information.

The colors are mainly gray and blue, to fit the church's subdued tone, but there are blazes of red (for the Woman Clothed with the Sun) and orange (around the Lamb). The composition makes fascinating use of the curved, recessed space provided by the cupolas. Energy-filled planes of abstract forms clash and meld. However, recognizable images (a lamb, a crowd of people, Mary) emerge from the abstraction. Some of the figures are surprisingly graceful, others distorted and slightly menacing, as befits this weird apocalyptic text. The picture at the right shows the painting behind the altar, which depicts the Throne of God. It's completely abstract, but there are more figural paintings on the sides.

The paintings pulsate with energy and color, they blend beautifully with the church interior, and they have a challenging and not at all saccharine iconographic program. I emerged very impressed with Mr. Gottfried. Of course, my little picture really can't do justice to the paintings, so next time you're in Cologne, stop off at the Neumarkt station and see if you agree with me...

Pope: Vacation is Holy

Pope Benedict XVI's least controversial pronouncement to date:

Working too hard, even for those leading the Catholic Church, is bad for the spirit, Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday as he greeted tourists at his summer residence outside Rome.... Benedict quoted [St. Bernard] as advising pontiffs to "watch out for the dangers of an excessive activity, whatever ... the job that you hold, because many jobs often lead to the 'hardening of the heart,' as well as 'suffering of the spirit, loss of intelligence.'"

A German Joys Contest: Pick My Religion!

I will shortly depart for a vacation to fabulous Slovenia and mysterious Hungary, but directly afterward, I'll be stopping by the Citizen Registration Office to renew my visa here in Germany.  I have little doubt that, as usual, I will be asked to write my religion on an official government form.  This always strikes me as rather dodgy.  I don't particularly think the government has any business knowing what religion I practice.

So I take an irresponsible American approach, defined by the motto: "Ask a silly question, get a silly answer."  At first I was an atheist, which seemed the safest way to avoid church taxes.  Then I found out I could name any religion I wanted without getting taxed, as long as it wasn't Catholic or "Evangelisch" (Protestant).  So the next time I renewed my visa I became a Buddhist, since I've always had a thing for the Noble Eightfold Path.

But why should my next answer be limited by my own creativity?  There's a whole world of possibilities out there I might not have thought of.  Although I have thought of a lot, including the Yazidi.  They worship a blue peacock and can't eat butter beans.  So far so good, but they're also prohibited from wearing dark blue, which is one of my favorite colors.  So no Yazidi-ism for me.  I've also thought about putting down "Worship of the Flying Spaghetti Monster," but that won't fit on the form.

So, dear readers, get to those comment boxes and give me a religion!  Whoever has the most creative suggestion will dominate my spiritual development for the next year, at least in the eyes of the German state.  What more precious reward could I offer?

New Pope, Old Scandal

The English and German-speaking worlds have welcomed the new Pope very differently.  The German press focuses overwhelmingly on his thought, character, and background.  The criticism -- and there is plenty -- deals primarily with his traditionalist views of church leadership and theology.

Little attention is paid to his role in the priest-abuse scandals that have rocked the American church.  There's no article devoted just to this topic on the website of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a standard-setting right-of-center broadsheet.  When the topic is mentioned it's a matter of a few sentences, usually capped by the assertion that Pope Benedict XVI has recently made himself familiar with the number and scope of the allegations, and plans to take them seriously. 

The New German Pope

Just a snapshot of the German reaction to the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI.  Benedict is, of course, a very known quantity here in Germany, and the reaction to his election has been distinctly muted.  Here are some representative quotes from an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the conservative German broadsheet:

Many Christians in the new Pope's homeland reacted to the message from Rome with mixed feelings. 

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Ecumenical outreach is close to the heart of many Catholics and Protestants in the homeland of Luther's Reformation.  Confessional boundaries are especially painfully felt here; the divide goes through many families.   The wish for more cooperation and a shared communion finds great understanding among many German bishops. 

Papal Insecticide

It's so far just in German, but this interview with dissident theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann is lively.  The reaction to the Pope's death is interesting here in Germany.  People here have grown up with their church deeply programmed into their cultural identity in a qualitatively different way than Americans might.  It's still very popular to study theology here, and the study is rigorous; you come away from the study with a deep, intimate knowledge of dogma, and might decide to spend a weekend reading City of God. 

Anyone can criticise the Catholic church as an outsider, from a political or pragmatic perspective.  Heck, it claims the allegiance of over a billion people, that makes it fair game.  But I find it more interesting to read critiques from people who believe in God, view materialism as dangerous, and accept the notion that religion cannot be just a matter of loosey-goosey, choose-your-own-ending spirituality. 

Uta Ranke-Heinemann is one of those.  Daughter of a former German President and the first woman to obtain a professorship in Catholic theology, had her license to teach revoked by the Church in 1987 because she questioned the virginity of Mary.  It didn't faze her:

Spiegel Online: Are you looking forward to meeting the Pope in Heaven?

Ranke-Heinemann: I'm not going to begin fantasizing here, but I have the impression the Pope will first meet Mary, who will come to meet him with Jesus' siblings, of which he had at least six.  These siblings are, of course, mentioned in the New Testament -- but, to protect Mary's 'virginity,' they have been theologically aborted with papal insecticide.  But I don't view this papal mistake as tragic.  I've made plenty of mistakes myself.

The Late Pope: A Polish Dissenter's Perspective

Don't overlook this interesting comment on my little blurb to the Hans Kueng piece on the late John Paul II (which perhaps wasn't all that original, but forcefully argued). 

In the comment, Schmetterling, who is from Poland, provides a needed counterpoint to the seemingly endless TV images of obediently faithful and telegenic Poles weeping, caressing photos of their dear Pontiff, and, apparently, asking for his heart to be ripped from his body and buried in their country (as today's Bild headline reported).

The executive summary is that while the Pope is due respect, many Poles have criticisms of Pope John Paul II's pontificate that are similar to ones voiced outside his homeland, and many more to add besides.  Also in Poland, there have been child-abuse scandals, links with questionable politicians, and toleration of a hidebound, hierarchical practice of the faith, which goes even well beyond what many Western Europeans and Americans might imagine. 

As well, apparently, as some really vulgar churches.  (I admit, I have a little weakness for vulgar churches).  But just click through yourself, it's worth reading.

Catholic Church in Crisis?

Here you'll find the English version of an article by dissident Catholic theologian Hans Küng. Technically, I guess you can't call him a theologian anymore, since the Church took away his permit to teach Catholic doctrine in 1979 after he wrote a book challenging the doctrine of papal infallibility. Küng finds almost nothing good about the Pope's tenure, singling out the following areas: