Symbols invite contemplation but can be confronting and confusing. I experienced all three reactions when faced with a massive crucifix above the judicial bench in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, where Nazis were tried for war crimes.
The crucifix was common in Germany’s public buildings until replaced with portraits of Adolf Hitler as part of the Nazi secularisation project. After the war, the portraits came down and crosses went back up. As though space must be filled.
In 2018, the Bavarian government intensified the process by mandating that Christian crosses be placed at the entrances of all public buildings. Premier Markus Söder said they should not be seen as religious symbols but as a “clear avowal of our Bavarian identity and Christian values”. There was resistance, and the arguments continue.
110km north sits Würzburg Cathedral, named for St. Kilian. Originally built in 752, it was restored after being bombed during World War II. I didn’t expect confrontation in this beautiful building but got it on the threshold. This time when faced with the giant menorah created in 1981by Andreas Moritz. It’s unmissable and powerful.
When talking about symbolism in art, Carl Jung said that “their pregnant language cries out to us that they mean more than they can say”. That made sense on my repeated visits to the cathedral, pulled back by the menorah gazing towards the high altar where another crucifix hangs. It felt as though the symbols were holding space so two siblings sharing the same mother tongue could create their post-Holocaust path together.
Silence, space and tension appeared again at Dachau Concentration Camp. No entrance fee. No security checkpoint. Just tree lined paths inviting visitors to walk quietly through the camp following the route a prisoner would take. Nothing was hidden. No-one tried to convince me of the atrocities committed there.
At the far end of a vast open space, where prisoner barracks once stood, were Jewish, Catholic and Protestant memorials. Behind them is a Carmelite Convent, in the shape of a cross, a place of prayer and “a living symbol of hope”.
In the Protestant memorial, itself “a symbol of suffering and death, but also protest and resistance”, is another crucifix but like no other I have ever seen. Within it, sculptor Fritz Koenig has embedded a creature that is struggling for freedom. In the process the creature appears to be destroying what threatens to subsume it.
Just before 3pm, the traditional time of Jesus’s death, the bell beside the Catholic Mortal Agony of Christ Chapel tolled, as it does daily. Another symbol asking to be noticed even if not understood. As Murray Stein says about symbols, what is being communicated is utterly untranslatable … at least for the time being.
As I walked away I wondered if Dachau, this secular place of suffering had, through the presence of symbols, become a holy place. A sanctuary inviting us to listen, to watch, wonder and wait. To move beyond judgement to imagine the liberating power of forgiveness.
