Sonderdrucke aus der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

WILHELM SCHLINK The Gothic Cathedral as Heavenly Jerusalem: A Fiction in German Art History Die Originalveröffentlichung erschien in: Bianca KÜHNEL (Hrsg.): The real and ideal Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian and Islamic art : Studies in Honor of Bezalel Narkiss on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday. Jerusalem : Hebrew University, 1998 (Jewish art ; 23/24), S. 275-285

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The Gothic Cathedral as Heavenly Jerusalem: A Fiction in German Art History

Wilhelm Schlink German art historians have been interested in architectural iconology for al long time. Günther Günter Bandmann’s book Mittelalterliche Architektur als Bedeutungsträger (The Meaning of Medieval Architecture), published in 1951, was the culmination and – in some respects – the end of a hundred odd years old tradition, a tradition rooted in the romantic period and based upon the figurative sense and symbolic power of all art and architecture.1 The maxim of „the Gothic Cathedral as Heavenly Jerusalem“ originated in this milieu. Everybody knows, that this maxim was largely developed by Hans Sedlmayr in his book Die Entstehung der Kathedrale (The Origins of the Cathedral), published in 1950. But Sedlmayr’s method is suggestive rather than scientific.

Recently the idea of the Gotic cathedral as Heavenly Jerusalem has achieved a revival in international architectural history. Take, for example, Anne Prache’s book Notre Dame de Chartres. Image de la Jérusalem céleste, published in 1993, or Stephan Murray’s investigations into the planning of Amiens Cathedral, with the questionable result, that this building in its measurements supposedly corresponds to the vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem.2

It looks as if the simplistic approach, the unrestrained method and the ideological tempered goal of Sedlmayr’s book has been forgotten. What apparently remains up to our days, is the fascination with the idea, that the Gothic Cathedral means or is the Heavenly Jerusalem. I will try to explain the following: firstly, that this maxim is symptomatic of a special Austrian catholic conservatism in the age of burgeoning National-Socialism; secondly, that this maxim is rooted in a specific manner of perception, German architects and art historians had developed from 1910 onwards; thirdly, that there is no reason to perpetuate this dubious idea – we would do better to forget it now and forever.

Hans Sedlmayr, born in 1896,3 was officer in the Austrian Orient-Army in 1915-1918. In this function he was in Constantinople, Syria and Jerusalem. In 1918 he began as an architectural student in Vienna, but two years later he changed the University and had an education in art history under Max Dvořak and Julius von Schlosser. He took his doctor’s degree in 1923. In 1934 he was qualified for lecturing in art history at Vienna University, where he received the chair in 1936. With the end of the Third Reich he was removed from University as an active Nazi. He had a six years wait for a new chair, – now at Munich University. In the meantime Sedlmayr had published the two books that made him well-known in post-war Germany: „Verlust der Mitte“ (Without Center), published in 1948, and the above-mentioned Entstehung der Kathedrale, published in 1950. Both books were written as complements to each other. The first is rooted in a Spenglerian apocalyptic atmosphere of decline,4 the second in a neoromantic vision of a wedding between Heaven and Earth. In the late 1950s – when I was a student under Sedlmayr – we had the impression, that these books were typical examples of a post-war newborn catholic restoration with a strong antiliberal and antimodernistic touch. Today we can see further: Sedlmayr had not to change his ideas and convictions after 1945 to obtain the chair at Munich. At least the Entstehung der Kathedrale was in all its essential parts conceived in the 1930s. It’s not a book written for post-Nazi rehabilitation; it’s the fruit of research and consideration done with the national-socialist party membership book in his pocket. From

1 Franz Kugler, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1842), 3 2 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 22 May 1996, Nr. 118, p. N5. Other examples of the Heavenly Jerusalem

– revival: Achim Hubel and Manfred Schuller, Der Dom zu Regensburg (Regensburg, 1995), 36, or André Chastel, L’Art Français, vol. II. Pré-Moyen Age et Moyen Age (Paris, 1993), 219.

3 For biographical notes on Hans Sedlmayr see: Peter Haiko, „Verlust der Mitte von Hans Sedlmayr als kritische Form im Sinne der Theorie von Hans Sedlmayr“, Willfähige Wissenschaft. Die Universität Wien 1938-1945, ed. by Gernot Heiss (Vienna, 1989), 77-87. Norbert Schneider, „Hans Sedlmayr, 1896-1984“, Altmeister moderner Kunstgeschichte, ed. by Heinrich Dilly (Berlin, 1990), 266-288.

4 Beat Wyss, Trauer der Vollendung. Von der Aesthetik des deutschen Idealismus zur Kulturkritik an der Moderne (Stuttgart, 1985), 283-296.

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1930 to 1932 and from 1938 to 1945 Sedlmayr was a member of the NSDAP and in between he organized Austrian underground art politics for nazi purposes.

We know little about Sedlmayrs life and work in Vienna during the 1920s and 30s. He published articles and books on baroque architecture, on Austrian art, on French medieval art and architecture and on art historical methodology.5 In his youth – during the early twenties – Sedlmayr was a rather progressive art critic: he remembers in 1950, that his first deep impressions of art and architecture had been Kokoschka and Loos, Picasso and Le Corbusier.6 An article dates from 1926 on Le Corbusier and his „plan Voisin“, written by the young art critic in a rather affirmative manner.7 But during the following years Sedlmayr must have profoundly changed his ideas on art, art politics, civilisation and culture, society and religion. In this time his discontent with contemporary art and modern culture begins and his search for a save world – represented in the Middle Ages. These are the very ideas of the „conservative revolution“, in particular of the youngconservative circles around Moeller van den Bruck and Gustav Steinböhmer;8 but for the Austrian Hans Sedlmayr the young-conservative conception was combined with his strong roots in a catholic social order and his expectations in a new Greater German Empire, ruled by a charismatic „Führer“. These ideas of the marked Catholic wing in the „Grossdeutsche Volkspartei“ were easily transformed into a general agreement with National-Socialist politics and ideology in 1938.9

In the late 1940s, when Sedlmayr was „persona ingrata“, he signed his articles in Catholic-conservative periodicals with the pseudonym Hans Schwarz. Among Sedlmayr’s pupils it is said, that this was an allusion to the great Italian connoisseur Giovanni Morelli, who signed his books in Russian as Ivan Lermolieff and in German as Johannes Schwarze. But I fail to see connection between Hans Schwarz and Johannes Schwarze. Moreover, Hans Schwarz was the name of a leading member of the young-conservative circle around Moeller van den Bruck, the chief editior of Moeller van den Bruck’s books and articles after the latter’s death in 1925.10 Sedlmayr must have been aquainted with this person and with his neoconservative ideas. The pseudonym Hans Schwarz for Sedlmayr evidently was an act of demonstration that he wouldn’t change his conservative principles due to different political circumstances, or in orther words: that he avoided and disdained every sort of opportunism. The same applies to his situation in 1938. In this very year Sedlmayr wrote an editorial for the Essays in Honour of Wilhelm Pinder, consisting of emphatic rejoicings over the four days old Heim ins Reich (the Austrians connection with the German Empire) and deeply felt pledges of fidelity to the „Führer Adolf Hitler“.11 But Sedlmayrs article itself should be described as rather non-National-Socialist. Sedlmayr tried to demonstrate, that the keyword for our understanding of French art and architecture – from medieval church-building through Versailles and Fragonard or Watteau up to the buildings of Boullé and Ledoux – must be das Paradiesische (the paradisiacal). And Sedlmayr explained this fundamental utopian character of French art by the Celtic roots of French culture. All these arguments are far from a National-Socialist ideology. The paradise located in Celtic France must have sounded offensive to pangermanic ears. Insofar as Sedlmayr imagined an art historical period always in its relation to God, he overlooked the Christan world in its entirety. This restrained him from overdrawn nationalist or racist art historical positions – the destiny and misery of so many of his art historian collegues. But he was a prisoner of his conservative, antiliberal and antidemocratic attitude. So he regarded the periods dating after the French Revolution as a cultural

5 A list of Sedlmayrs publications up to 1960 will be found in: Festschrift für Hans Sedlmayr (München,

1962), 349-355. 6 DarmstädterGespräch (1950). Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit, ed. by H. Gerhard Evers (Darmstadt,

n.d.), 97 7 Hans Sedlmayr, “Der absolute Städtebau I, Stadtbaupläne von Le Corbusier (ausgestellt im Wiener

Künstlerhaus, März-April 1926).“ Die Baupolitik, Zeitschriftfür Bauwesen und Städtebau, Siedlungspolitik und Wohnungsfürsorge (München, 1926/27), 16-21

8 Armin Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932, Ein Handbuch, 2nd ed. (Darmstadt, 1972). Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik (1962. München, 1994). Explicitly Sedlmayr adoptet the term Reichsstil from Gustav Steinböhmer: Sedlmayr, „Die Rolle Österreichs in der Geschichte der deutschen Kunst“, Forschungen und Fortschritte 13, 1937, 418 ss.

9 Wien 1938, Forschungen und Beiträge zur Wiener Stadtgeschichte 2 (Wien, 1978). Das Geistige Leben Wiens in der Zwischenkriegszeit, ed. by Norbert Leser (Wien, 1982).

10 Oswalt von Nostitz, Ein Preusse im Umbruch der Zeit: Hans Schwarz 1890-1967 (Hamburg, 1980). 11 Festschrift Wilhelm Pinder zum 60. Geburtstage (Leipzig, 1938). Sedlmayrs article „Vermutungen und

Fragen zur Bestimmung der altfranzösischen Kunst“, 9-27.

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Fig. 1. Max Taut, Marmordom, sketch for illustration in Frühlicht, 1919. From Catalogue Max Taut, Berlin, 1964, no. 26 (All photos by author)

and artistic decline, as a constant distancing from God, as a mere provoking of Chaos; bad modern times found their positive opposite in the good middle ages, when the gothic cathedral as Heavenly Jerusalem joined the human existence with the celestian sphere.

Sedlmayr’s decision to write a book on the gothic cathedral was not an overly original idea. The cathedral was one of the great catchwords during the time between the two world wars. On the one hand, for leftist intellectuals and for modernists, it meant in an utopian manner the task of building the future society. This is how „the cathedral of the future“ is represented in sketches by Bruno and Max Taut (fig.1), in the famous Bauhaus-Program woodcut by Lionel Feininger from 1919 (fig.2), or in books, articles and aphorisms by Paul Scheerbart, Adolf Behne and Walter Gropius.12 One of the keywords Sedlmayr uses to analyze the gothic cathedral, is called „crystal“: Der Raum baut sich aus lauter durchsichtigen Baldachinzellen zusammen wie ein Kristall aus seinen Teilkristallen (The space of the gothic cathedral bears a strong resemblence to a crystal grown from parts of crystals).13 Exactly this keyword is used in a similar sense in the utopian discussions of expressionist architects. The „cathedral of the future“ should be the „crystalline symbol of a new forthcoming religion“, – so Walter Gropius in the Bauhaus manifesto.14

On the other hand the gothic cathedral was a bygone utopia for the young-conservatives. Paul Fechter’s Die Tragödie der Architektur (1921) can be read as an interesting parallel or as a sort of introduction to Sedlmayr’s Entstehung der Kathedrale. Even in National-Socialist pamphlets the Gothic cathedral held its place

12 Paul Scheerbart, Glasarchitektur (Berlin, 1914). Bruno Taut, Die Stadtkrone (Jena, 1919). Bruno Taut,

Frühlicht (periodical, 1920-1922). Adolf Behne, Die Wiederkehr der Kunst (1919). Gören Lindahl, „Von der Zukunftskathedrale bis zur Wohnmaschine“, Idea and Form. Studies in the History of Art (Figura, N.S. 1, Stockholm, 1959), 226-282. Wolfgang Pehnt, Die Architektur des Expressionismus (Stuttgart, 1973), 50 ff. (Der Geist der Gotik)

13 H. Sedlmayr, Die Entstehung der Kathedrale, 50. Cf. also 69, 82, 85f., 241, and 332 f. 14 Uwe M. Scheede, Die 20-er Jahre. Manifeste und Dokumente deutscher Künstler (Köln, 1979), p. 165.

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Fig. 2. Lyonel Feiniger, Cathedral, Bauhaus-Programm, Fig. 3. Chartres Cathedral, central nave and apse From Catalogue L. Feiniger, 200 Holzschnitte aus Privat- besitz, Ludwigsburg, 1995, p. 63.

as an example for the dynamic artistic genius of Germanic Europe. There is a rather exhaustive passage on the gothic cathedral in Alfred Rosenbergs notorious book, published in 1930, Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts.15

Let us turn to art historical investigations in high-gothic church-building. For the 20th century they come up with Wilhelm Worringer, and one cannot overestimate the influence this author had up to the 1950s. Worringer’s book Formprobleme der Gotik (1911), puts anthropological interests in front of architectural analysis. It is not the cathedral of Chartres or the cathedral of Reims, that are in the center of Worringer’s book, but der Gotiker (the Gothic man); and this Gotiker is both a historic figure (the contemporary of the gothic cathedral) as well as the modern German interpreter himself. The Gotiker of the tirteenth century had to bring his „chaotic ecstasy into a systematic form“, that is to build the gothic cathedral. And the modern Gotiker, the interpreter of the gothic cathedral, is well advised to be open für die Erfahrung einer mystischen Sinnberauschung, die nicht von dieser Welt ist (for the experience of a mystic overhelming power, that ist not from our world).

The conviction, that stands behind such statements, is a double one: Gothic architecture is non- or anti-classic, and gothic architecture has its origins in chaotic concepts. Consequently gothic architecture cannot be described or analyzed as a logical and reasonable composition from its parts. The only perception, an art historian is able to communicate to other people, is an individual mystic experience, a rather amorphous impres-

15 195th to 200th edition (München, 1943), pp. 351 ff.

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sion. The German term, that is the basis of this sort of interpretation, (a term difficult to translate into other languages), is called Erleben (a deep experience achieved by an inner participation and emotion). Up to the 1950s the Erlebnis of the gothic cathedral is predominant in all German architectural analysis; it is aimed at the integral whole, it is expressed rather in a mystic vision than in a reasonable discourse, and each author is convinced, that his own Erlebnis and his own interpretation are the only right ones.

In 1927 Hans Jantzen in his famous lecture „Über den gotischen Kirchenraum“16tried to give a correct and scientific analysis of the wall, that borders the high-gothic central-nave. In the opinion of Jantzen the diaphane Struktur (the diaphanous structure) describes the gothic wall in a specific manner. That’s well known to all art historians, but everybody has a different understanding of the diaphanous structure; most of us realize the light and luminous character of the gothic wall consisting of piers, columns, galeries and window tracery. But the original sense of Jantzen’s diaphane Struktur was another one, – a rather mystical, at least a very complicated one. Diaphane Struktur describes the relationship of the central-nave wall to its background (fig.3). This background – in the words of Hans Jantzen: der Raumgrund, der der Wand als optische Zone gleichsam hinterlegt ist (the background, that is placed as an optical zone behind the wall) – is seen as a mystical continuity that wraps around the whole cruciform of the central-nave of the gothic cathedral.

For Hans Jantzen the term Raum (space) has a double significance: on the one hand it is an enclosed space, for example the central nave of the cathedral; on the other hand it is an optical phenomenon, that lies behind the frontiers of the prior defined space. Together they define die spezifischen Merkmale gotischer Raumwirkung (the specific features of gothic spacial organization and experience).

Jantzens analysis of gothic architecture is an apodictic one. His starting point is his private Raumerlebnis (experience of space). The primary space of the high-gothic cathedral is the cruciform of the central nave (including the high-choir and the apse); everything else is mere background for the central space walls. Mere background are the side-ailes, the galeries and the stained glass –windows. Nothing is called by its exact name, – everything is described by metaphorical terms. The stained glass windows – in Jantzens interpretation – don’t represent prophets, apostles, biblical events or the legends of the Saints; they are mere farbige Wände (walls of colour and light). Jantzen rejects analyzing the cathedral in detail; what he searches for are dark and magic terms that describe his impression and that make gothic architecture distinguishable from romanesque architecture. Jantzen was unable and unwilling to explain the gothic cathedral in all its details and to give a real understanding of its meaning. His conclusion is rather trivial and sounds mysteriously: Der Raum der gotischen Kathedrale ist das Symbol eines Raumlosen (The space of the gothic cathedral ist the symbol of a space-lessness).

This was the level of high-gothic architectural interpretation in Germany, when Hans Sedlmayr took up his own investigations in the 1930s. As a scientist and in character he was quite different from Jantzen. He had an unrestrained desire to describe, to analyze, to explain everything. He was convinced that he had got the key to the understanding of the cathedral as a whole and also to all its individual parts. His key-statement is as follows: the gothic cathedral is a representation or rather a reproduction of the Heavenly Jerusalem as described in Revelation 21. So the mysteriously sounding phrase of Hans Jantzen „der Raum der gotischen Kathedrale ist das Symbol eines Raumlosen“ was transformed into a specific christian interpretation. Sedlmayr was a rationalist and a mystic in one person. His architectural analysis is on a high level and his insights into medieval architecture were among the best of his time. Yet he is absolutely obstinate in his preoccupation that „the gothic cathedral is the Heavenly Jerusalem“; each phenomenon in architecture, decoration and liturgy has to be interpreted in the sense of this one and only principle.

It’s not my intention to present Sedlmayr analysis and interpretation of the gothic cathedral in detail. The more so, as I have the impression, that none of us would voluntarily interprete the gothic cathedral in Sedlmayr’s way. Today we are absolutely unable to see the vaulting system of Chartres cathedral as a chain of canopys coming down from above and connected with the human world by „aerial roots“. Also our perception is overhurdened, when Sedlmayr describes the lower story of the cathedral as massiv irdisch (massively terrestrial), whereas the upper parts glide down from heaven. And we are also mistrustful, when the wall, that fills up the lateral arcades of the imaginary canopies, is seen as a jewel-like mosaic. The latter idea comes from Jantzen. But for Jantzen it was on optical phenomenon, what he calls

16 Reprinted in: Hans Jantzen, Über den gotischen Kirchenraum und andere Aufsätze (Berlin, 1951), 7-20.

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Fig. 4. Revelation 21. Bible Moralisée. Vienna, National Library, Cod. Vindobonensis 1179, fo. 244r.

farbige Wände; for Sedlmayr however it is rather a physical reality, what he calls Edelsteinwände (jewel-walls). In Sedlmayr’s interpretation of the gothic cathedral all parts and details of the building have to hover; to be in suspension is – in Sedlmayr’s opinion – the characteristic of the gothic cathedral: not raised on human ground, but coming down from Heaven. The facade, the towers, the flying buttresses, the portal figures and all the minor or greater baldaquins of the exterior; inside the vaults and even the foliage on the pier-capitals, – everything has to be in a state of suspension, – has to be Heavenly Jerusalem on a visit to earth.

Why should we accept Sedlmayr’s interpretation? In the latter’s opinion only correct interpreta-

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tion; that is, to compare our insights before and in the building with contemporary poetical descriptions of real or phantastic architecture. This method seems correct, but in Sedlmayr’s application it’s quite the opposite. The leading texts, he uses, are the vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem in Revelation 21 – a text, that was fundamental for christian eschatology at all times – and the description of the phantastic Gral-temple in the Younger Titurel dating from about 1270. The point is, that these texts don’t stand at the end of Sedlmayr’s interpretation, but – in a rather too manifest manner – at its beginning. Sedlmayr begins his analysis with seeing, what he wants to see. Revelation 21,2: „And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven“; consequently the author sees the canopies of the gothic cathedral coming down, in suspension over our terrestrial world. Revelation 21, 11 and 18: „Her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal. And the building of the wall of it was of jasper, and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass“; consequently Sedlmayr sees the walls set with jewels and he reconstructs – without any proof – an excessive gilding of all stone parts inside and outside the cathedral.

We realize Sedlmayr’s affinity to Jantzen and at the same time the difference between them. We may compare the rather apodictic manner, by which the authors declare their visual impressions and their interpretations of all phenomena to be the only correct

Fig. 5. Detail of Fig. 4

ones. But while Jantzen’s interpretation ends with a new perception of optical facts (whatever this may be), Sedlmayr goes further and develops a new understanding in the sense of a Ganzheitsanalyse (holistic analysis). Ganzheitsanalyse seems to be not far from Iconology, but in reality there is a great difference. Panofskys Iconology goes step by step and each level of analysis works with a new method of its own. Sedlmayr however begins with a holistic impression and ends with a holistic vision; his method is a vicious circle. At the end is nothing but an affirmation of the first „Erlebnis“, and at the outset of the interpretation is a conviction, which should really should have come at the end of his discourse. In Die Entstehung der Kathedrale there ist an exemplary passage concerning this method: Die Kathedrale ... ist zugänglich nur einem geistigen Transzen-dieren des körperlichen Sehens: Ahnen und Vorstellen müssen mit dem Sehen zusammenarbeiten zur „Vison“ des Ganzen (The [Gothic] cathedral is only approachable by a mental transcendence of our physiological seeing. Sensation, presentiment and imagination must go together with our visual perception, to come to a vison of the whole).17 „To get the vision of the whole“ – that is the starting point and the goal of Sedlmayr’s investigations. Or in other words: the vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem is the optical, historical and illustrative matrix for our perception, analysis and – finally – for our vision of the gothic cathedral.

We have to realize, that all painted representations of the Heavenly Jerusalem, dating from the 12th and 13th centuries, show us a city and in no way a Gothic

17 H. Sedlmayr, Entstehung, 83.

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cathedral.18 In the literal sense, as a city, the Heavenly Jerusalem is represented in the Klosterneuburg enemels, in all Apokalypse-illustrations, and in the Liber Floridus. Also in the Bible Moralisée, Cod. Vindob. 1179, dating from the 1230s, the four roundels in the upper and in the third line show the celestial city (fig. 4 and 5). Here one had the opportunity to develop the figurative sense of the Heavenly Jerusalem in the roundels of the second and the fourth line; indeed these roundels explain the vision of Revelation 21 in an ecclesiological sense. We see the Church represented by its members, the „lapides vivi“: Christ, Mary, the Apostles, clerks, monks and so on; and we recognize the Church in its functions, for instance baptizing. But nowhere in the richly illustrated Bible Moralisée do we find the cathedral building as a type or figure of the Heavenly Jerusalem. The sole roundel, where a gothic church building appears, is the well-known commentary figure to „God saves the Salomonic temple“ and it here means the corresponding benediction of the christian church-building by Christ and Godfather himself.19 So the Bible Moralisée expresses quite clearly that contemporary church-building, that is the gothic cathedral itself, refers first of all to the temple of Jerusalem, while the Heavenly Jerusalem, the City of God, is represented by the people of God in its entirety, by ecclesia militans and ecclesia triumphans, ecclesia terrestris and ecclesia coelestis combined. Where romanesque or gothic art really had the intention, to represent the Heavenly Jerusalem, they depicted it clearly as a city with its town-walls and its twelve town-gates (for exemple Barbarossa’s chandelier in Aachen or the fresco at San Pietro in Civate).

There are two other points in Sedlmayr’s argumentation, that have to be critizised. The first is his disregard of all painted or sculptured figures, all pictures and pictorial programs connected with the cathedral. That’s a suppression that can hardly be understood in our days. All what Sedlmayr has to say on the stained-glass windows, is, that they are jewel-walls. And the sculptures on the portals he regards only in their optical function: hovering over the ground. It’s amazing, that the desire for a perception of the cathedral-building as a whole is connected with an apparent neglect of all figural representations. That is – yet again – the inheritance of German expressionist architectural contemplation. In the last years of the 19th century Emile Male had done excellent work to explain the cycles of portal figures and stained glass windows in all their iconographical details.20

But in contemporary Germany this book didn’t find response. Worringer and Jantzen were convinced of German art history’s superiority over Males historical iconography. For them Emile Male committed a sacrilege, when he compared the gothic cathedral to a book and all the paintings and sculptures inside and outside to phrases and words of this book, that should be read as a sermon or a scholastic ‘summa“. During the years before and after the First World War it was a set-phrase in Germany, that Germans have a profound sensation, while French people regard art superficially. Males interpretation and Jantzens analysis seemed to be the convincing proof of this common saying: the French author was interested in the didactic (Germans would have said: schoolmasterly) message of the pictorial and sculptural programms, the German authors however came to a deep and tremendous Totalerlebnis (to a holistic sensation) of the gothic Kirchenraum (the gothic church interior).

Sedlmayr too regarded the Totalerlebnis for more suitable and sympathetic than the iconographical definition of this or that figure in glass or stone. So he was unable to take into consideration, what the cathedral really means in a manner of self-reflection or self-portraiture, which are achieved by all its figures and narrative cycles in glass and stone. If we seriously look at the glaspaintings of Chartres cathedral, we see the trades depicted at the bottom of the side-aile windows: the carpenters, the bakers, the shoemakers, the wine sellers, and so on; and above these we see the legends of the Saints, starting with their earthly life. While this life runs up the window, it ends with salvation – in a medallion, where Christ himself takes up the soul of the Saint or gives his benediction. All this is clearly not a represen-

18 For representations of the New City comp.: Agostino Colli, „La Gerusalemme celeste nei cicli apocalittici

altomedievali e l’affresco di San Pietro al monte di Civate“, Cahiers Archéologiques 30 (1982), 107-124. Marie Thèrèse Gousset, „Un aspect du symbolisme des encensoirs romans: La Jérusalem Céleste“, Cahiers Archéologiques 30 (1982), 81-106. Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, vol. V, part 1 (Apokalypse des Johannes, 1990), 192 ff. (Radleuchter, Jerusalem-Lichtkronen).

19 Rainer Haussherr, „Templum Salomonis und Ecclesia Christi. Zu einem Bildvergleich der Bible Moralisée“, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 1968, pp. 101-121.

20 Emile Mâle, L’art religieux du XIII siècle en France. Etude sur l’iconographie du moyen-âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration, (Paris, 1898).

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tation of the Heavenly Jerusalem, but it represents the christian path from earth to Heaven.21 I am not sure, if Sedlmayr was a competent theologian. All the pictorial and sculptural programs, that are

represented in the gothic cathedral, are common property of christian iconography; as such they can be read in the forfould sense of christian exegesis, and more anagogico they can be understood as leading to the future and to the celestial. But the Heavenly Jerusalem stands at the end of the History of Salvation, it remains an expectation of the christian people; it is a goal of christian eschatology and as such it can be described and represented in a vision, but physically it remains far from human existence on earth.

What Sedlmayr proposes: the marriage between Earth and Heaven in the form of the gothic cathedral, is a rather heretical idea. But it is an idea, that was customary in youngconservative circles. Armin Mohler found the parable of „line and sphere“:22 the history of salvation – in the christian orthodox sense – should be compared to a goal-oriented straight line. But the youngconservatives were longing for „a full presence, in which – insofar as it is really a full presence – past and future should be combined“ (erfüllte Gegenwart, in welcher, sofern sie erfüllte Gegenwart ist, Vergangenheit und Zukunft vereint sind). With Nietzsche everything had to become „mid-day“, – Konservativismus hat die Ewigkeit für sich (the Conservative Revolution has eternity for itself).23 The discord of terrestrial life and heavenly afterlife should be suspended. So human existence, understood in christian Religions as a teleological one, was interpreted by the youngconservatives in the figure of a circle or a sphere: Um jedes Hier rollt sich die Kugel Dort: Die Mitte ist überall (Around every Now the sphere rolls There. The centre is everywhere).24 In this ideological milieu Sedlmayr’s vision of the gothic cathedral and his intention to combine our world with the Heavenly Jerusalem „ad oculos“ are rooted. It is a vision that is more secular and totalitarian than christian and godfearing.

My last critical argument against Sedlmayr has to be treated in short. Sedlmayr is unable to fix the presupposed relationship between the gothic cathedral and the Heavenly Jerusalem in precise terms. He changes the terms as they come to his mind. First he calls this relationship a symbolic one, than an anagogical one; now the gothic cathedral represents or signifies the Heavenly Jerusalem, later it is a reproduction (Abbild) of it. In the end Sedlmayr repetitively states: the gothic cathedral is the Heavenly Jerusalem. Here the utopian character of Sedlmayrs interpretation is obvious. No medieval author would have been allowed to make such a confusion between earth and heaven.25 We well know, that medieval architecture has a potential symbolic content. Among other things the portals of the cathedral may signify the gates of paradise, but significare is in no way repraesentare, at least esse;26 and in the dedication-liturgy of a church the laudes Urbs jerusalem beata / dicta pacis visio / qua construitur in caelis / vivis ex lapidibus were sung; but this text also refers to the celestial church as the people of God, and not to the new city, described in Revelation 21, as architecture.

Sedlmayr writes: Die Himmelsbedeutung der gotischen Kathedrale erfassen wir nicht in erster Linie durch den Intellekt, sondern wir sehen, hören, riechen und schmecken sie. Ein Kind könnte sie erkennen (The gothic cathedrals meaning as Heavenly Jerusalem we don’t recognize primarily by our intellect, but we see, we hear, we smell and taste it. A child could recognize this meaning). This is written in a more than 500 pages long art historical treatise with apparent scientific pretensions. But at the end we see, that its method is an anti-intellectual one and that its objective is a mere vision.

Sedlmayr will have us believe, that the maxim „The gothic cathedral is the Heavenly Jerusalem“ was a selfevident fact for all centuries from the 12th up to the 19th, when finally atheism came up and christian symbols fell more and more into oblivion. This, too, is one of the many partial truths Sedlmayr produced in his Die Entstehung der Kathedrale. For it is not true, that French people of the gothic period could imagine Heaven only under the visionary image of the Heavenly Jerusalem, Revelation 21. In the tympana of the three main portals of Chartres Cathedral we find three differ-

21 Colette Manhes-Deremble, Les vitraux narratifs de la cathédrale de Chartres, étude iconographique,

(Corpus Vitrearum, France-Etudes II, Paris, 1993). 22 Armin Mohler, Konservative Revolution, 118 f. 23 Moeller van den Bruck, Das dritte Reich, ed. by Hans Schwarz (Hamburg 19313), 187. 24 Friedrich Nietzsche, comp. Armin Mohlerm Konservative Revolution, 86. 25 I cannot discuss here medieval hermeneutics. Compare the excellent article: Martin Büchsel, „Gibt es eine

aesthetische Theorie der Skulptur im Mittelalter“, Studien zur Geschichte der europäischen Skulptur im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert, ed. by Herbert Beck, (Frankfurt a.M., 1994), 57-73.

26 Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale. Les quatre sens de l’écriture, 4 vols (Paris 1959-1964), vol. IV, 151: „Mais signifier n“est pas représenter“.

284 WILHELM SCHLINK

Fig. 6. Sulpiz Boiesserée, Groundplan of the Gral temple, 1835.

ent representations of Heaven (and not one is the representation of the Heavenly Jerusalem as a new city): in the „Majesty of Christ“, in the „coronation of the Virgin“ and in the „Last Judgement“. Neither in the poetical texts of the 13th century nor in art historical interpretations of the Romantics can I find the slightest proof for the maxim „The gothic cathedral is the Heavely Jerusalem“.27Medieval poets did not describe the gothic cathedral or the Heavenly Jerusalem, but the Gral-temple or a fictious castle elsewhere; and in so doing they may have also looked at Revelation 21 as well as made use of their visual experience of the gothic cathedral.28 In other words: it is not the gothic cathedral, that reproduces the Heavenly Jerusalem, but it is the poetical vision of a fictious architecture which reproduces – to a certain degree – Revelation 21 and the gothic cathedral. Still in 1835 Sulpiz Boisserée drew his reconstruction of the Gral-temple (described in the Younger Titurel) as a sort of an eternal-city-like high gothic cathedral (fig. 6, 7).29

27 In all questions regarding literary history Sedlmayr was based on the doctoral-dissertation Die

Architekturdarstellungen in der mittelhochdeutschen Dichtung by Heinrich Lichtenberg, published in 1931, but his account of this book is rather incorrect.

28 Cf. the exposition-catalogue Der Gral. Artusromantik in der Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. by R. Baumstark (München-Köln, 1995). Albert Verbeek, „Der Gralstempel in romantischer Sicht“, Kunst als Bedeutungsträger, Gedenkschrift für Günter Bandmann (Berlin, 1978), 439-458.

29 Sulpiz Boisserée, „Über die Beschreibung des Tempels des heiligen Grals in dem Heldengedicht: Titurel Kap. III“, Abhandlungen der Philosophisch-Philologischen Classe der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 1 (München, 1835), 307-92.

THE GOTHIC CATHEDRAL ALS HEAVENLY JERUSALEM 285

Fig. 7. Sulpiz Boisserée, Elevation of the Gral temple, 1835.

German architectural history of the 19th century never made use of Sedlmayr’s maxim, neither Franz Kugler or Franz Schnaase, nor Anton Springer or Joseph Sauer.30

So „The gothic cathedral as Heavenly Jerusalem“ is not an eternal truth, that merely had to be rediscovered by Hans Sedlmayr. On the contrary: it is a pure fiction by the Vienna Art-Historian. But it is more than a harmless fiction; for it is the product of a neoconservative ideology with mystical and utopian predispositions, and with a strong anti-intellectual touch; Today we have other predispositions, but I hope they may be less tempting and ourselfs less self-assured. This would be the precondition for a look at the gothic cathedral not longer as a vision and as a gift from above, but as a reality of our human world. In any case the Heavenly Jerusalem in time and space is far from this reality.

30 Franz Kugler (note 1); Carl Schnaase, Geschichte der bildenden Künste, vols, IV and V of the 2nd edition

(Düsseldorf 1871 and 1872); Anton Springer in his books published in the 1850s; Joseph Sauer, Symbolik des Kirchengebäudes und seiner Ausstattung in der Auffassung des Mittelalters (Freiburg i.B., 1902). As far as I can see only artists combined the idea of the Heavenly Jerusalem with the real architecture of the gothis cathedral: for example Caspar David Friedrich in his paintings Druiden vor der Vision der christlichen Kirche and Die Kathedrale (both in Coll. G. Schäfer, Schweinfurt).