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Melchior crib figure in Ulm: "Racist caricature"
Photo: Sebastian Gollnow / dpa
Under the organ loft of the Ulm Minster hangs one with a beautiful name and another with a less beautiful one.
"St. Michael" is the beautiful one, "Hitler Angel" the less beautiful one.
Threatening, angular, larger than life, he has been building himself up there since August 1934, the Horst-Wessel song rang out to greet him.
Under him stands Ernst-Wilhelm Gohl, the dean of the minster, and after recent discussions one might expect the dean to say: Michael has to go.
But he doesn't say.
He says: "You have to explain it."
In addition, in his opinion, the bronze Michael stands in a silent dialogue with the stone prophet Jeremias, diagonally opposite, who was a gift from the local Israelite community in 1877.
Except that the Nazis tried to remove the reference to the donors from the Jeremiah.
That is what Dean Gohl understands by iconoclasm.
Not what is happening around Melchior, the black king of the Christmas crib, in Ulm Minster today.
Strange that with this Melchior a Gothic basilica is now at the intersection of two current social debates.
"Black Lives Matter," some say, because it is about racism.
"Cancel Culture," say others who accuse it of eliminating anything that disrupts majority opinion.
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