Notes from Germany

Last week I was with my wife in Cologne, Münster, Bremen and Lübeck.

I refer you all to her site for the pictures.

This is me in front of Bremen cathedral

Comparing Cologne cathedral with Münster cathedral is like comparing night and day. Münster cathedral I have always loved, with its sense of light and space. I visited it frequently in 1980-82, when I knew that I had to move out of the business world and into the church, often visiting the neighbouring Aegidi-Kirche for evening mass on the way back from Bremen to Düsseldorf.  The presence of Cardinal von Galen remains compelling. Cologne cathedral, by contrast, is miserable: a dark, disordered Rumpelkammer not helped by some of the most horrible stained glass in Germany. 

Lübeck I took to. The reformation here was clearly more gentle: no Bildersturm, the old church wall paintings and carvings kept and covered or changed only when the interior was restyled. The two churches we visited, the Dom (cathedral) and the Marienkirche, though both Protestant and both heavily restored after war damage, felt like places you can pray in. In particular they did not have that perfection which can quickly sterilize a religious building - which is the case in Bremen cathedral.

And the collection of carved altarpieces in the St-Anna museum is remarkable, not to mention the incredible and excellently-restored Memling altarpiece.

Memling remains for me the most Christian of the Flemish Primitives: clearly a man with a huge sensitivity to human psychology, but never harsh or condemning in the way that, for example, Dirk Bouts sometimes is.