Dhe town of Zerbst, with barely 25,000 inhabitants, was an important town from the Middle Ages to the Baroque period. With two monasteries, city wall, residential castle, the winding old town and the mighty city church of St. Nikolai and a not so small Jewish population. A few street names still bear witness to this today, as do two monuments dedicated to making Jews despicable, depicting so-called “Judensauen”: an early modern beam from the house of a wealthy citizen on the market square, which has been kept in the city museum since it was demolished at the end of the 1980s, along with the comparable panes of glass from a Frankfurt town house shows how deeply this motif had penetrated the everyday world.
And then there is the “Zerbster Sau” in the choir of the ruins of the Nikolaikirche, which was badly damaged in World War II and has been open to wind and weather ever since. The memorial shows a sow whose bottom is licked by a person, probably a rabbi, two children identified as Jews by their hats at their teats, a person feeding them. This sculpture was made around 1440 and even survived the use of the neighboring property as a concrete work in GDR times. On Friday she received a “counter-monument” designed by the sculptor Hans-Joachim Prager.
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