Year 2003. The German author Günter Grass finishes a first version of The statuehandwritten on some loose sheets. He keeps them in a drawer. The plan was for the text to form a chapter of his autobiography Peeling the onion (Alfaguara, 2007), but its surreal tone had taken it to another terrain, from dreaming, from imagination, to a universe in which a sculpture, specifically of the one considered for centuries to be the most beautiful woman of the Middle Ages , Uta of Naumburg, becomes an obsession, a goal, a projection.
More than fifteen years passed until the text was rediscovered by his collaborator Hilke Ohsoling, who published it in 2022 in her native language. Alfaguara has just published it for the first time in Spanish, coinciding with the tenth anniversary of his death.
The statue It is a novel that captivates, that generates deep curiosity, due to the freedom that the Nobel Prize winner in Literature allows himself to delve into his fascination with the figure of Uta of Naumburg, to a point that is touching. Their connection is so great that he dedicates the pages of his work to allowing it to come to life. Not only that she is remembered or vindicated, but that she lives, that she speaks, that her gaze, apparently empty on the stone, is filled.
It was in the mid-eighties when the writer discovered it, in a still divided Germany, during his visit to the Naumburg Cathedral. He was not the first to be enthralled by the representation of this woman. Uta was a noblewoman belonging to the house of Ascania, one of the most important families of Medieval Saxony. It is believed that she was born around the year 1000 and married Ecardo II who, although he ended up taking the crown of the Holy Empire and became the guardian of the German borders, the marriage had no offspring and the lineage became extinct. She was accused of witchcraft and went down in history thanks to this sculpture in her honor.
At the beginning of the 20th century it became an object of aesthetic worship, although nothing is really known about its appearance, since the one who the Master of Naumburg chose as the model for the statue was his own daughter. Be that as it may, her features were exalted during Nazism as an emblem of Aryan beauty. In fact, it is still represented on German postage stamps today. And it caught the attention of Walt Disney himself. One of the collaborators of the creator of the Mouse Factory, who was German, chose her as the model for the villain in his first film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
The feature film, which adapted the Brothers Grimm story about a young woman who fled from her stepmother’s attempt to murder her to be the most beautiful woman in the kingdom, was released in the United States in 1937. It was banned in Germany. The Nazis didn’t love the idea of an emblem of Germanic feminine virtues becoming the wicked witch Grimhilde, and they banned the film until 1950.
The dinner of the statues, or their models
Günter Grass, author of other titles such as The tin drum (2009), dog years (2013), The cat and the mouse (1999), From the diary of a snail (2019) and one hundred decades (2003), in his hitherto unpublished novel in Spanish, he considers what to do with the statues of Naumburg Cathedral, the bond, if possible, that he can establish with them. Immediately his bet is to invite them to dinner. Its protagonist recognizes that he had “already” invited people to his table who had later gone down in history: “On one occasion I shared a tablecloth with an executioner and his clientele, in front of a plate of tripe, and before that with commanders of a military order.” ”.
In Naumburg Cathedral, the stone Uta was accompanied by others like Reglindis, about whom he describes: “Depending on where you look at her, she smiles, pouts or even laughs, it is said that, as the daughter of a king of Poland, shows typically Slavic features and laughs like a cleaning woman.” He also reflects on the possible sociological background that these sculptures could have had, but soon lets their “beauty and energetic expression” dominate the discourse, allowing “their effect to be felt without interference.” But the questions do not stop once the decision to organize the particular dinner is made.
“Who should I invite? To some historical figures about whom I know absolutely nothing? “To that Ekkehard number two, who in the 11th century fought as a marquis with a Serbian or Polish army or with I don’t know what Ascanids?” he asks. His great doubt then turns into considering whether the beings chosen to accompany him should be the real models of the goldsmith who created them, “because he undoubtedly worked in his workshop with models from the neighborhood, clean and happy, or sad and brooding.” These twelve Gothic statues represent the founders of the old chapel around which the current cathedral was built, but for the German writer, “they only provided the name.”
This is how it builds bridges with the earthly and mundane, lowering the importance of historical figures, the great gentlemen and ladies who dominate the books; and ordinary citizens. Whether he represents them in his image and likeness or not, Günter Grass decides that they are the important ones and puts the focus on allowing them to talk, eat, sit with him, and therefore with the readers of his novel. And he incorporates the bishop of the moment into the invitation, to find out his opinion on the matter.
“I wanted to know if they had caused problems because they were too human and without an aura of holiness. He smiled, sly, and after some hesitation, he gave me to understand, in code, that in any case the overproduction of virgins and saints throughout the country, whether as altar images, carved in wood or stone, bored him. “, capture.
This priest wonders at the same time “how is one going to reach the Lord with so much colorful distraction,” reflecting from irony on the transcendence that should be given to the sculptures to which the faithful later feel devotion. Not to ridicule their religious beliefs, but to move the focus to another point, perhaps more related to introspection, than to its representation in stone in this case. Stones that in Grass’s novel are used in great monuments. “I have to go. I have a job, I have to appear on the portico of the cathedral,” says Uta de Naumburg, ending the evening.
The work of the German author does not end here. Its protagonist, through some, in its possible pages, time travel, insists on meeting his beloved Uta again, on subsequent trips to see her again in other places in Europe, at other times in his life, during which he does not He is capable of forgetting her. Quite the contrary, the attachment increases, and he infects the reader, who in turn infects him through his drawings, incorporated into the Alfaguara edition. Portraits that expand the story and give special meaning to Uta’s gaze, hidden, transparent, covert and indecipherable. Magnetic.
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