Sabina” is a wondrous book. No novel, no non-fiction book, no art-historical treatise and no illustrated book, but a hybrid of all of these together. Written in a subtle ironic tone, it combines photographs, historical documents, excerpts from novels, paintings and original texts into a sophisticated story framed by the fictional exchange between an editor and a mysterious figure called “W.”, a kind of alter ego and romantic duplication of the artist Wiebke Elzel.
Not scientific, but driven by a spirit of discovery, the volume Ws follows investigations into Sabina, the legendary Gothic woman who held Wiebke Elzel under her spell for years and made her travel all over Germany. It is the “reconstruction of the peculiar research”, it says right at the beginning, “that W. undertook on the possibly fictitious medieval sculptor Sabine von Steinbach and the course of which led to unexpected insights”. The search is peculiar because W. fixates on this Sabina in such a way that she soon finds it more important than anything else whether the woman really existed, “and if not, who invented her, when and for what purpose has”.
The town signs shown at the beginning in sober black-and-white photography, which have the same name as the heroine of the book – Steinbach – set the pace for the search. Sometimes they lead to an idyllic landscape under trees (Hochtaunuskreis), sometimes to a sprawling area next to power poles (Donnersbergkreis), sometimes to the small-town milieu of Baden-Baden, where the sign joins the notice board for local services. The stonemason Erwin von Steinbach, master builder of the cathedral in Strasbourg and Sabina’s alleged father, is said to have been born here around 1244. The monument depicted in the volume, of course made of stone, commemorates the “immortal master builder”.
In mixed confusion
There are countless legends about his daughter. The fact that romanticism in its enthusiasm for the Middle Ages was the reason for Sabina’s later fame fits the picture. While Goethe, who studied in Strasbourg, still regarded his father Steinbach as a genius, Sabina became a pillar saint for artists such as Moritz von Schwind and Otto Geyer. Among other things, a Latin banner on the portal of the Strasbourg Cathedral, which was held by a figure of an apostle, served as evidence. It read: “The grace of divine goodness be with Savina, by whom I am made a figure of hard stone”.
The fact that the church frieze was razed and lost during the French Revolution made Sabina even more fascinating for those who came after her. Hundreds of years after her supposed birth, it was nineteenth-century artists who recreated their early sister in spirit. W. consults them all. Ernst Stadler’s poem, Moritz von Schwind’s oil portrait from 1844, which shows the graceful lady with hammer and iron at work on the Minster, or Georg Christian Braun’s novella: “It had become quiet in the house. But Sabina could not fall asleep on her bed; the images of the day passed before her soul in colorful confusion and crowded like bees in front of an entrance where each one wants to be the foremost.” W. will later summarize how exemplary this novella from 1833 is for the bombastic tone in which was written about Sabina at that time.
Moritz von Schwind’s portrait now hangs in the Old National Gallery. The fact that even the builders of the Berlin museum, which was still planned on behalf of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV and then opened as a classicist building in the early days of the German Empire in 1876, felt an obligation to the medieval woman, was what prompted W. to do their research in the first place. In the stairwell there, she came across Otto Geyer’s frieze of figures, who wanted nothing less than to canonize German cultural history from the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest to the coronation of the Emperor in 1871 in figures and names.
Between facts and imagination
Sabina is one of only four women in this Walhalla of 121 chosen ones from politics, art and science, and the only one who is not aristocratic and has a job. The depiction of a sculptor at work was unusual for a nineteenth-century painting, and the portrait in the Berlin Temple of Arts and Sciences was even more unusual. This is only surpassed by the idea that a woman was artistically active in a building hut among men during the Gothic period, as the researcher W. will find out in the course of her work.
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