Gläsernes Gedenken

In the churches and chapels of Thuringia, some 400 artistically glazed windows — so-called “Gedächtnisfenster” (memorial windows) of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — document a persistently strong interest in commemorating people, objects and historical events. They form a remarkable iconographic theme within stained-glass art. In word and image, through symbols and heraldic signs, a culture of remembrance manifests itself that records personal concerns as much as communal interests. Their contextualisation within sacred space lends the windows and their messages a special veneration oriented towards eternity — the works themselves thereby undergoing a form of sacralisation. Through the diversity of the content they commemorate, they are at the same time testimonies to social and cultural diversity.

Published in the series Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Deutschland, Studien, vol. V, edited by Uwe Gast and Daniel Parello on behalf of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz and the Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft Berlin.