Bettina Schmitt chooses words that you wouldn't necessarily expect from a museum director: "They were really awesome." And at first glance, when we look from the gallery to the nave at our feet, it remains quite unclear what exactly she means by that.

But as director of the Frankfurt Cathedral Museum, she should know.

Because not only does she go in and out of St. Bartholomäus, the "Imperial Cathedral";

she knows the history of the Frankfurt landmark like probably few others.

For the current exhibition dedicated to Hans Leistikow on the 60th anniversary of his death in the cloister of the church and in the house by the cathedral directly opposite, she once again dealt intensively with the windows and the creator of the outstanding glass art in the sacred building.

Christopher Schutte

Freelance author in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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If one recapitulates the eventful building history of the cathedral with Schmitt, then one might call the interventions carried out on the cathedral by the architects Alois Giefer and Hermann Mäckler, who were responsible for the reconstruction after the Second World War, quite radical.

Which of course applies to all epochs since the late Gothic period.

After all, church building was also subject to the spirit of the times, vulgo: changing fashions, and St. Bartholomew’s in the Baroque era or after the great fire of 1867 was always presented in a new and amazingly different way from today’s perspective.

However, when Giefer and Mäckler changed the cloister, removed a bay window without further ado or removed the ornamental painting of the 19th century including plaster and implemented a simple, softly white wall design, then some of their decisions were definitely due to the pragmatism that prevailed in the 1950s.

After all, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were other concerns.

And there was simply a lack of everything.

In addition: If you liked the comparatively sober, even Protestant design for a Catholic church, then you also appreciated the decision to entrust Hans Leistikow with the design of the cathedral windows that were destroyed in the hail of bombs in 1944.

Then you could see in her a clear, if not religious, at least philosophically sound statement.

Simple grid and simple geometric shapes

After all, Mäckler was close to the liturgical movement, which wanted nothing to do with the neo-Gothic ornaments of the 19th century.

"The colourfulness", formulated the architects accordingly in the tender, "must move within a specific gray scale, which does not change the inherent color of the interior." And further: "Within this gray scale, deviations in all directions of the color circle are possible." What reads almost as precisely outlined for Leistikow.

The artist, born in Elbing in East Prussia in 1892, had already shaped the image of New Frankfurt in the 1920s as the leading graphic artist. Later he went to the Soviet Union with the Ernst May Brigade and after the end of the war worked first with Hans Scharoun before returning to Frankfurt.

As a child of modernism, he already stood for an essentially abstract design language.

What's more, as a student of Hans Poelzig in Breslau and during the reconstruction of Frankfurt's Westend Synagogue, he had shown how masterfully he knew how to work with glass as a material.

This is reflected in the repeated cooperation with the Giefer/Mäckler office in numerous projects such as the All Saints' Church, Maria Hilf im Gallus or the luminous band running around the windows in the chapel of the Katharinen Hospital.

However, as the glazing also and especially shows of the 54 cathedral windows, Leistikow, who from 1948 on as a teacher at the Werkakademie, later the Kassel Comprehensive University, was to shape a whole generation of young designers, always started with a simple grid and simple geometric shapes .

In contrast to earlier stained glass, the figurative representations and biblical stories are missing.