White Christmas

The place I grew up in is an epitomized fairytale. Things are clean, people civilized. Narrow alleys bear the ambience of the middle-ages. Seats in cafés are standardized, so that no one gets confused with the distractions of modernity. It’s a place one finds “boring” when growing up in it and “beautiful” as a grown-up. The longer I’m out there (something like 10 years) I raised some naïve touristic interest – at least every time I come back to visit. Now, for the holidays, I travelled to see my mum and took a walk through the city. It made me stumble upon something I seemed to have forgot: At the bottom of the dome cathedral (a relic from the 14^th century – 100 meters high – the city’s most prestigious landmark), on its south façade, there is a carved sculpture called “Judensau”. It depicts three Jews (people with pointed hats) sucking from a sow. Despite that thing being politically and also personally insulting, I thought there might be some twisted surplus in seeing it there. In mediaeval times, in the place I grew up in, pigs lumbered through alleys, living on garbage. Before the Jews were exiled in early pogroms, people indentified them with what they were most afraid of already back then: chaos and distraction. Now one could easily use such a sculpture in a productive way, say, to raise awareness for Christian anti-Semitism. However the commentary beneath is the real (creepy) thing: “Depicted is a pig, with whose tits Jews tamper. The sculpture, a lithic evidence of a passed epoch, must be seen in connection with its time. For today’s observers it is, given its anti-Jewish content, disconcerting. Today the relationship of Christianity and Judaism is characterized by tolerance and mutual respect.” Yes, that’s it. Funny, just about 100 meters from the “Judensau” there is a house in which Oskar Schindler used to lived for some years. The commentary description on Schindlers time in the place I grew up in is much more exposed and triple as long as the one mentioned before. It’s a White Christmas everyone.