Cloister Cemetery in the Snow

1817-1819

Caspar David Friedrich

Formerly in the Nationalgallerie Berlin (destroyed 1945)

Images of the church and of monastic life are both ubiquitous in Friedrich’s paintings and a persistent source of ambiguity.  In the case of the present canvas (destroyed during a bombing raid on Berlin in 1945), one commentator seems quite certain of how to interpret Friedrich’s iconography:

1. The barren oaks encircle the central ruin … By echoing the standing remnants of the cloister, the vertical forms of the oaktrees open up the church, and with it the mass celebrated within, to surrounding nature.  … As in so many of Friedrich’s images, the scene’s axial symmetry inscribes the landscape’s architecture into the geometry of the canvas, giving the image itself the character of an altarpiece.   Motivating all these expansions, all these dissolutions of boundary and distinction lies the desire for immediacy.  In terms of a Protestant theology shared by Friedrich and Kosegarten, this desire might be expressed as a critique of the church as necessary intercessor between the individual and God.  Martin Luther, in his St Stephen’s Day Epistle of 1522, wrote that “it would be better to uproot all the churches and monasteries of the world and burn them to dust,” for it does not matter where one prays or sermonizes, “whether in a house or in the market.”--From Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject and Landscape (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1990), pp. 133-34.
   

There is reason to doubt such an account, however, not least because the image depicts relics of the monastic order that had long disappeared from the Northern German (Lutheran) landscape.  In short, monasticism around 1820 was no longer a signifier carrying (supposedly) negative connotations.  Rather, it is a sign being revived at a moment when Germany’s political and historical prospects look decidedly uncertain.  As with a number of other Romantics (Schlegel, Novalis, Eichendorff, et al) the crisis of the German nation was perceived to be intimately entwined with the crisis of a modern Protestantism whose deist and Erastian tendencies seemed to have stripped it of the sacred altogether.  Monastic life—aptly captured as lying in ruins and yet drawing once again devotees in spite of its faded condition—thus can be plausibly read as signifying a longing for a religious order capable of establishing normative goals of its own and doing so independent of (rather than in subservience to) the modern nation state that Prussia is on its way to becoming.  (T. P.)

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