Germany's Sacred Groves

Caspar David Friedrich, "The Solitary Tree"; 1822.

Trees are the anchors of Germanic culture. According to the ancient historian Tacitus, Germans "do not deem it consistent with the divine majesty to imprison their gods within walls"; rather, "their holy places are the woods and groves"—for it was in the forest that the gods dwelled, and there that "the nation had its birth." Tacitus was not wrong to claim this; most German creation myths culminated in humans emerging out of tree trunks. The most famous Germanic tree-cult is probably that of Yggdrasil, the ash tree that unifies the nine worlds of Norse mythology. This cult, in a changed form, is still evident in our ritual use of Christmas trees—a German invention of the 16th century.

Germany's conversion to Christianity (ca. 4th-7th centuries) meant that adaptations of this kind were required. Up until the Reformation, Germany's church was centered in Rome—the arch-city, where stone, not tree, is fundamental. When Tacitus refers to "imprisoning gods within walls," he is clearly invoking Rome's temples as a counter-example; and though Rome's religion changed, its rootedness in masonry was constant. Nearly all of Western church architecture is based on an ancient Roman building type: the basilica. Originally designed for judicial proceedings and imperial audiences, the practical shape of the basilica lent itself well to Christian worship—providing both a large space for communal gathering and a hierarchical arrangement between the apse (where emperors once sat) and the nave, suited to the distinction between priest and congregation.

Given the historical trans-Alpine confrontation between Germany and Italy, Germans could not simply accept the basilican form that Rome had given them; it had to be Germanized, "othered" in some suitable way. Gothic architecture—borrowed from France—provided a suitable framework for this. The intense verticality of the gothic—a contrast to the generally horizontal Roman basilica—not only makes a different kind of statement about the structure of religion, but also allowed for a "grafting" of traditional Teutonic symbolism into the heart of Germany's adopted religion—it allowed the transfiguration of the Roman basilica into a sacred forest.

Nature-imagery in Roman church decoration is generally systematized; where nature does appear, it is usually broken down into patterns, fit into motifs, or delimited by edges. In short, it is decorative, but not constitutive, and usually quite flat—it does not "pervade the space."

Arranged nature; ceiling mosaic, Mausoleum of Santa Costanza, Rome; 4th century.

The highly-stylized "nature" (acanthus vine) of San Clemente, Rome; 12th century.

In German churches, the natural has been brought into the space quite differently—rather than imbedding images of plants in the walls, German churches use plant decorations to become natural spaces themselves. In the 13th century, the massive, trunk-like columns of the Cologne cathedral ditched traditional Roman capitals and sprouted clusters of leaves instead. In many other German churches, the columns sport no capitals at all, and simply fork into a web of ogival limbs under a canopy-like ceiling. But the church that inspired this post was the Liebfrauenkirche in Trier. Its piers soar upward to a high vault, where they split into slender branches supporting dense clusters of painted leaves. The effect of this decorative program is to activate the entire space; through the en-leafing of the ceiling, the pillars and roof-supports and congregation-space all become engaged as elements not of a church, but of a forest clearing. Nature's image is not just an image; it is an incantation that transfigures stones into woods. In this way the German church has overcome the boundaries of Roman worship and returned its religion to its ancestral place—the sacred grove.

The Liebfrauenkirche, interior.