Salzburg presents itself as a burning glass of the world spirit
The hiker who comes from Bavaria in Salzburg first appreciates the unpredictable compactness of the Markuskirche, an architectural treasure from the spirit of the epochal architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach. The people of Salzburg still call their jewel at the northern entrance to the city center for the Ursulines, as their monastery church they served until the end of the sixties. Anyone entering the small church will be amazed at the orthodox iconostasis that pervades the late baroque church. St. Markus has been available to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic community for over 20 years. Is there a beautiful symbol of the connection between Roman and Orthodox believers?
This already shows how the archbishops’ city has always been a place of encounter, even if the native Salzburgers make little use of the privileged art education they were given. Neither the prince archbishops nor their architects, artists and composers were Salzburg residents. Wolfgang Amad Mozart and Georg Trakl were also born to new parents, with Leopold Mozart from Augsburg following the fame of the archbishop’s court, and the Protestant Tobias Trakl from the diaspora near the Hungarian border wanted to benefit as an entrepreneur from the new railway junction between Austria and Bavaria. The musicians alone should die in every generation of a new junk business from Salzburg. The poet was spared chocolate balls and plastic ducks, so his name remained unknown to most of the natives.
“Today Salzburg is in a free fall
and could only be achieved through vigorous external intervention
to be partially saved “
If you assure an indigenous peoples that Georg Trakl is in poetry what Mozart is in music, he cannot believe it, because the poet, unlike the musician, does not generate any foreign currency. In the depth of field of magic, Trakl has foreseen, as he says, the “evil spirit”, which should destroy his hometown, over 100 years ago: “It shines so brightly / Towards the city / Where cold and evil / A decaying family lives / The white grandson / Dark future produces. ”If you want to see what Salzburgers build when they are among themselves, just look at the Alpine road and other forms of dubious aesthetics. The inner de of the local politicians and builders are turned outward there, one could say cynically.
After Salzburg was degraded to a “city without a landscape” (according to the desperate rescuer of Salzburg, Hans Sedlmayr) by the middle of the 20th century, and the unique surroundings of the castles and parks were brutally destroyed and, in large parts, degraded to the most playful commercial and residential areas, the demon is now gradually destroying the old town itself. Every time you visit Salzburg, something old, beautiful, and valuable has fallen victim to the pickaxe. Even when you arrive at the train station, you will find the elegant neo-rococo building vaulted by an amorphous hall, the surroundings alienated from the Martian architecture. Greed eats their children and, as so often, shows itself to be bad business. Too late do the unscrupulous notice how they are singing on the branch on which they are sitting. Today Salzburg is in a free fall and can only be at least partially saved through energetic intervention from floodplains, for example by placing the former archbishopric again under the Vatican.
A view of the unique city from the Kapuzinerberg
In the millennia-old history of the archbishopric city with its magical urban landscape, the eighth and eighteenth centuries mark different turning points. The Carolingian years gave the former Celtic settlement those legendary Capuchin and Benedictine monasteries and, above all – as the oldest existing monastery in the German-speaking area – the Archabbey of St. Peter. They determine the image of the city just as the fathers and venerable sisters embody the backbone and structure of the spiritual Salzburg.
How happy you are when you meet one of the cheerful brothers while hiking on the Kapuzinerberg or, while walking past their monastery church, hear the chants and enjoy the view of a city the like of which there is no other in the world. The charming shape of the squat red church tower, however, which Benedictine women on the other side of the Salzach received in the eighteenth century for the millennium of their monastery, shines to this day as an expression of the spiritual light over the whole city. Of course, Salzburg found its greatest urban development, as Hans Sedlmayr described, in the years of Mozart, when the Baroque era reached its most artistic foothills.
Harsh criticism of city officials
For the city fathers and mothers, “culture” is a village disco, and that’s why they want to transform the whole of Salzburg into one. The advancing city, however, faces an indestructible spiritual substance. Nobody embodies this resistance more vividly than that. Ivory about ten centimeters groetokindl in the monastery church of the same name, founded in the seventeenth century. The stories of help and salvation that entwine around the child adorned with crown, scepter and cross made from the jewelry of noble donors are legion and extend to the miraculous tutoring for troubled Salzburg students. The effect of his protection has been attested again and again over the centuries. Will the child be able to protect his homeland from city crime in the long term?
When we ignore the most conspicuous treasures of the year after St. Peter in Rome completed the Salzburg Cathedral and while we turn to the altar of St. Anna Selbdritt, we find a powerful representation of the mutual ability of heavenly and earthly life. According to information from the director of the Cathedral Museum, Reinhard Gratz, the altarpiece in the middle shows Saint Anna Selbdritt: Anna (mother of Mary) with the baby Jesus and Mary. On the left St. Ursula with the arrow, on the right St. Erentrudis. Not all female saints can be clearly identified. In this picture we encounter at the same time the mutual interpenetration of religion and science: the painter of the devotional picture is namely none other than Joachim von Sandrart the Elder. ., who was not only a master of the brush, but also of the pen and, with his artist’s works, is one of the foundations of modern art history.
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