Schifferkirche St. Maria shows current figures
Un of the countless varieties of Cologne customs, the “Kreppchensjang” (crib walk) is not the best known outside the city limits. But for Cologne residents after or before the carnival, the most beautiful ones die. The doors of the churches are often open from the first Sunday in Advent until the feast of Candlemas on February 2nd, so that young and old, rich and poor, Kölsche and “Imis” can be touched by the events of Christmas again. Because the fact that God became man should not be a one-off event that happened more than 2000 years ago in a distant place. “As true as it is that God became man, man has become God,” the Dominican monk Master Eckart once taught. The mystic, who comes from near Erfurt, received his theological training in the 13th century in the Studium Generale Order in the center of the “Hillije Kölle”. Today dozens of nativity scenes in a radius of a few kilometers around Cologne Cathedral invite you to look at the first part of the Christmas message: “Üch eß der Heiland jebore” – the Savior is born to you.
“Üch” does not just mean the strollers who stroll from church to church on Advent and Christmas days. Many a nativity scene wants to penetrate the world of the observer through the scenic visualization of the past and widen the view for the “others” – above all the nativity scene in the old Romanesque boatman’s church St. Maria in Lyskirchen.
It all started with Pastor Gottfried Kirsch. In the eighties he had the idea not to leave Mary, Joseph and the newborn child in the manger alone with the people and animals who gather around them in the Christmas stories of the Gospel of Matthew and Luke (Mark and John, the other two evangelists , manage without the birth and childhood of Jesus). Little by little, all sorts of figures appeared in front of the artistically designed backdrop of the Cologne Rheinauhafen with the warehouses and the Malakoffturm, “Lück wie Ich un Du”. Because it was never elegant in the narrow streets around Maria Lyskirchen. “Rhingrollers” hired themselves out as day laborers in the port. Up until the Severinsbrücke was built in 1956, Cologne’s largest red-light district was located around next street. A sailor had to find his place at the crib just as much as a light girl. “Do not judge that you will not be judged,” says the Gospel.
The Franziskaninnen from the nearby Holzgasse, which has become indispensable in the figure of “Schnäuzerkowski” from the “Veedel” (district) Hänneschen Theater, should not be missing. And then there is the dance couple “Golden Lyse Knäächte und Mägde”, the oldest traditional dance group of the Cologne Carnival. The association goes back to the servants and maidservants who once toiled in the fields of the Kappesboore (cabbage farmers) on the banks of the Rhine and carried the figures of saints from the churches and monasteries through the city during the processions. Until a few years ago, members of the dance corps were present when the Corpus Christi procession took place in St. Maria in Lyskirchen. Today they can still be seen in the cathedral procession. It is unthinkable that they could be missing from the nativity scene in their Biedermeier costumes.
This has nothing to do with Rhenish sentimentality, neither during the lifetime of Pastor Kirsch, who died in 1996, nor in the years since then when Benjamin Marx, a Cologne native with a Saarland migration background, and the Caritas pastor Matthias Schnegg took care of the milieu day care center. The nativity scene reflects, year after year, what changes in the world, both large and small, for better and for worse. The crib has long been indispensable for the junkie, who is drawn every year from the emergency shelter on Viktoriastraße into the alleys of the former harbor district, as is the non-sedentary. Those who want a little warm from them not only in the church will find a place in the nearby Annostraße.