The German photographer Peter Seidel’s touring exhibit of his photographs of mikvaot — ritual baths — is on show in Friedberg, the town near Frankfurt am Main where Europe’s largest known mikvah, dating from the 13th century, is located.
Called “Ganz Rein!” (Quite Pure! — and it can also mean “Total Immersion!”), the exhibit, which opened November 5, is now on show until January 9 at the Wetterau Museum in Friedberg, which includes as part of its complex the extraordinary monumental mikvah built around 1260 and in use by the Jewish community until the 19th century.
It has been recognized as a historic monument since the beginning of the 20th century.
That’s Seidel’s photo of the Friedberg mikvah on the exhibition poster.
Seidel began photographing mikvaot — ancient and contemporary — in 1987, inspired by a visit to the Friedberg mikvah.
The exhibit of his photos has been shown in many places in Europe and the U.S. since it was first mounted in 2010 at the Jewish Museum in Hohenems, Austria, to coincide with the restoration of the mikvah in Hohenems, which dates from 1829 and is the oldest in Austria. (The exhibit is a project of the Jewish museums in Hohenems, Vienna, Fürth, and Frankfurt.)
The Friedberg mikvah is remarkable for its size — it’s 25 metres deep and its shaft is square, with each side 5.50 metres wide, its elaborate construction, and its state of complete preservation.
Some 72 steps lead down to the water, arranged in seven staircases around the shaft, which is decorated with gothic arches and columns.
Stephanie Fuchs, of the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation, describes it like this, in an essay on the Shared History Project website of the Leo Baeck Institute:
A narrow, cellar-like vestibule leads to an entry door which opens onto a square shaft. Steep flights of stairs run along the walls down to the water. The arches above the stairs rest on intricately designed columns, quarter columns, and corbels. The free-standing pillars are crowned by capitals featuring leaf ornaments in the typical fashion of the time. Similar forms can also be seen on other buildings from the mid-13th century, such as the Friedberg Stadtkirche (town church) and smaller religious buildings in the area, not to mention cathedrals throughout the wider region. Like the Romanesque mikvahs of Worms and Speyer, the structures built a century later by the Jewish community of Friedberg followed the prevailing architectural taste; there seems to have been no attempt to stand out from the majority society.
The Shared History Project (SHP) was initiated by the Leo Baeck Institute – New York | Berlin (LBI) and supported by #2021JLID – Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland e.V. with funding from the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community (BMI), as part of observances in 2021 marking 1700 years of Jewish presence in Germany.
The Friedberg mikvah is one of 58 objects, presented chronologically, that the SHP uses to create a historical narrative of Jewish history in German-speaking lands, from ancient times to the present.
See a gallery of Seidel’s photographs of mikvaot
See notice of the exhibit on the Wetterau Museum web site
See a photo documentation of the Friedberg mikvah by the Center for Jewish Art
See the mikvah on the Shared History Project page
Read the article by JHE’s Ruth Ellen Gruber about the Ganz Rein! exhibit in Hohenems in 2010
1 comment on “Germany: “Ganz Rein!”– the touring exhibit of Peter Seidel’s Mikvah photographs — is mounted in Friedberg, site of Europe’s remarkable and largest known mikvah, dating from the 13th century and fully preserved”
Quite pure is a very bad translation. The German phrase has a double meaning, the first obvious, the 2nd less so and both in connection to mikvaot.
The first meaning is totally pure, the 2nd something like totally immersed (totally in).