···III···

We know there is a long tradition

of persecuting the Jews, in the City

of Frankfurt as in other places.

Around 1240, the records tell us,

173 were either slaughtered

or died of their own free will

in a conflagration. In 1349

the Flagellant Brothers instituted

a great massacre in the Jewish quarter.

Again, the chronicles tell that the Jews

burned themselves and that

after the fire there was a clear view from

the Cathedral Hill over to Sachsenhausen.

Thereafter the Jews only hesitantly

returned to the city on the Main.

In the mid–fifteenth century

a clothing statute is issued,

yellow rings to be worn on the tunic,

later a grey circle the size of

an apple, for the prevention of all

carnal intercourse between Christians

and Jews, for a long time to come

under the pain of death.

Then, at the expense of Frankfurt’s

high city council, in the train

of civic reform, progressive order

and hygienisation, a ghetto of their own

is built for the Jews by the Wollgraben,

fourteen houses and a new synagogue.

By Grünewald’s time, we learn,

there are twenty-three houses, and soon

the district counts more than three thousand souls

without the boundaries having been widened.

Each night—on Sundays at four in the

afternoon—they were locked up, and

might not walk into any place

where a green tree grew,

not on the Scheidewall

nor in the Ross, nor on the Römerberg

or in the Avenue. In this ghetto

the Jewess Enchin had been raised

before, not many months preceding

her marriage to Mathys Grune

the painter, she was christened

in the name of St. Anne.

In the compendious book about the historical

Grünewald which Dr. W. K. Zülch produced

in ancient Schwabach type,

in the year 1938 for Hitler’s birthday

the story of this extraordinary union

could not be admitted. Grünewald

would have noticed this child,

remarkable, it was said, for her beauty

when she passed through the Bridge Gate

and the Preachers’ Lane on her way

to her workplace just outside the ghetto.

But there is no evidence that it was he who induced

this Anna, betrothed to him a year later,

to change her religious faith.

Rather it seems that she herself

had facilitated this step

attesting great strength of will,

or desperation, by looking the painter

straight in the eyes; perhaps

at first merely in love with

his green-colored name,

a conjunction which to the bachelor

master, who meanwhile had given up

the Mainz Court Painter’s appointment

in favour of the great Isenheim Altar

commission, will not have come amiss,

for without a household of his own

he could employ no assistant

or apprentice for his work.

When Grünewald buys a house

very close to the cathedral

on December 17th 1512

for twenty-three guilders

twelve shillings, already,

the documents record, he has taken

to wife the baptised Anna.

The much admired young proselyte,

who for the Frankfurt Christian

community, which even for her baptism

had overwhelmed her with gifts,

was no mean acquisition, and

could have founded Grünewald’s fortune.

If it fell out otherwise, for one thing

it was because the painter

who later lived as a recluse

and almost underground, himself

made impossible his recognition

by this community; and,

for another, as his pictures prove,

he had more of an eye for men,

whose faces and entire physique

he executed with endless devotion

whereas his women for the most part

are veiled, so relieving him of the fear

of looking at them more closely.

Perhaps that is why Grünewald’s

Anna grew shrewish, ill, a victim

to perverse reason, to brain fevers

and to madness.

In the end, awaiting recovery,

she is placed in hospital where

at the time of the painter’s death

still she lives on, infirm

in body and mind.