German court rejects bid to remove church’s antisemitic pig sculpture

Plaintiff Michael Duellmann now wants to take case to country’s highest court

The sculpture adorns the wall of Town Church in Wittenberg, Germany (AP)

A German federal court has refused a Jewish man’s request for an antisemitic medieval statue to be taken down from a church in eastern Germany.

On Tuesday, the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) rejected a case brought by Michael Duellmann, who said the recently-restored relief in Wittenberg, Saxony-Anhalt, was "a defamation of and insult to the Jewish people".

The 700-year-old “Judensau” sculpture, which adorns the outside wall of a church where Martin Luther once preached, depicts a rabbi lifting the tail of a pig - an animal deemed unclean in Judaism - and other figures sucking its teats.

The work has had "a terrible effect up to this day”, said Mr Duellman, who wants the work to be moved to the nearby Luther House museum.

The BGH’s rejection of the proposal is the latest in a series of legal setbacks for Mr Duellman’s proposal, after his request was turned down by courts in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt in 2019 and 2020.

Ahead of the most recent case, BGH judge Stephan Seiters said Mr Duellman was within his rights to call for the statue’s removal, calling the relief “anti-semitism, carved in stone”.

Mr Seiters said the court would decide whether the church had done enough by mounting an information plaque in 1988, which discusses anti-Jewish persecution in Europe.

“We must also determine whether an insult remains an insult, regardless of any new context it is placed within,” he added, according to Deutsche Welle. 

Responding to the BGH’s decision, Mr Duellmann told German news agency dpa the country’s courts had yet to take “seriously” the statue’s “poisoning effect on society".

Mr Duellmann wants to take his case to the Federal Constitutional Court, Germany’s highest court.