text: Carsten Theumer

The medal Casting of the New Osanna Bell (“Neuguss der Osanna”), 2019

The medal was created to commemorate the casting of the new large OSANNA bell for St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig in 2019.
For more than 100 years, the church’s southern tower had been deserted, as the preceding bell had been melted down in 1917 as part of the war effort. To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Peaceful Revolution in East Germany, St. Nicholas Parish launched a project to create a total of six new bells for Leipzig’s largest church.
At the end of the competition, I was commissioned to embellish the large Osanna bell.

As the theme for this more than 2 m tall bell that strikes the g° note, I selected Genesis, the creation of the animate world, placing more than one hundred different kinds of animal across the bell’s entire surface. Fish, amphibians, mammals, insects and birds span the bell, along with some trumpet players grouped around the blessing; the back is dedicated to a text on the bell’s history with an image of the church façade.

The image on the front of the medal shows the Albert Bachert foundry in Neunkirchen;
a caster is at a smelting furnace above a casting pit, regulating the flow of the liquid bronze. A small devil has been tied to the chimney above the flames of the smelting furnace, thus incapable of causing harm during the casting process.
The scene is populated by animals found on the bell. To the right of the caster, we see the four animals that symbolise the parish: captivated yet peaceful, the dove, donkey, lion and lamb watch the caster at his work. A flying fish passes through the room overhead. In the casting pit, an angel presses itself close to the mould, protecting it, while in the background, sea creatures calmly swim by.
To me, the irrational yet contemplative images on this side of the medal reflect the actual event of the bell’s casting in the foundry. Headed by Albert Bachert, the casters were extremely focused on their work; the mould of the bell took more than half an hour to fill.

The text on the back of the medal is devoted to this event. In the end, the bell weighed in at almost 7 tonnes, which was more than originally planned.