Resumen de Dis/Continuities in Dresden's Dances of Death
One central claim of the Dance of Death, namely, that in death all are equal, is examined here in its manifestation in the history and culture of Dresden. Emphasis is on three works: Christoph Walther I’s frieze (1535), Alfred Rethel’s print series (1849), and Richard Peter’s photobook (1949). Rethel’s and Peter’s secularization of the Dance of Death is accompanied by a shift in attention from the dead to the living, understood as survivors. This shift raises difficult questions about the Dance of Death’s central claim, its authors, and their audiences, which are explicitly addressed from a late twentieth-century perspective.
