Towards the end of January 1937, Beckett made a stop in Naumburg to see its cathedral and came away with his interest in ecclesiastical architecture and sculpture front and centre. Travelling on, he devoted most of his attention to churches and their statuary, though the great sculptors of the 15th and 16th centuries did not always convince him. In Bamberg and Würzburg, it was the work of the Wolfskehlmeister that he preferred – and appears to have related to: “Master of senile & collapsed. Another man for me” (25/02/37).
In Nuremberg, Adam Kraft’s work impressed Beckett the most. A visit to the Heilig-Geist-Spital and Kraft’s Kreuzigungsgruppe became one of the few occasions during his journey that drew some lines of poetry from him and the motif of the two thieves, whose statues are placed to both sides of the crucified Christ in the shadowed corners of the courtyard, will appear once more, over ten years later, in Waiting for Godot.
![[Translate to English:] 02/03/37I wish I were an old man or an old womanhalf & halfor an old hermaphroditeif hermaphrodites live to be oldonly old old as a crutchwith a room off the big yard of the Holy Ghost Spital in NürnbergWhen the sun shines at midday on Adam Kraft’s Big black stone Christ CrucifiedBut not on the repentant thiefNor the unrepentant](/fileadmin/sub-websites/bibliothek/user_upload/bilder/ausstellungen/beckett/02-03-37.png)
