Ludwig Vogele Crib @museum.de

F: Ludwig Vogele's skill with the knife was as striking as his personality – his deep, crisp carving style gave his figures sharply outlined, angular facial features. The crib you’re looking at now was made in the 1950s and is brought to life by his figurines. They’re ten centimetres or four inches tall, unpainted, and designed in the Nazarene style.

M: As a wood-carver, Ludwig Vogele had a particular passion for Christmas cribs. He created more than a thousand figures of Christ, made life-size carvings of saints, and was commissioned to decorate entire churches.

F: As the Klüsserath Friends of the Crib, we enjoyed a very special relationship with Ludwig Vogele. The sculptor from Ichenhausen was present when our association was founded and later became an honorary member. Until his death in 2000, he taught more than twenty wood-carving courses in Klüsserath, where he passed on his skills to members of the association and countless students.

M: Let me conclude with a little anecdote. The setting for this crib was created by a man called Anton Haisch, who was a master baker. While he was waiting for the bread dough to rise, he would build cribs in his bake-house, mostly from cork oak bark. If he ran out of glue, he’d use bread dough instead. Much to the delight of the mice, who gnawed away and gradually stripped all the bread dough out of his cribs.