a crib? No, what Maurizio Cecchin and Ulli Tandler set up in their living room in Markt Schwaben is actually not a classic nativity scene. The nativity scene is actually an entire landscape and, to a certain extent, has grown out of the room, has unfolded as a kind of parallel universe into which the viewer can immerse himself at will and in which he can lose himself. A bit like in an old master landscape painting. The panorama of mountains, villages, stables, forest and meadows dominates the living room from one wall to the other. The window is draped with a starry sky and delivered by a fabulous mountain scenery, which serves as a background for scenes from village life; atmospherically a mixture of Alps and Apennines, of Bethlehem and Belluno.
Looks like a facade in an Italian mountain village, but it’s just a tetrapak in disguise.
(Photo: Peter Hinz-Rosin)
Isn’t that a bit much crib? Ulli Tandler laughs and says: “I’m lucky this time. Last year I wasn’t able to watch TV the entire Advent season.” Her husband Maurizio packed the TV with him, just like Christo packed the Reichstag.
Ulli Tandler has long since given up fighting her husband’s passion for cribs, she is responsible for draping the figures and also…
(Photo: Peter Hinz-Rosin)
…for solving some logistical problems. So she fired the roof shingles from a fimo-like mass in the oven.
(Photo: private)
The nativity scene has a long tradition with Maurizio Cecchin, whom everyone who lives in Markt Schwaben knows. Cecchin himself is actually not an original but a market Swabian who has traveled to us – but he has long since done so with body and soul. He was born in Italy, albeit in the very north, near Belluno, which, if you listen to him, isn’t really Italy at all. The Wahl-Markt Schwabener has a lot to complain about in the rest of the country further south, but that would lead too far here. Despite all his personal criticism of his fatherland, he brought his Italian songs, his childhood memories and a bit of “Vita Bella” with him, and he sang the audience at the Weiherspiele in ecstasy for years.
“When I was little, there was a competition for the most beautiful crib on our street.”
The nativity scene is not actually part of his public life, he has been cultivating this very private passion at home for many years together with his wife, and there is a lot of his family and his past in all the little figures and scenes. “When I was little, there was always a competition on the street for the most beautiful crib,” he reports. The jurors came from the church, where else from. “These were monks who worked for us as pastors. They went into every house and looked at the cribs.” There was probably at least one panettone in return, but the boy probably didn’t notice anything. But the fact that the churchmen came in sandals and without stockings demanded respect from him. “It used to be minus 31 degrees for us,” he says.
Styrofoam is under the surface of these houses, which are modeled after a village near Cosenza.
(Photo: private)
His father built the building back then – and woe betide if the children, Maurizio and his two brothers, came into the corridor too early. “We were never allowed to be there when my father tested the lighting.” This is different now. Maurizio and Ulli work together on the final details, here a small light, there a missing piece of fence, even if the responsibility for the big picture lies in his hands. Most of the time he says where to go, that much can be heard, and then his wife goes online to search for ideas to implement it. Tandler fired the roof shingles from a kind of polymer clay in the oven, lovingly shaped one like the other, just like her Christmas cookies. Under the stone facade of a cottage is a milk carton, others are made from medicine packs. Tandler covered them with small stones so that the fronts look like roughly whitewashed or peeling house views from some mountain village.
Some materials are found in the forest, such as rootstocks or moss.
(Photo: Peter Hinz-Rosin)
“When he moved in” – that was almost 20 years ago, “then the construction of the nativity scene started,” she says. “I had a little nativity scene,” a kind of shed, a couple of shepherds, that’s it. Ulli Tandler looks as if she wants to say: “It was nice too.” But her husband had little time for it. “The Christ Child wasn’t born on a farm,” he said. And so first a nativity tree was created, with scenes on several levels, then gradually entire villages, huts, workshops, the nativity grew in width, the mountain range, initially made of fabric, was now made of papier-mâché.
With the construction of the nativity scene, the advent season arrives in the Tandler-Cecchin house, this time in November, because a trip to visit relatives in Italy was pending and everything had to be ready before then.
These buildings are a bit reminiscent of the dwellings in the Shire.
(Photo: Peter Hinz-Rosin)
The former pond singer and long-time managing director of the former Edeka behind the train station spent almost a weekend working on his landscape this time. A village made up of rounded houses, modeled on a village near Cosenza, is brand new. He first had to set it up in the garage to see how it looks and how it fits together. Only then did he transport the buildings, which are made of Styrofoam underneath, covered with glue, grass and stones and covered with moss on top and now look a bit like the caves from the Shire, up in sections and fitted them into the landscape. And meanwhile his wife has disappeared into the kitchen and has taken on the task of baking Christmas cookies.
Maurizio Cecchin spends days and weeks tinkering with the individual elements of his crib landscape.
(Photo: private)
That too has now become a tradition for the two of them. “Then it gets very quiet here, you don’t hear anything for hours. At most, an occasional curse from the kitchen or the living room.” When all the cookies were baked, all the shepherds gathered their dogs and sheep, chamois on mountain meadows, greengrocers and villagers their place, and the Christ Child lay in his cradle, the tiny lights went on to make the woodcutter’s job easier, the dreams of the sleeper to light up on the rock or to illuminate the inside of the rounded houses.
And if Ulli Tandler was a bit skeptical about her husband’s passion at the beginning of their marriage, that has long since subsided. “I love to sit here at the table and just look at the crib,” she says. Before doing so, she set up sheep, hedgehogs, squirrels and whatever else is crawling there herself. But there are so many wooden figures, most of which come from Val Gardena, that you can always marvel at the diversity. Some of them move, such as a bearded fellow who keeps swinging his ax over a pile of wood, or a peasant woman struggling with a pitchfork. When it’s very quiet in the room, you can hear the creaking of the joints.
Most of the figures come from Val Gardena, some, like this farmer’s wife, can even move.
(Photo: Peter Hinz-Rosin)
This year Cecchin christened his building the “Dolomite Nativity Scene” – “last year everything was Arabic,” he says. “During Corona we were doing handicrafts, you couldn’t go out anyway,” says his wife. It is not known whether the nativity scene in Cecchin’s parents’ house was similarly powerful. But the fact that Christmas Eve started with a large portion of tortellini, cooked by my mother, that’s for sure. Then the whole family marched to midnight mass – not without leaving a schnapps for the Christ child, who was expected in the meantime.
Strangely enough, his father was always the last to leave the house, reports Maurizio Cecchin. He could still remember that his brother Claudio pushed him once when he came back, pointed to the empty shot glass and whispered: “Look, the Christ Child was there.” Sometimes it was white outside after mass. And as the Italian Markt Schwabener puts it, the glorification of the white Christmas was cultivated in Belluno just as it was in Markt Schwaben and elsewhere.
When Maurizio Cecchin’s family went to Christmas mass at home, a shot of schnapps was left for the Christ Child.
(Photo: Peter Hinz-Rosin)