Frankfurter Kunstverein - Markus Schinwald. Children's Crusade

Markus Schinwald combines several tragic tales, including the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Because of the lack of wages, the minstrel took revenge by luring the children out of town. Just 100 years earlier, in 1212, 30,000 children actually set out from Cologne and France for Jerusalem to liberate the Holy Land from the Saracens. The so-called Children's Crusade soon comes to a halt, the children starve or freeze to death on the way, even before they reach the Gulf of Genoa. The film "Children's Crusade," which ties the two stories together, shows a group of chanting children following a life-size puppet with changing faces. The poignant images of enticement and seduction were filmed at Vienna's Mölkerbastei and set to Benjamin Britten's Opus 82. [Thomas Trummer, 2005, in Österreichische Galerie Belvedere (ed.), Annual Report Belvedere 2004, Vienna 2005, p. 12]