Inscription, the Embossed Surface and the Ceremonial Sip: The Traubenpokal of Bernkastel-Kues, 1661–2001

This article relates the biography of a seventeenth-century gilt-silver cup from its origins in Nuremberg in the 1630s to its use in civic drinking rituals in the small town of Bernkastel-Kues on the Moselle River during the twentieth century. It investigates in particular two of the cup’s physical features, its 1661 in-scription and the lobate forms populating its surface, which facilitate different modes of social relation and offer distinct orientations to permanence and the historical past. Recounting the cup’s history over centuries occasions discussion of the shifting significance of ceremonial drinking ( Ehrentrunk ) and council plate or civic plate ( Ratssilber ) in German cities and towns.

work, in material, in form, in construction and in ornamental details it is not unique.Now residing in a civic collection outside Nuremberg, it remains overlooked in the extensive scholarship connecting extant objects there to the deep archives witnessing the work of the city's famed goldsmiths.It is the cup's inscription that renders it singular and makes it Bernkastel's, as the engraver's litany of honoured local names competes with and threatens to cover the N of Nuremberg's Beschaumark, the regulatory punch testifying to the purity of the silver, and the SG of the maker's own mark (Fig. 3).The study of early modern German silver has often focused on such marks and the context of production they evidence. 4Beyond their use in attribution and authentication, regulatory marks can be analysed as clues to the material regime that produced them, which determined the value and function of precious metalwork and the way in which it was crafted and consumed. 5Singular examples of gilt-silver vessels with highly specialized decorative and textual programmes have also been effectively contextualized within the social and political structures of the material communities that created them. 6The inscription on Bernkastel's grape cup layers on top of the existing records of its origins evidence of a new material community, one that was distinct from and yet culturally related to that in Nuremberg and in which this typical grape cup would come to have a local function and significance.
The inscription materializes the cup's enmeshment within a set of social relations, naming specific historical actors and referencing the hierarchies of power reflected in the locality's structures of governance.But the cup does more than document a historically contained set of civic connections.Carefully protected over the centuries, it was not simply held in storage, but also continued to be used in celebratory events during the twentieth century and up to the present day.Tracing the object's existence and use, as well as the changing meaning of the lobed cup as an iconic form in German visual culture, over this historical longue durée makes visible the cup's ability to constitute new relationships around it, which include meaningful links between past and present.This capacity is rooted in part in the cup's function as a vessel that can facilitate rituals of drinking.But the cup's physical features also make possible different forms of interaction.
This article uses Bernkastel's Traubenpokal and its specific biography as an opportunity to examine two of these features in detail, the inscription and the convex 'grapes' of its raised surface, which create multiplying reflections.In addition to situating these two features within early modern craft practice and its associated visual culture, I consider especially the differing temporal affordances of inscription and embossed lobe.An inscription's incised permanence and lobes' transient reflections generate distinct forms of social relation, with implications for who is seen and connected through the cup in the historical record.

I. The Ehrentrunk, Social Bonding and Civic Plate
Gold and silver cups were objects of enormous significance in medieval and early modern Germany, and in Europe more broadly.That they remain ubiquitous as the expected prize in sporting and other types of competitions speaks to the evocation of triumph, reward and honour that endures from previous centuries.In material and form they instantly call to mind high financial value and the act of drinking, with its various and morally ambiguous associations.Ann Tlusty has tracked the social function of ritual drinking in early modern Germany, from that undertaken in guilds and elite drinking societies to the more widespread tradition of the contract drink, which was a crucial aspect of sealing business deals as well as matrimonial unions.7 Drunk from pottery, stoneware, glass and baser metals, these quotidian ceremonial sips were in concept related to the more elaborate ritual events involving silver and gold vessels, which were some of the most culturally and financially valuable artisanal products available.In some patrician families, a commemorative draught was drunk from precious metal vessels designated for this purpose to mark the death of a relative. 8n civic contexts, welcoming esteemed guests often involved drinking to their honour (the Ehrentrunk or Ehrenwein) and, as Valentin Groebner has shown, the gift of wine, which for the most high-ranking guests could be accompanied by the further gift of gold and silver vessels, which were often filled with gold coins.This combination of precious metal vessel, currency and wine served to collapse the three into the shared category of 'liquid assets'. 9Perhaps a similar conflation was at work in the Traubenpokal, which explicitly referenced in its grape-cluster form the commodity of wine in the financially valuable materials of silver and gold, themselves capable of flow; in 1610 Nuremberg's town council ordered a number of grape cups for the purpose of future gifting. 10Gifts of precious-metal vessels were a way of signalling alliance and allegiance, so princes and city governments could build up substantial collections over time. 11A town's council plate (Ratssilber), consisting of gifts, acquisitions and donations, created a store of objects that could be used on civic occasions and even regifted when an urgent need arose.12Made of precious metal, these collections served also as a repository of monetary value and could be liquidated to alleviate financial hardship.But they were also a store of materialized memory of the city's past and the social networks of its illustrious citizens, which helped protect them from alienation despite their high value and easy convertibility into currency.
Although they appear to be a unified form, standing cups were often constructed of different components screwed together, with these attachments hidden by the stem, in the foot or in the lid.To the complex and carefully worked raised foot and cup, the goldsmith added cast components or elements made by colleagues with another specialization, like the silver-flower makers who produced the ornaments (Schmeck) that crowned the lids of standing cups and festooned the junctures of the cup's components.The little bouquet that springs from the cast urn on the Bernkastel cup bears the mark IR for Jeremias or Johann Rauchwolff, father and son silver-flower makers in early seventeenth-century Nuremberg. 13As cups changed hands or were renewed, these crowning elements were easily replaced, allowing their association with a given city or family to shift.The Bernkastel cup has a cast stem that imitates a trunk with knotty bark, with a thick silver vine added to curve up around it and a small climbing cast figure.Clearly a generic component, he seems out of scale with the rest of the ensemble.Once described as a farmer hunting a bird, his identifying attribute is now missing. 14Other grape cups from roughly the same period have woodcutters incorporated into the stem in reference to the grape harvest; some even distinctly represent vintners in support of the oenological theme. 15he council plate of Bernkastel currently includes four silver vessels. 16Little is known about the circumstances in which they came to this small town on the Moselle River, though they all have inscriptions referring to events and figures in the seventeenth century.The Gressel cup may have been incorporated into the town's Ratssilber because its shape and contemporary association with wine-making corresponded nicely to Bernkastel's famed vineyards or simply because Nuremberg silver was a desirable commodity, but whether it was purchased or donated or was intended to mark a political alliance and when it was acquired by the council remain a mystery.An item in the town's account books does allude to the confiscation of the majority of Bernkastel's civic plate in 1636, when Bavarian forces wintered there; it is almost certain that the Nuremberg cup came into the town's possession after this event, perhaps as a replacement for some of the lost vessels. 17ernkastel had erected a town hall in elaborate Renaissance style in 1608, and it was here, with a view onto the market square, that the civic plate was probably kept and used.Steps from this building, on an extreme incline, was a fountain topped by a sculpture of Saint Michael, in reference to the town's affiliation with the archbishopric of Trier. 18Along with the town hall, this stonework testified to Bernkastel's prosperity at the beginning of the seventeenth century.The buildings surrounding this square belonged to elite citizens, many of whom participated in running the town's governing structures.While no documentation of the use of Bernkastel's civic plate survives, based on contemporaneous cases it is fair to surmise that the vessels were used when the town council met in the town hall and shared meals and perhaps particularly on the election of new members. 19

II. Practices of Inscription
Drinking was a serious business-it was the means by which masculine honour was constructed and social relations were formed and reaffirmed. 20Investment in a finely crafted silver vessel certainly signalled the importance of ritual drinking and raised the status of the institution that could afford it.But such cups could also be fairly generic, making them vulnerable to alienation through gifting, theft, sale or being melted down and, more simply, to having their significance remain unspecified.The precious metal surface was very receptive to engraved elaboration in word and image.Many early modern inscriptions on precious metalwork mention the word Gedächtnis (remembrance), and commemoration of individuals and events was a major impetus for modifying the metal surface in order to stabilize or give new meaning to an important object.In Bernkastel in 1661, the inscription made on the existing grape cup, by then about thirty years old, related to that year's election of new officials.It is not clear what prompted this record to be made-there is no evidence of this having been a regular practice in Bernkastel, which was hardly wealthy enough to boast a groaning credenza of civic plate-and why this election and these particular men's names appear on the Nuremberg cup.But the inscription stabilizes the cup's meaning around these figures and gives them an enduring presence on what remains one of the town's great treasures.Although the hand responsible for the inscription is not known, it would be unsurprising if a local craftsman had been commissioned to take on this alteration.Bernkastel was far too small to sustain a sizable community of goldsmiths, but a few were recorded there in the course of the seventeenth century.Nikolaus Feger lived in Bernkastel until around 1661.His listed occupation of goldsmith and copperplate engraver (aurifaber et calcographus) makes him a tantalizing candidate for the inscription's author, because it shows he had precisely the necessary skills to incise the grape cup's lip with the list of local names. 21e might distinguish between two types of inscription, those designed and executed at the same time as the vessel and those added later by another hand.Contracts for elaborate vessels could stipulate text that was to appear on the surface, and some preparatory drawings communicating a design between client and smith indicate precisely where text was to be included. 22In such cases the text more deliberately fits the intended location.Other inscriptions must work within the parameters of the existing object or add an additional engravable surface where one did not exist before-this could be a circular ring soldered to a cup's lid or a curved boss attached beneath the foot or on the underside of the lid.On the Bernkastel cup, the only flat, undecorated surface on the entire object was the cup's lip.Whoever engraved the text had to accommodate it to the petal shapes between the cup's protruding lobes and negotiate the existing marks that already claimed the flat surface, including the guild and master's marks and the Tremolierstrich, the zigzag 'bite' that took a small quantity of the metal to be assayed (see Fig. 1).The result is lines that cannot be read like text that runs horizontally across a handwritten or printed page, but must instead be read in fits and starts, guided by the punctuation of colons and full stops and tiny inscribed stars and attuned to the spaces where words threaten to run together.This three-dimensional reading, requiring the investment of time and interpretation on the part of the reader, cannot be accomplished without moving with the object in the round, whether by turning it or circumambulating it.This is also the challenge that inscribed metalwork presents to modern photographic illustration, which traditionally can capture only a short excerpt of text in two dimensions.
Abbreviation was one strategy for allowing the text to fit the available surface, with implications for legibility and the audience of possible readers.The inscription on the Bernkastel cup is heavily condensed, particularly when it comes to the names of the officials.With family histories embedded deep into the town and its surviving archives, these names are easily recoverable, but when an inscribed object travels from its original location, its text may prove impossible to parse. 23A cup associated with Bernkastel now in Los Angeles remained unidentified for decades because its inscriptions were so opaque and, unlike the Traubenpokal, it did not explicitly offer the name Bernkastel. 24espite the desire for permanence, then, the inscription constructs an audience of future readers on the assumption such abbreviations will remain legible.
In other cases inscriptions record enough information to narrate complex stories of mobility and reappropriation.A Buckelpokal made in Nuremberg by Hans Petzolt around 1600 and now in the British Museum bears on its lip an inscription in Hebrew from 1740, asserting its ownership by the Chevra Kadisha, or burial society, of Pressburg, modern-day Bratislava. 25A charitable organization tasked with tending to the dying, the dead and the grieving according to Jewish law, the burial society held a yearly dinner to commemorate the death of Moses, at which sips were taken communally from the large cup, a practice reflected in the corporate festivities of many Christian guilds and brotherhoods. 26The exact origins of the cup are not known, but the inscription signals a shift in ownership and function, just like the vessels donated to civic and sacred purposes from private ownership.It provides a trace of the social relations that formed and re-formed around the vessel through time.In this case the Hebrew text and the ritual context it alludes to made the cup particularly desirable for Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, who could assert through its acquisition not only his connoisseurship of historical German silver but his Jewish identity as well.

III. The Buckel
The part of the Bernkastel cup that proved physically resistant to inscription was a design feature that had intense appeal beginning in the later fifteenth century: the Buckel, or lobe, created through repoussé (Treibarbeit). 27Repoussé was an ancient technique that had been used, for example, by the Greeks to create gold libation bowls whose ornate depressions held wine in concentric, glimmering pools. 28In early modern Germany it was a skill central to the masterpiece-often a large standing cup-that goldsmiths were required to produce for official entry to the guild.Portrayals of smiths in this period most often represented the process of raising a vessel from a flat sheet of silver, because this skill was among the most demanding and sought-after proficiencies and required for the most prominent sacred and secular vessels. 29It involved shaping the metal using a hammer and then refining this shape by carefully pushing the metal from inside and out using a series of increasingly precise tools.The hump of the Buckel needed to be defined in the vessel wall against the other lobes, a complex push and pull of the malleable metal that resulted in an arrangement of netted forms recalling the fish-bladder tracery and ribbed vaulting of Gothic architecture. 30The lid transformed the open vessel into a closed, complete entity whose sculptural surface hid its interior contents.
Associated iconically with visual and material culture of the later fifteenth century, including designs by Albrecht Dürer, Buckelpokale remained aesthetically and culturally dominant for more than a century. 31The Traubenpokal itself appears to have been invented by the Nuremberg smith Hans Petzolt in the last quarter of the sixteenth century and was imitated until it had become an established form. 32The most arresting examples of lobed cups have the effect of barely contained soap bubbles, highlighting the reflective nature of the material and, belying its true weightiness, appearing almost to defy gravity. 33They have often been described in organic terms.The period word for Buckel was Knorre, as in node, tuber or the gnarl of a tree. 34References to fruity, botanical forms are made explicit in the names given to specific types in the broad typology of the Buckel: Traubenpokal (also known as Ananaspokal), Erdbeerpokal, Herzpokal, Akeleipokal-grape, pineapple, strawberry, heart and columbine respectively.
Modern scholarship maintains a distinction between varieties of the Buckelpokal and contemporaneous vessels with flat surfaces, a distinction already meaningful in the sixteenth century. 35Although both were raised into three dimensions from flat sheets, lobate forms required a much greater investment of time and skill.They also offered far less surface for engraved ornament and lettering.The contrast is made explicit in Albrecht Altdorfer's etching of around 1520 where a double cup with regimented lobes and ornamental acanthus leaves is set against the unmarked surface of a covered beaker (Fig. 4).The artist's monogram is fitted into the thin seam of metal separating the cup's two halves, a fictive inscription that recalls the origins of the new media of engraving and etching in the craft of metalworking, including the punched marks identifying the  maker. 36The white expanse of the covered beaker in the etching is meant to signify as raised, but uninscribed, silver; it is itself the product of the unmarked area of the etching plate.

IV. (Bad) Women Bearing Cups
In addition to the prominent part it played in the training, recognition and output of goldsmiths and in collections of secular plate with their myriad functions, the Buckelpokal was often referred to in contemporary visual culture.Although men dominated public rituals of drinking, it is more often women who hold elaborate raised lobed cups in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century representation.The figure of the female cup-bearer was ambiguous.It could represent wealth and welcome gifts, like the Queen of Sheba holding out a double lobed cup to Solomon in the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493. 37ut very often the seductive woman holding a cup represented sensual temptation by conveying a heady mixture of luxury, nudity (connoting sexual licentiousness) and alcoholic excess. 38The devilish figures disguised as beautiful women who tempt Saint Anthony often bear lidded cups.More reliably it was the Whore of Babylon in biblical illustration who epitomized this dangerous combination of luxurious sensuality.Her golden 'cup of filth and fornication' usually took on the stylistic features of contemporary metalwork.Thus woodcuts accompanying Martin Luther's translations of the New Testament in the early sixteenth century give her a double or covered Buckelpokal. 39eyond the context of Christian subject matter, the figure of Fortune often bears an elaborate cup of reward, an iconography routed through Albrecht Dürer's Nemesis, the formidable goddess pinching between two fingers a precious metal vessel in a recognizably contemporary form entwined with silver Schmeck (Fig. 5). 40This image inspired dozens of later portrayals of Fortune that preserved the iconographical formula of nude woman with cup. 41he gendered dynamic of the Ehrentrunk is at play in these representations of female cup-bearers, who are usually either dangerous temptresses or divine arbiters, both tropes growing out of a misogynistic fear of women's power.Tlusty outlines the many ways women's drinking was differentiated from men's in early modern Germany, including the idea that a woman's participation in the social bonding secured by drinking usually consisted of taking a sip from her husband's cup. 42Women were rarely on the receiving end of the wine gift or the ceremonial toast. 43Outside of familial keepsakes like wedding and baptismal silver, which were sometimes engraved with the names and arms of brides, godmothers and baptized girls, secular plate primarily bore inscriptions related to spheres of male political and professional engagement, from council plate to the elaborate cups used in the drinking rituals of guilds and other male societies.Gressel's grape cup offers just one example, with its list of Bernkastel's patriarchs filling the single free space unpopulated by its swelling lobes.V.The Temporality of the Lobe's Reflective Surface Modern museum photography works hard to eliminate reflections from highly reflective objects by using light tents and other tools.The goal is to concentrate the viewer's attention on the object's form, rather than on the blinding shine that might obscure it or the invasive appearance of the photographer's apparatus, which would puncture the arthistorical framing designed to convey the object's originating moment.But, as Wolfram Koeppe has noted, this practice prevents us from seeing a lobed cup as historical viewers would have experienced it and thus from understanding that the reflective potential of the embossed surface was not something to be mitigated but instead a feature with intense appeal. 44Lobed standing cups appear in many seventeenth-century still-life paintings, where they are often interpreted as symbols of ostentatious wealth and sensuous materiality, thus fitting the genre's expected commentary on transience. 45Beyond this symbolism, however, the Buckelpokal offered the opportunity for the artist to explore reflective effects. 46While play with the artist's own reflection was a long-standing trope, the first artist to reflect themselves multiply in the convex lobes of a gilt-silver vessel was the Flemish painter Clara Peeters (Fig. 6).Celeste Brusati has probed the complexity of this self-portrait, which touts the painter's mimetic skill while also appearing 'remarkably self-effacing'. 47The illusionistic talent Peeters put on display in this painting is precisely what allows it to testify to the Buckelpokal's operation as an image-making device.The lobed vessel may return Peeters in miniature, 'just as she is' in her painting attire, but it does so eight times over, as though reproducing her in the way lovers' eyes were said through mutual gazing to 'make babies' in contemporary English parlance. 48eeters' conscious comment here makes clear that its image-generating capacity was an observed and appreciated effect of the lobed cup.
The reflective convex surface had been a particular site of investigation in Northern European painting of the previous two centuries.The primary object in art-historical narratives of these investigations is Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait, where the convex mirror on the wall behind the depicted couple captures two further figures, who stand in the position in the fictive room that is coterminous with that held by the artist while painting and, later, by the panel's viewer.Famously painted in elaborate script on the wall above that mirror and its reflection is the surprising legend 'Jan van Eyck was here, 1434' (Fig. 7). 49The inscription has prompted much debate about its implications for this unusual portrait's function, but it has also been read as testament to the painter's mimetic skill and conceptual imagination, as Van Eyck reminds the viewer he, not a mirror, is the author of this seemingly reflected slice of reality.The wall text could also be understood, however, as a hedge against the mirror reflection below it, acknowledging that image's fleetingness in the hypothetical world of the painting.Van Eyck's phrase, reiterated in spontaneous graffiti the world over, condenses the essential meaning of all inscriptions into its most brusque expression: I was here.Peeters's still-life painting asserted the same but employed a wordless and much more precarious (fictive) medium: the Buckelpokal capturing her visage.
In other still lifes Peeters acknowledged the commemorative utility of text when she placed in the foreground an elaborately ornamented silver-handled knife bearing her name. 50A subtler, more 'motivated' conceit, perhaps, than Van Eyck's writing on the wall, the knife adhered to the contemporary practice of inscribing the very personal, portable forms of eating utensils with individual and familial identifiers. 51But while many early modern spoons and knives bore initials, monograms and coats of arms, which often keep their original owners unidentified today, Peeters did not leave the recognition of her authorship to chance and painted into the silver handle each distinct letter of her full name.
The Arnolfini portrait's juxtaposition of convex, reflective surface and stabilizing, enduring inscription is shared with the Bernkastel Traubenpokal, where the list of local officials nestles around the cup's polished lobes.When the cup was inscribed and as it was used in ritual drinking in the seventeenth century, the faces of the men identified, their colleagues and friends and, later, their sons and other descendants appeared in the surface that held their names.They were also 'here' and participated in a complex temporal convergence specific to this vessel and the act of drinking from it, where the drinker's lips met the seventeenth-century surface-made and assayed in the 1630s, inscribed in 1661-and momentarily remade that surface through their reflection.The temporality of this object is always multiple, as it is for all historical artifacts, linking its moment of creation to later uses, including the inscription, up to and including its present existence.But highly reflective objects have the unusual capacity to exhibit the visual features of both their historical context of origin and the present, for the time of the reflected image is always now.The grape cup's reflective surface thus made possible the fleeting connection of its handlers and viewers-yet another set of social relations networked out of it-while also linking them to a deeper past through the cup's form, ornament and inscription.

VI. The Bernkastel Traubenpokal, 1891-1933
The convergence of historical figures (by means of inscription) with contemporary drinkers (by means of reflection) enacted physically through the cup's form is echoed by the symbolic function of ceremonial vessels in the Ehrentrunk.Those who handled and drank from the cup were linked in a transhistorical chain that reinforced the honour this ritual bestowed upon individuals while cumulatively adding to the larger community's pride in its civic history.As Tlusty explains, beliefs about ritual drinking could be strongly held but remain implicit. 52In the case of Bernkastel's civic vessels, however, beginning in the nineteenth century, this understanding of the cup's transhistoricity was explicitly articulated in events of ritual toasting.So while the precise use and function of the town's Traubenpokal is not richly documented for the early modern period, the archive of reportage and photography chronicling its more recent use reveals its centrality to Bernkastel's civic occasions in this later period.
If it had not already been before, Bernkastel's market fountain became the site for ceremonial toasts, serving as a stage for the performance of civic unity, with the town hall as the backdrop and the historic timber-framed buildings of the marketplace tightly enclosing a gathering of people in the round.The fountain, always dressed for such occasions in cut flowers and greenery and sometimes in small flags, even had steps that created a natural dais for the Ehrentrunk, where speeches and toasts were made before wine was offered and received in the elaborate vessels belonging to the town or those of the society being honoured. 53Surviving photographs show the means by which wine was then dispensed to the gathered crowd, in small glasses passed over narrow temporary barriers.A gendered distinction can often be identified between those participating in the ceremonial toast, who are usually older men, and those serving the wine, who are always younger women dressed in Tracht, or traditional costume.These events created and reinforced over time a mutually identifying nexus between the historic silver vessels, the market fountain and the town hall, so that they would have been out of place elsewhere in Bernkastel.Part of this nexus involved a slippage between the fountain, which was naturally filled with water, and the Moselle wine that was doled out from counters set up around it.This slippage created the sense that wine was flowing directly out of the fountain, which reinforced Bernkastel's historic identification with wine production.
An intensely documented Ehrentrunk that illustrates the role that fountain and vessels played in linking Bernkastel to its history occurred in 1891, when the town celebrated its 600th anniversary with two days of masses, parades, performances, dancing, historical re-enactment and speeches.The culmination was a reading of the town's founding documents followed by a 'ceremonial toast offered from the civic cups' (Credenzen des Ehrentrunkes aus den städtischen Bechern) and festival wine served 'through the market fountain'. 54Bernkastel's mayor gave a speech in which he honoured visiting dignitaries and urged the audience to think on emperor, king and fatherland.He then introduced the Ehrentrunk in terms that cast it as specifically German and asserted the bond created by the historical chain of those who had drunk from the town's seventeenth-century vessels: To strengthen this sentiment, gentlemen, in accordance with the old German custom, let us empty these time-honoured cups from which three powerful rulers of the House of Hohenzollern have already drunk, filled with the noblest and best product of our local vineyards. 55e local newspaper reported that after reading aloud the town's founding documents, the district president raised a toast to Bernkastel and drank out of one of the three civic wine cups, which were afterwards passed around the crowd.The journalist himself seemed to have handled the three cups, for he noted physical details, including measurements of height and volume, and recorded-with several errors-two of the inscriptions.Testifying to the challenge of reading the text on the Nuremberg cup was its vague description as 'a series of names of Schultheisen and Scheffen' from the local area, which shows how the memorializing potency of the inscription could be easily diluted.
This report refers to the cups as 'precious and, because of their age, unusual', a phrase that gains greater meaning when read against the shifting status, location and function of German civic plate in the second half of the nineteenth century.In this period, many ceremonial cups were alienated from their original contexts and bought up by private collectors or acquired by museums.Ceremonial drinking vessels left the sites in which they had long been housed either because the institution they had served was defunct or because their intended function was no longer required. 56The skyrocketing market value of historical silver was also a powerful driver of alienation, which the city of Lüneburg recognized when it sold its council plate to the Prussian state in 1874, replacing it with electrotype copies. 57The loss of cultural patrimony on such occasions could be palpable, particularly for preservationists and local historians. 58hat the small town of Bernkastel had held on to its silver cups and was able to employ them to celebrate the momentous occasion of its anniversary was indeed noteworthy.
The popularity of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century German silver at this time alongside the limited availability of authentic specimens created an industry of replicas, forgeries, heavily restored originals and modern historicist interpretations of iconic vessel forms, including the Buckelpokal. 59In the wake of industrialization, its raised lobes hearkened back to the ascendant craft traditions of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.It became an easy metonym for goldsmiths' work and for the ideals of handcrafted decorative art more generally. 60In the visual program for the 1908 exhibition of art and industry in Munich, a small nude boy-a kind of Jugendstil putto set against a cloudfilled sky in a meadow-was used to represent applied art.On surviving postcards he awkwardly, but with evident pride, holds a grape cup the size of his toddler's torso (Fig. 8).Rather than a generic symbol, this was a highly specific reference to German craft of the late Renaissance, perhaps as a gesture to the importance and longevity to which modern German applied art aspired.The humour of this image rests not only in the typical theme of cherubic ornament-a gentle poking of fun at babies attempting adult endeavours-but also in the mock-heroic reimagination of the tradition of honouring and being honoured by the ceremonial toast and the gift of a precious cup. 61n Bernkastel, as in many other German towns, the Ehrentrunk continued to be a focal point of civic ceremony in the twentieth century and where possible employed historical vessels capable of connecting past and present in this ritual imbibing.Under National Socialism, the established tradition was deployed for new purposes.As Christof Krieger has shown, propaganda on behalf of German wine spurred the creation or elaboration of local wine festivals in the Moselle Valley, many of which took place in Bernkastel (Fig. 9). 62Photographs from the 1930s and 1940s record the town's Traubenpokal being offered to esteemed guests, who were often high-ranking politicians and members of the military, at these and other civic events. 63The choice of this cup over the others may have been because it was the largest-holding half a litre-and most spectacular or because of its instantly recognizable shape, which effectively conveyed both a gesture to a German Golden Age and a reference, through its grapecluster form, to Bernkastel's association with wine.Around 1942, Johann Port, a soldier from Kues, was given a parade honouring a recent commendation.It culminated at the market fountain, where Port, a proud grin on his face, held up Bernkastel's cup to a higher-ranking official; another figure in the background holds the lid (Fig. 10).crowds (Fig. 11). 64In Bernkastel in 1933, the grape cup, through its incorporation into Göring's triumphant gesture, was being utilized, as indeed it had been in 1891, to claim continuity between a particular narrative of the German past-recognizable in its emblematic forms and traditions-and the present political moment, which pointed the way forward to a glorious future.The reality that only certain historically sanctioned forms of civic plate would be tolerated under National Socialism became clear also in 1933, when several recent modernist additions to Cologne's Ratssilber were denounced as dissolute and 'Bolshevik'.Although these pieces, which creatively restaged momentous events in Cologne's history, had been praised when completed in the 1920s, their donation by a Jewish citizen and their spiky, attenuated forms made them unacceptable-the decorative arts form of 'degenerate art' (Entartete Kunst)-and after 1936, under the direction of the city's mayor and the director of the Schools of Art and Craft, they were melted down. 65The revivalist vessel forms in the city's collection, including a grape cup of 1905, survived to grace civic events in the postwar period. 66The Ehrentrunk honouring Göring in Bernkastel in 1933 took place against the unfolding tragedy of the town's Jewish community, which had fifty-nine members that year.In 1927 Bernkastel's Jews had celebrated with great fanfare the seventy-fifth anniversary of their synagogue, as well as a local history going back to the thirteenth century. 67By 1941, having fled or been forcibly removed, some to concentration camps where they were murdered, none were left, and their fellow citizens had desecrated their picturesque cemetery overlooking the river in the hills above the town. 68Following the shameful eradication of the local Jewish population, the war ended in catastrophe for Bernkastel.In March 1945 American warplanes flew over the Moselle Valley and bombed the town centre, destroying several buildings, including the town hall and the market fountain, precisely where Göring had triumphantly raised the cup at the bridge's dedication twelve years before.To prevent Allied troops from crossing the Moselle, the Wehrmacht blew up that bridge on 11 March 1945, effectively splitting the now-unified municipality of Bernkastel-Kues back into two communities facing each other across the river. 69rimed by the long visual tradition of figures hoisting Buckelpokale into the air, it is possible to see Göring in the photograph of 1933 as a more corpulent, goggle-wearing version of the Whore of Babylon of sixteenth-century Bible illustration, or even as the 1908 Munich putto now grown up and wielding his cup in a single hand.The image of Göring grasping this spectacular gilt-silver vessel resonates with his documented predilection for the shiny and ostentatious and the part he played in separating German and other European Jews from their property. 70A particular admirer of Gothic art, Göring even acquired some Nuremberg Buckelpokale himself. 71In 1940 his agents confiscated through a forced sale a pair of wedding cups by Hans Petzolt from the silver collection of a German Jewish banker. 72Nor was the image of the powerful cup-bearer far from his personal visual archive.His collection also eventually incorporated a nineteenth-century copy of Dürer's Nemesis, whose minute depiction of a Tyrolean landscape shares many affinities with the community of Bernkastel-Kues, spread across the Moselle River and girded by steeply rising hills. 73Of this landscape Joseph Leo Koerner has written, The scene of town, rivers, roads, and mountains, which we experience in its specificity whether or not we know its locale, does endow the whole sheet with a sense of the always particular character of doom.[…] as if this town has, here and now, become a fulcrum of history. 74o bring Dürer's sixteenth-century goddess of divine retribution to the scene of Göring's Ehrentrunk in 1933 and to the destruction of the Göring Bridge in 1945 would be an anachronistic gesture of dubious value.Still, Nemesis's proffered cup provides a reminder of Bernkastel's overlooked female cup-bearers.In a photograph taken on the day of the bridge dedication in 1933, a group of fresh-faced teenage girls, those tasked with dispensing wine from the market fountain, crowd smilingly into the frame (Fig. 12).The artificial grapes tacked to their shawls and hung in their hair echo the shiny Buckel of Gressel's cup that one girl holds by the stem, firmly in her grip.The Rauchwolffs' silver flowers rise up, fading into overdeveloped white as they cover the mouth of another girl standing behind.
It was common for a teenage girl dressed in some version of folk costume to offer the cup to the senior male figure in modern rituals of the Ehrentrunk, and this image must relate to the preparation of a similar moment for Göring.Virginal young women make acceptable cup-bearers because they are sexually untainted and, unlike the threatening female figures of divine judgment and fate, almost entirely disempowered.With the cup's lid firmly on, the seventeenth-century inscription populated with the names of Bernkastel's town patriarchs is hidden and the cup's surface reflects only, and in multiple, this crowd of expectant female faces.The excitement they feel at having been chosen to play this part in the civic drama is as visible here as it is devastating to reflect on and draws out their simultaneous complicity in and co-option into this event honouring Göring.Like Clara Peeters in her invented cup, they appear, for good and ill, just as they were.And though the Traubenpokal bears no permanent trace of the girls, in contrast to the engraved presence of the officials of 1661, both groups are bound up in its history.

VII. Conclusion: 2001
The photographs taken of Bernkastel's grape cup in the twentieth century capture the new sets and types of social relations that formed around it as the Ehrentrunk was performed during the town's celebratory occasions.They provide a view of the vessel that is radically different from that chronicled by its seventeenth-century marks and inscription, revealing how the cup was physically handled as well as the centripetal force it exerted in civic events, drawing Bernkastel's townspeople into and around the market fountain.Whereas the cup's reflective surface produced only fleeting images of these interactions, the photograph provides an auxiliary site of inscription that preserves a visual record of the cup's experience and its role in staging the town's history and self-identity through moments of human connection.Unlike the 1661 inscription and the reflected images on the cup's Buckel, though, the photograph exists independently, making it vulnerable to separation and loss.Its evidence must be sutured back into the cup's biography to provide the fullest accounting of the Traubenpokal's social agency.
In May 2001, when Bernkastel-Kues celebrated the 600th anniversary of Nicholas Cusanus's birth, a local newspaper published a brief profile of the town's civic plate in anticipation of the planned festivities. 75Under the title 'Expression of Civic Pride', it connected the town's surviving vessels to the erection of the town hall in the seventeenth century and the town's history of self-governance.Discussed as well was the vessels' role in welcoming esteemed guests, including King Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1848.Hermann Göring went unmentioned, suggesting that his interaction with the grape cup had been forgotten or suppressed.But when the German Federal President Johannes Rau visited later that month to mark the Cusanus anniversary, he was given the Traubenpokal to drink from in a ceremonial toast and was reminded, while sipping, that Göring too had shared this honour.An oral tradition about the cup's more recent history, including the event documented in the photographs from 1933, had been kept alive in Bernkastel and apparently accompanied the cup on its rare appearances in public.Rau's response-blanching or spitting the liquid out, according to differing 3

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: Detail of the Inscription on the Bernkastel-Kues Traubenpokal.Source: Photograph author's own.

Figure 3 :
Figure 3: Detail of lip of Bernkastel Traubenpokal showing inscription covering the Nuremberg Beschaumark.Source: Photograph author's own.

A
much larger and more significant occasion took place in December 1933, when a new bridge between Bernkastel and Kues was named for Hermann Göring, then prime minister of Prussia and president of the Reichstag.Standing in an open-topped car parked on the market square, Göring lifted the Traubenpokal to toast the teeming

Figure 10 :
Figure 10: Ehrentrunk on the Steps of the Market Fountain, Parade for Johann Port, c.1942.Source: photograph courtesy of Roland Klinger.

Figure 12 :
Figure 12: Unknown Photographer, Wine Servers at the Göring Bridge Dedication, December 1933.Source: photograph courtesy of Roland Klinger.