Paumgartner Altarpiece – Right Wing – Hl. Eustachius

As from Albrecht Dürer’s masterwork, this wing represents a warrior-saint. St. Eustace’s seasoned but still ephebic appearance, his almost dancing posture and the Hubertus Cross on the flag , both remind the omosexuality deeply spread among the German Freikorps soldiers and officers – many of them later in the Sturm Abteilungen, SA. Think about Luchino Visconti’s masterpiece movie “The Damned”. So we see altogether other quotes from the Freikorps’ epic, as the Stahlhelm (the German steel helmet) and the Odalrune in the central buckle. The saint is also defined as a Rossbacher (a soldier of the Freikorps Rossbach, whose escutcheon was the Hubertuskreutz), Rossbach himself being a widely known homosexual. Nonetheless, both Saint Hubert and Saint Eustace in their legends were hunting a stag, both of them had the same mystical vison of the Holy Cross between the stag’s antlers, and then converted to Christianism. A concept of how sacred can hide and be found in the unholy. The quote on the left, Annaberg 1921, reminds the first German victory after World War II, in Upper Silesia, against the Polish-French Army, a battle where Freikorps Rossbach fought at his best.