Behalt: The Painting That Circles the Room
Near Berlin, Ohio
Just outside Berlin, at the Amish and Mennonite Heritage Center on County Road Seventy Seven, hangs a painting unlike almost anything else in the world. It is called Behalt, a German word meaning remember or hold onto, and it is a cyclorama, a mural painted in the round so that a visitor standing at its center is surrounded on all sides by the image. The painting measures ten feet tall and two hundred sixty five feet in circumference, and it traces the entire history of the Amish and Mennonite people from their origins in sixteenth century Switzerland to the present day.
Behalt was painted by Heinz Gaugel, a German-born artist who had immigrated to Holmes County in nineteen sixty two. The project took fourteen years to complete. Gaugel began work in nineteen seventy eight after an Amish blacksmith told him he wished there were some place where people could go to understand why the Amish live the way they do.
That question became the painting's purpose and its guiding spirit. The Heritage Center opened in nineteen ninety, funded by donations of eight hundred thirty five thousand dollars raised from the surrounding community, though the painting itself was not finished and dedicated until nineteen ninety two. Behalt is considered one of only a handful of cycloramas still in existence anywhere in the world, and the only one known to have been painted entirely by a single artist.
