The most famous artwork in the Güstrower Dom is Der Schwebende — a bronze sculpture of a floating angel originally made in 1927 by Ernst Barlach (1870-1938) as a memorial for the fallen of the First World War.
The angel, with eyes closed to the sorrows on earth, floats westwards towards a better world. Barlach wrote that during the war, time stood still for him. It did not fit into anything on earth. It floated and he tried to reflect something of this feeling into the angel that floats through emptiness. (The more prosaic German: „Für mich hat während des Krieges die Zeit stillgestanden. Sie war in nichts anderes Irdisches einfügbar. Sie schwebte. Von diesem Gefühl wollte ich in dieser im Leeren schwebenden Schicksalsgestalt etwas wiedergeben.“)
