The main reason to visit St. Stephan is the nine stained-glass windows by Marc Chagall, installed between 1978 and 1985. The luminous blue glass fills the Gothic interior with an unearthly, almost submarine light — quite unlike the coloured windows in any other church. The Old Testament scenes depicted are deliberately universal, chosen to represent a shared heritage rather than to mark the space as exclusively Christian.
The church itself is a fine late Gothic structure dating from the fourteenth century, positioned on a hill above the old town. It was heavily damaged in 1945 and rebuilt after the war. The Chagall windows came decades later, when the artist was already in his nineties, and transformed a solid but unremarkable provincial church into one of the most moving artistic interiors in Germany.