Barlach finished the Güstrower Ehrenmal in 1927 and it hung in the cathedral for ten years. On 23 August 1937 it was removed; in 1941 the bronze went into the Metallspende des deutschen Volkes, the national metal donation, and was melted down. What saved the work was a piece of quiet defiance. In January 1939 Bernhard A. Böhmer - an art dealer, and the former husband of Barlach's partner Marga - commissioned a second cast from the Hermann Noack foundry in Berlin, and it survived the war in Hugo Körtzinger's studio at Schnega. That second angel went west: since 15 May 1952 it has hung in the Antoniterkirche in Cologne. From it, Noack cast a third, and on 4 June 1952 the angel came home to Güstrow. It hung in the western part of the cathedral until 8 March 1985, when it was moved east to the position Barlach had intended from the start.

Barlach was born in Wedel in 1870 and settled in Güstrow in 1910, and he stayed for the rest of his life. He began the war as an enthusiast - his 1914 figure The Avenger is a body flung forward into violence - volunteered as an infantryman in 1915, and was discharged after three months with heart trouble. He came back a pacifist and never moved from that position. The memorials he made in the 1920s show soldiers as sufferers rather than heroes, which was precisely the wrong message for the regime that took power in 1933. His work was confiscated from an exhibition in 1936 and branded degenerate, his academy memberships were cancelled, he was forbidden to work as a sculptor. His Kiel figure was sawn apart in 1937 and rescued; the Magdeburg cenotaph was removed and restored only after the war. He died in Rostock on 24 October 1938. Since 2006 the town has carried the official name Barlachstadt Güstrow, and his studio house holds a large collection of his work.

The name comes from the Polabian Guščerov and means, roughly, lizard place. A Wendish castle stood on the palace site by 1219, and the town is credited to Heinrich Borwin II, a grandson of Henry the Lion; it appears in writing in 1228, and the cathedral was founded as a collegiate church two years earlier. Güstrow was the seat of the lords of Werle from 1229 to 1436, then capital of the small Duchy of Mecklenburg-Güstrow after Mecklenburg divided in 1621, until the last duke died in 1695 and the duchy was absorbed by Schwerin. Not every layer is comfortable. In 1330 a host-desecration trial here - a charge levelled against Jewish communities across medieval Europe and never substantiated anywhere - ended with twenty-three Jewish residents burned to death and the synagogue destroyed. A chapel was built on the site of the synagogue and dedicated to the Holy Blood.

Fire kept remaking this town - 1503, 1508, 1512 - and when the old castle burned in the 1550s Duke Ulrich chose not to rebuild a fortress. From 1558 the Italian architect Franziskus Pahr raised the west entrance wing and the western half of the south wing, and the main structure stood by 1565. Philipp Brandin, a Netherlander, rebuilt the north wing between 1587 and 1591 after another fire; Claus Midow added the east wing in 1594; Charles Philippe Dieussart finished the gatehouse and bridge in 1671. What resulted is a deliberate synthesis of northern castle building with Italian and French Renaissance motifs, and because Güstrow escaped the nineteenth-century historicist rebuilding that reshaped Schwerin, it survives largely as its architects left it. The Festsaal keeps a hunting and ancestral frieze by Christoph Pahr from the 1570s and stucco by Daniel Anckermann of 1620. Wallenstein, made Duke of Mecklenburg in the Thirty Years' War, held court here from 1628 to 1631.

Grandeur is not permanence. After 1800 the palace became in turn a military hospital, a workhouse for the poor after the agrarian reforms of 1817, and finally an old people's home, its splendid interiors rebuilt or destroyed to suit each new purpose. East Germany restored it comprehensively between 1963 and 1978 and opened it as a museum in 1972; a Renaissance garden was laid out again from old engravings, and it is one of the few of its kind in Germany. Roughly 29,000 people live in Güstrow today, making it the seventh largest town in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, set on the Nebel about forty-five kilometres south of Rostock, ringed by five lakes and a good deal of forest. The brick Gothic cathedral, begun in 1226 and finished by about 1335, holds a late Gothic high altar of around 1500, the tombs of Duke Ulrich III and his two wives - and the angel.