Dear H.,
In every person’s biography, there is an interwoven web of situations whose experiences are indelibly stored in our memory. We call them key experiences because, in retrospect, we become aware of the fact that they have had a decisive influence on our lives. Without these impressions, we would not be who we are, or to put it more cautiously, who we think we are.
They had and still have a decisive influence on our lives because they inspired us from an explicit situation to want to repeat the experience we had. They allowed us to make a new discovery in life, pushed a development, awakened a hitherto hidden passion, consciously or unconsciously guided us to take a certain course on our life path.
A room in an old apartment. A system of solid wooden shelves arranged in an “L” and reaching up to the high ceiling, home to an uncountable number of books. They are arranged in strange formations on the shelves: some are uniform in size and color, neatly lined up in rows like a small army, others, especially the large ones, in which there are more pictures and photos than letters, are stacked crosswise on top of each other, and still others are arranged like an infinitely long freight train consisting of many different types of wagons.
This room, bathed in subdued light, is completed with a green settee consisting of two armchairs, a long, height-adjustable table and a couch. On at least one of the armchairs, as well as on the coffee table, a further number of books are piled up into small towers. You are lying on the couch, engrossed in a book; sitting on the floor, I do the same. It is wonderfully quiet. A peaceful togetherness between the books, their ideas and you and me. There is little talking. There is no need to talk. There doesn’t need to be a television on or a radio chattering. Everything my heart desires is there. You read your books and I took mine from the shelves, even if I can’t understand the letters yet, my departure into the world of books is already mapped out at the age of about four. Supported and fed by the wonderful fairy tales and stories I was read. At school, I had an empathetic relationship with language and text right from the start. I read and read. My introduction to great literature was works by Grass and Böll – I was thirteen then. In secondary school, I became acquainted with Frisch, Brecht, Eich, Enzensberger, Jandl, Borchert, Büchner and Tucholksky. All of these became friendships and sources of knowledge for life! For my 16th birthday, you gave me a complete edition of Hesse. At seventeen, I stole Thomas Mann’s “Collected Stories” from you, and at the same time I fell in love with Beauvoir and Sartre. And so it went on and on. Until today. Until today and as long as I live.
What drew you under the spell of books? What were the motives behind it? There must have been key experiences for you too. Can you remember them?
The same room. Sometimes the piles of books have to be cleared from the table to make room for small frames with glass windows, white, strangely grooved plastic containers and sheets of paper, each with 36 small pictures attached. Then I sit next to you on the sofa and watch as you arrange the individual pictures first in the frames and then the filled frames in the plastic containers. Sometimes we look at these so-called slides together: either by holding them up to the light with the naked eye or, even better, by putting them individually into the slide viewer, which looks like a small futuristic screen measuring 9 by 7 centimeters. You tell me about the places where you took these photos.
I can never wait until the day finally comes when the screen and slide projector are set up in the room one floor down and family and friends watch the slides together. I love the concentrated atmosphere in the room, which is then only lit by the projector bulb. You explain the individual slides, which are played in chronological order and tell the story of your travels. The short presentations are only interrupted by questions and comments from the audience, a collective burst of laughter when slides that were either poorly recorded, not at all in keeping with the theme or upside down, have managed to sneak into the presentation. The mishaps are also exciting, for example when a slide frame gets stuck in the projector’s transport tunnel or the projector’s light bulb explodes with a loud bang and has to be replaced. The obligatory noises are pleasant to my ear: the low-frequency, continuous buzzing sound of the projector, the robotic clickety-clack rattle when the next slide is transported in front of the lens by remote control or the plaintive, squeaky buzz when trying to focus a slide that looks out of place.
I see pictures of foreign landscapes, cities that are built very differently, people who look different. Early on, I have the desire to do the same: to travel, the longing to visit foreign places, to hear foreign languages, to have foreign money in my hand, to breathe in different air, to feel a different climate on my skin. My first trips to big cities outside Germany were with you. At the age of 12 we went to Vienna, at fourteen you showed me London, at sixteen we went to Paris. A year later, I took my first trip of my own to Tuscany. This was followed by the classic Interrail/hitchhiking tours to Turkey, through France and Spain. Later, I was able to perfectly combine my purpose and profession with my passion for travel: as a musician, I was invited to almost every country in Europe, spent a total of two months of my life in Australia, commuted between Berlin and the USA probably 100 times and discovered my love for Latin America.
What drew you into the world of travel? What were your motives? There must have been key experiences for you too. Can you remember them? Where were your favorite places? In which places were you happiest – and for what reasons?
The same room again. Many of the large-format volumes contain reproductions of paintings and sculptures. They exert a great fascination on me, especially at a time when I am not yet able to read. I can leaf through them, just like you; I can make personal feelings and statements about their content, because to look at pictures you need nothing more than eyes and imagination. I discovered my first great favorites during this time: Dürer and Klee. The former perhaps because I rediscovered one of his works on the green five-mark bill, the latter because his colors are so delicate, his motifs so beautiful, his forms so fragile that they remind me of illustrations from my favorite picture books. At the age of ten, you took me to Munich. For the first time in my life, I experienced this wonderful, quiet, concentrated dialog in the Lenbachhaus: between me (the viewer) and the painting, or rather the person who painted it. Walking through the rooms and then always finding a picture in front of which I have to linger longer. I cannot walk past it, but am magically drawn to it, as if the painting is saying to me: “here I am, you have found me”, or even: “hello, my dear: there you are, at last I have found you”.
found
found you”. The moment of dialog, the moment of immersion, of contemplation, the moment when everything else fades into the background, as if there is no longer an outside world, only the picture and me. These are moments of devotion. The re-recognition of worlds that had previously only existed in my head and the joy of knowing that I am not alone in my personal perception of the world: Franz Marc’s tear-jerking animals, Kandinsky’s exploding and at the same time absolutely calming color-form compositions, Jawlensky’s magical, resting facial perspectives, Chagall’s fairy-tale figures, Kirchner’s sharply cut faces and bodies, the divine clarity and simplicity of Barlach’s sculptures … Later Picasso, Beckmann, Ernst, Grosz, Dix, Schlemmer, El Lissitzky, Rodschenko, Malevich, Dali, de Chirico and Picabia. Later still, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, Rauschenberg … Anselm Kiefer, Mattheuer and Gerhard Richter … and in recent years an increasing interest in going back in time: Liebermann, Arnold Böcklin, Caspar David Friedrich …
What drew you into the world of art? What were the motives behind it? There must have been key experiences for you too. Can you remember them? Which paintings by which artists are your favorites – and have you ever thought about why these in particular?
These are three key experiences that have become defining elements of my own biography and identity. And you are at the center of these situations.
For me, this is one of the most beautiful and wonderful facts of life: that the behavior of one person can have an inspiring influence on the life of another person: free from educational goals or educational constraints, away from dogmatism or the missionary zeal of wanting to create others in one’s own image.
It is something else. It is quite simply the devotion, the heart, the lived joy that jumps from one to the other like a spark – unconditional, unintentional and not for sale – it is living and experiencing itself …
In this way – as Beuys wonderfully put it in a nutshell – “the flame is carried on”. And in everyone who picks it up and carries it on, something new grows from the existing material. An essence that can then be passed on to the next person in a newly combined form. An inexhaustible dialectic process. This is the story of ideas, exchange, understanding and inspiration. This is the story of the creative human being. This is the story of man who is a helper to man.
So much of you lives on in me and, how wonderful, much of you – transformed by me – perhaps also in other people and so it will go on … and go on as long as there will be people and true ideas.
I would like to thank you for that …
I wish you all the very best for your 70th birthday
Your Harald