‘What was I running away from? Everything caught up with me.’
Einar Schleef won’t let me be. Since the day 18 years ago when I stood before his massive pictures of Germany in an abandoned Karstadt building in Halle. As I worked through hours and hours of footage, my fascination with and amazement of Schleef, the man and the artist, has never ceased to grow. Schleef never tires. He sets free energies, thoughts, and feelings. What is to become art must burn, Schleef says. I caught fire.
Schleef’s theme is also the theme of my film and my texts: Our origins in this country and its history. For me, no other artist besides Einar Schleef has so unsparingly set themselves this task. ‘What from your fathers’ heritage is lent, earn it anew.’ Faust, the archetypal German subject, with which Schleef grappled his entire life.
The fractures in this country run straight through this man –the devastations of war, the division of Germany, the dislocations of reunification. I am familiar with Schleef’s inability to feel at home. It has something to do with these fractures, which also run through my generation and through me.
For Schleef, it is never about the ‘sauce of everyday politics’, but instead what is bubbling below the surface and what neither the so-called mainstream media nor politics manage to articulate and tie together. Schleef and his art act like an antidote: Because he suffers the tragedy in many people’s lives, their existential struggle, with his own body and his own soul.
The theatres must burn after every performance, Schleef says. This is not a call for violence, this is the seriousness with which Schleef mobilises people to tear away from their sense of well-being. Art is not allowed to be an escape from reality, it must be an escape into reality, in all its cruelty.
In Schleef’s staging of ‘Ein Sportstück’ (Elfriede Jelinek), armies of young men and women steel their bodies for deployment in a new war. The public of 1998 laughed at this scene. Today I sit in the cutting room and edit with horror the images which from week to week are becoming more of an illustration of our present. ‘When I suffer, how do others suffer under these conditions,’ says Schleef. ‘And when I cannot live, why can others live.’
Sandra Prechtel
