D. E. Sattler
Death and Dance
Some of them lived, almost unnoticed, and have gone already; they did not drink from the grail of oblivion. Like foreign messengers, in a town that is already doomed, they were just there, a miracle for themselves in their own strangeness. They held onto the things, the reckless had let go of. They dug up again the wells of the past and remembered future days, when the present would be the past. As long as they kept going like this, the doomed city existed liberated from the restraints of time, from parents, grandparents, children and grandchildren. Within them the unstable balance of a scale still existed. As long as they lived, the kiss of death had not yet come upon them. With them an intimate connection lived on, the mental sense, the breathing feeling of life, without which the frightened life, which had taken precautions in vain and had become estranged towards itself, which had lost itself in its own self-certainty and had become harmful in its own selfishness, was already destined to debauch. They alone had risen above the general need of oblivion. In their conscious remembering past, present and future still belonged together and the triadic time of vanity was ripped away. They lived like all the others but they did not bow to the self-empowered, unlimited tyranny of the present day. The present day, which judged itself because it could not value what had come before and what would come after, as it had excluded the wholeness of time from its conscience.
Guardian of forgotten time. Hermann Falke the painter was such a guardian. He knew death as a Master in Germany and knew what his mastership consisted of: killing and making people forget. He had his sight fixed on him, like a secret brother, like a bird with a sharp sight and thus controlled his power. He was one of the few, who cleared the country from its sins. He shook the dust off his feet and walked away with the others. The fact that they died early, does not discount them. It just consternates and warns those left behind. Thus they stand in front of us, in the healing horror of the night and remind us with just one word or one view of the forgotten remembering, that death will not come upon us, while we are still alive.
That the human being should remember his path and be grateful for his life was established as a main character trait of human beings by Friedrich Hölderlin in a fragment of his philosophical letters. It seems doubtful that Hermann Falke had read this central and at the same time hidden passage. Nevertheless, exactly this knowledge was part of him. Nothing demonstrates this better as these pages, which were published on the occasion of the second anniversary of his death. They add a certain moment of truth to the words of Hölderlin, which cannot be directly read from them: the law of coincidentia oppositorum, the artistic technique that is able to make the most difficult possible: the connection of mutually exclusive opposites. It is for that reason that there could not have been a better fitting title for this first post mortem exhibition catalogue than the one chosen by Renate Falke. Deepest mourning does not exclude highest joy, just the opposite is true; the one needs the other. The deeper and the more empathetic the memory of life together, the greater and more pleasurable the thankfulness that comes from it, for a life, that death has no power over. Orcus and Elysium harmoniously reconciled next to each other. The pictures of death, of painfully dying, are not isolated. No memento mori that extends the memory of death into space that belongs exclusively to life. Death, not as an image of horror, not a means of lessening the joy of life, of even killing it in the enthusiasm of asceticism, but as the dark background, in front of which the crystal-clear, God-given life shines even brighter. The amount of empathy and presentiment that Hermann Falke felt, according to himself, already while he was still very much alive, towards the near and at the same time infinitely far spheres of the dead, was also the amount of exaggerated joy of life he felt. It was also this joy that distanced him from the still blooming but endangered and damaged earth. As if the slowly fading eyes of a dying person (which the twelve-year old had seen in military hospitals during the war, remembered his whole life long and kept for the precious moment of light-hearted writing) looked at a New Earth and in it humans that were newly creating themselves. There is no doubt: here death and dance meet each other.
Like flags moving in the wind, they wave at each other, bodies, faces, the pale face of death and the green grass, dithyrambic dance and the cross. The calculated “within-each-other” of water-soluble colors in highest perfection, sometimes of dimensions that do not care about the commonly accepted limits of this kind of painting. Very expressive, yet tender at the same time. Pearl-white being the color of the suffering transfigured. The “Dying Soldiers” of Andreas Schlüters at the Zeughaus in Berlin become their brothers. I cannot think of a more honoring comparison.
Catalogue: „Hermann Falke DEATH AND DANCE“, Gallery Alte Mühle Schmallenberg und Falke- Gallery Loibach, 1988