We see ourselves
MZ, 14.02.2013. Thomas Steinert has photographed the life of the philosopher Nietzsche
in about 1000 photographs. In Naumburg he shows a selection.
It began in Karl-Marx-Stadt. There of all places. In a city that owes its name to a 19th century philosopher with whom a lot of state could be made, Thomas Steinert came across the philosopher in the 1960s with whom no state could be made. On the contrary. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the all-questioner, is a thinker who can steer the state onto its own track, because one is suddenly considered politically and intellectually unreliable, even dangerous. This is what happened to Steinert in the GDR.
Born in 1949 in Burgstädt near Chemnitz, which was renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt in 1953, Thomas Steinert underwent training in Freiberg to become a skilled metalworker with a high school diploma. Not because he had a big heart for metallurgy, but because this training was his only chance to escape the village. Into the wider world, to which Karl-Marx-Stadt also belonged.
After all, the district town had a Christian bookstore that ran an antiquarian department. And from time to time an old book of the unwanted philosopher was available there for good customers. When the dealer asked him what Nietzsche title he was looking for, Steinert replied: "I'll take anyone". This got him off the waiting list before he was on it. He could not get rid of Nietzsche.
From 1972 on, Steinert studied photography at the Leipzig Art Academy. He dedicated his theoretical thesis to the subject "Photography and Truth". He incorporated a quotation from Nietzsche: "Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what the unphilosophical way of speaking calls the strong will: the essential thing is just, not 'wanting'. Translated into GDR plaintext: This photographer is not available for propaganda, whatever the degree of skill.
This was understood in Leipzig: Steinert did not get a job, and as a result, no apartment. He later made his way as a postcard photographer - and yet he became what he is today: one of the most independent German photographers of the present day. And one of the most idiosyncratic.
At the end of the 1980s, Friedrich Nietzsche's place of life in Leipzig began to take photographs. And to explore the work of the philosopher who was born in Röcken near Lützen and grew up in Naumburg. A philosopher who travelled and thought from Central Germany to the south, whose traces Steinert was able to follow all the way to Italy after 1989. Around 1 000 (!) black-and-white photographs were taken on these journeys. Pictures, a small part of which had already become public in the "Dionysos was here" episode about the poet Ernst Ortlepp, which was shown in Zeitz in 2009. Now, for the first time, 60 photographs of this unparalleled enterprise are on display in the new building of the Nietzsche Documentation Center in Naumburg, which was completed in 2010.
From the staircase of the birthplace in Röcken, Steinert shows the philosopher's whereabouts: Schulpforte, Leipzig, Bonn, Sils Maria, Venice, Monte Carlo. Picturesque statues full of energy, which is also the energy of the people who moved through all these landscapes, the houses and apartments. What do the houses know? one asks oneself. What do they pick up from those who lived in them?
Steinert, who as a photographer is a kind of private scholar on Nietzsche, provides, in addition to the factual references to his photographs, quotations from the philosopher that explain what is shown or think away from it. Thus, it is a great pleasure to follow the always surprising scenes and objects of Steinert as well as the paths of Nietzsche's thought. And all this in the new Documentation Center, which must be understood as an all-round successful building. One looks at Nietzsche's places on the display walls and through the glass façade of the house out onto Naumburg, where Nietzsche also had to live.
What do the houses know? What do the landscapes know? And when we look at them: About whom do we get information? Only about ourselves, says Nietzsche, from whose "Götzendämmerung" Steinert quotes to a picture from the Swiss Rosenlaui Valley: "It was evening, the smell of fir trees poured out, one could see through it to gray mountains, above, the snow was shimmering. A blue, calm sky rose above it. - We never see something like that as it is in itself, but always put a delicate membrane of the soul over it - that is what we see then. Inherited sensations, own moods are awakened by these natural things. We see something of ourselves - in this respect this world is also our imagination. Forest, mountains, yes, this is not only a concept, it is our experience and history, a part of us.
-By Christian Eger
MZ, 14.02.2013. Thomas Steinert has photographed the life of the philosopher Nietzsche
in about 1000 photographs. In Naumburg he shows a selection.
It began in Karl-Marx-Stadt. There of all places. In a city that owes its name to a 19th century philosopher with whom a lot of state could be made, Thomas Steinert came across the philosopher in the 1960s with whom no state could be made. On the contrary. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the all-questioner, is a thinker who can steer the state onto its own track, because one is suddenly considered politically and intellectually unreliable, even dangerous. This is what happened to Steinert in the GDR.
Born in 1949 in Burgstädt near Chemnitz, which was renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt in 1953, Thomas Steinert underwent training in Freiberg to become a skilled metalworker with a high school diploma. Not because he had a big heart for metallurgy, but because this training was his only chance to escape the village. Into the wider world, to which Karl-Marx-Stadt also belonged.
After all, the district town had a Christian bookstore that ran an antiquarian department. And from time to time an old book of the unwanted philosopher was available there for good customers. When the dealer asked him what Nietzsche title he was looking for, Steinert replied: "I'll take anyone". This got him off the waiting list before he was on it. He could not get rid of Nietzsche.
From 1972 on, Steinert studied photography at the Leipzig Art Academy. He dedicated his theoretical thesis to the subject "Photography and Truth". He incorporated a quotation from Nietzsche: "Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what the unphilosophical way of speaking calls the strong will: the essential thing is just, not 'wanting'. Translated into GDR plaintext: This photographer is not available for propaganda, whatever the degree of skill.
This was understood in Leipzig: Steinert did not get a job, and as a result, no apartment. He later made his way as a postcard photographer - and yet he became what he is today: one of the most independent German photographers of the present day. And one of the most idiosyncratic.
At the end of the 1980s, Friedrich Nietzsche's place of life in Leipzig began to take photographs. And to explore the work of the philosopher who was born in Röcken near Lützen and grew up in Naumburg. A philosopher who travelled and thought from Central Germany to the south, whose traces Steinert was able to follow all the way to Italy after 1989. Around 1 000 (!) black-and-white photographs were taken on these journeys. Pictures, a small part of which had already become public in the "Dionysos was here" episode about the poet Ernst Ortlepp, which was shown in Zeitz in 2009. Now, for the first time, 60 photographs of this unparalleled enterprise are on display in the new building of the Nietzsche Documentation Center in Naumburg, which was completed in 2010.
From the staircase of the birthplace in Röcken, Steinert shows the philosopher's whereabouts: Schulpforte, Leipzig, Bonn, Sils Maria, Venice, Monte Carlo. Picturesque statues full of energy, which is also the energy of the people who moved through all these landscapes, the houses and apartments. What do the houses know? one asks oneself. What do they pick up from those who lived in them?
Steinert, who as a photographer is a kind of private scholar on Nietzsche, provides, in addition to the factual references to his photographs, quotations from the philosopher that explain what is shown or think away from it. Thus, it is a great pleasure to follow the always surprising scenes and objects of Steinert as well as the paths of Nietzsche's thought. And all this in the new Documentation Center, which must be understood as an all-round successful building. One looks at Nietzsche's places on the display walls and through the glass façade of the house out onto Naumburg, where Nietzsche also had to live.
What do the houses know? What do the landscapes know? And when we look at them: About whom do we get information? Only about ourselves, says Nietzsche, from whose "Götzendämmerung" Steinert quotes to a picture from the Swiss Rosenlaui Valley: "It was evening, the smell of fir trees poured out, one could see through it to gray mountains, above, the snow was shimmering. A blue, calm sky rose above it. - We never see something like that as it is in itself, but always put a delicate membrane of the soul over it - that is what we see then. Inherited sensations, own moods are awakened by these natural things. We see something of ourselves - in this respect this world is also our imagination. Forest, mountains, yes, this is not only a concept, it is our experience and history, a part of us.
-By Christian Eger