Thomas Steinert »with Friedrich Nietzsche
on the road—images from an unpublished book«
24 June—16 July 2016

We see ourselves
Thomas Steinert has taken around 1,000 photographs of the philosopher Nietzsche's life. He is now showing a selection at the f/stop festival for photography.
 

It all began in Karl-Marx-Stadt. There, of all places. In a city that owed its name to a 19th-century philosopher with whom there was much to be done, Thomas Steinert came across the philosopher in the 1960s with whom there was no state to be made. On the contrary. Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900], the all-questioner, is a thinker who can steer the state in your own direction because you are suddenly considered politically and intellectually unreliable, and even tend to be 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 trained as a metalworker in Freiberg and passed his A-levels. Not because he had a big heart for metallurgy, but because this training was the only chance he had to escape the village. Into the wider world, which also included Karl-Marx-Stadt.

After all, the district town had a Christian bookshop with an antiquarian section. And now and then, an old book by the undesirable philosopher was available for good customers. When asked by the dealer which Nietzsche title he was looking for, Steinert replied, »I'll take any«. That got him off the waiting list before he was on it. He never got rid of Nietzsche.

From 1972 onwards, Steinert studied photography at the Leipzig Art Academy. He dedicated his theoretical thesis to the subject of 'Photography and Truth'. He incorporated a quote from Nietzsche: »Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what the unphilosophical way of speaking calls the strong will: the essential thing about it is precisely not ›wanting‹.« Translated into GDR plain language: This photographer is not available for propaganda, whatever the degree of artistry.

This was understood in Leipzig: Steinert did not get a job, and as a result he did not get a flat. He later made his way as a postcard photographer—and yet 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, the Leipzig resident began to photograph places where Friedrich Nietzsche lived. 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 south from Central Germany, whose traces Steinert was also able to follow to Italy after 1989. Around 1,000 [!] black-and-white photographs were taken on these trips. Pictures, a small part of which had already become public in the Dionysos war hier–series about the Vormärz poet Ernst Ortlepp shown in Zeitz in 2009. In 2013, he showed 60 works from this series at the Nietzsche Documentation Centre in Naumburg. Now, selected photographs from this cycle can be seen at the f/stop Festival for Photography in Leipzig.

From the staircase of the house where he was born in Röcken, Steinert shows places where the philosopher stayed: Schulpforte, Leipzig, Bonn, Sils Maria, Venice, Monte Carlo. Picturesque statues full of energy, which is also the energy of the people who passed through all these landscapes, houses and flats. What do the houses know, one wonders? What do they keep of those who lived in them?

Steinert, who as a photographer is a kind of private scholar of Nietzsche, provides, in addition to the factual references to his photographs, quotations from the philosopher that explain what is shown or continue to think from it. Thus it is a great pleasure to follow Steinert's always surprising scenes and objects as well as Nietzsche's paths of thought.

What do the houses know? What do the landscapes know? And when we look at them: About whom do we receive information? Only about ourselves, according to Nietzsche, from Götzendämmerung [whose Twilight of the Idols] Steinert quotes a picture from the Swiss Rosenlaui Valley: »It was evening, the smell of fir trees was wafting out, one could see through to grey mountains, the snow shimmered above. 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 soul over it—this is what we then see. Inherited feelings, our own moods are awakened by these things of nature. We see something of ourselves—in this respect, this world is also our imagination. Forest, mountains, yes that is not just a concept, it is our experience and history, a piece of us.«
—By Christian Eger

________________________
Christian Eger is cultural editor
of the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung [MZ] in Halle an der Saale.
in Halle an der Saale.
In 2012 he received the Journalism Prize
of the German Cultural Council.
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