Thoughts

It was a great pleasure to be a guest on this podcast. I spoke with Eathan Janney from Piano Technicians Masterclasses about my musical career, piano playing in musical theater, and modern composition and arranging.

Once again there is something new professionally: for the show “China-Girl” I rearranged David Bowie’s songs for our Band der Kulturen. We are currently playing at the First Stage Theater in Hamburg. From mid-February we will be touring Germany and the eastern territories.

From Nietzsche comes the wonderful insight that, strictly speaking, every human being has their own philosophy. So it is not really decisive whether someone sees themselves as a Kantian, an existentialist or a Christian. Individual life decisively shapes the practical philosophy that emerges from it.

Yet despite all individuality, certain basic philosophical lines can, in my view, only be understood from the respective cultural space. Hence the fascination and simultaneous incomprehensibility of Western versus Eastern philosophy and vice versa.

But what exactly shapes a cultural space? Climate, history, social structure… all good and correct answers. But as a native of Mainz, alcohol in the form of wine naturally occurs to me too.

Just as my compositions are virtually a Mainz wine tavern turned into music (you sit down at a table for six with complete strangers, drink wine, eat, talk to everyone and have a wonderful evening with new impressions and perhaps new friends), so the philosophy of Rhenish Catholicism (“to every little creature its little pleasure”, combined with a well-founded rejection of all radicalism) is hardly conceivable without the enjoyment of white wine.

This becomes particularly clear on the short journey from the wine-growing Vorderpfalz to the beer-drinking Waldpfalz. While the temperament of the Rheinpfälzer seems very animated, stimulated and inclined toward excitement and liveliness, the Pfälzer of the heights are rather more easy-going, unhurried and need many times as long to work themselves up — or to become agitated at all.

Accordingly, philosophy changes with the drug consumed: the far too small red-wine glass suits Hans-Georg Gadamer. One can almost feel the will of the post-war generation to bake only small rolls. Even less fits together: Gadamer originally came from Breslau. Yet he never mentions anything about the fate of the lost homeland. He seems to have superficially adapted himself to the Trollinger-like fate of small-scale Baden-Württemberg.

In the time of Hegel, who came from Stuttgart, the Trollinger was still a comparatively heavy variety imported from France, which also demanded thinking in unusually heavy grooves. Since we are already on the subject of Trollinger: is there not a certain spiritual kinship between the all-levelling world-spirit of a Hegel and the moral rigourism of the RAF leaders Baader & Ensslin, who came from the same region?

A Westpfalz beer-drinker would never have opened himself to such ideas: he would much rather have remained in the natural musicality of the Kusel region, which developed so wonderfully in a talent like Fritz Wunderlich.

The whole tragedy of Nietzsche, in turn, can only be grasped once you know his birthplace more closely: in the undefined landscape between Weißenfels and Leipzig nothing has contour — too cold for wine, too warm for schnapps, one must dream here of foreign, unknown pleasures that one can approach but which ultimately never become part of one’s own nature.

Would Nietzsche’s thought have found the same extreme had he been born in Mainz? Certainly not. Closer to him would certainly have been Goethe, raised on cider and losing himself in the Riesling vineyards of Wiesbaden-Frauenstein, and he would have remained more spiritually with the Schoppenhauer and -stecher Schopenhauer.

A perpetual enigma, of course, remains Kant, who eludes every categorisation. But would Dostoevsky or Tolstoy be conceivable without vodka? How else is the pragmatism of English philosophy to be explained than through warm beer? And whoever has once appreciated the clarifying effect of Japanese sake knows even more how to absorb the seemingly superhumanly hovering effect of Zen philosophy.

All in all, however, it turns out that philosophy reached its true flowering in the wine regions — and, to be even more precise, in the white-wine regions. Whether Albert Schweitzer from the Edelzwicker and Gewürztraminer area, Michel de Eyquem Montaigne from Bordeaux, Rousseau from Geneva, Karl Marx from Trier — white wine apparently tempts and inspires one to promote the Western way of philosophising.

In this sense let us raise the next glass of wine also in the name of philosophy!

In my library there is still an antiquarian book on the character of keys: a very scientifically worded analysis of all existing keys of the Western major-minor system. In the 19th century this was a very popular way of looking at things, which in this way gathered an abundance of beautiful adjectives supporting the hypothesis that the composer’s choice of key essentially determines the character of the piece.

As a small side remark let me be permitted: what was considered scientific then is no longer even considered worth discussing today.

As a small thought experiment I would like to take the opportunity to transfer the character of keys onto the character of the current management of the pandemic. As a reader of international newspapers I find it quite fascinating how such a universal problem is tackled with entirely different mentalities. It turns out that one and the same illness is seen quite differently depending on the culture.

Promptly one arrives at a characterisation of peoples that has not developed all that strongly over the last hundred years. I still remember well the schadenfreude in Europe over the initial powerlessness of the Americans at the start of the pandemic. To many I had to say back then: “Just wait.” And lo and behold: it turned out that the qualities of the Americans also showed their best side in the crisis: initiative, gift for improvisation, inventive spirit, entrepreneurial spirit. And just as the Japanese did after Pearl Harbour, many this time too rejoiced too soon.

To continue the somewhat provocative analogy to the Second World War: the Germans are always wonderful at implementing a plan they know. They are devoted to detail and show great pride in the infallibility of their own system. And that works well until something gets in the way. But woe betide if it does! Then nothing works any more. No one carries out anything unplanned on their own responsibility. Everyone waits for the Führer’s order that never comes. And then, unfortunately, Stalingrad had already happened.

Once you have a functioning system in Germany, it is virtually invincible. That applies just as much to football as to mechanical engineering and to the economy and culture in general. What is unfortunately completely lost in this phase of invincibility is the individual voice, the space for simple being beyond the merciless demands of the machine society, which beats down on the individual without cease.

We have experienced this in all the years since reunification: in five lands that were once a single country, the soul was operated out, so that no local pub or youth club remained. A gigantic reservation for an ageing population that can at most still meet in the car parks of ALDI supermarkets.

Now we are experiencing how, little by little, this whole system collapses and lets all the open questions about meaning and value in the individual and society break open. The emptiness that opens up will be frightening for many people. One realisation that may come is that intellectual life in the Federal Republic of Germany has been withering for a very long time.

Of all people, the peoples one had hitherto looked down on somewhat for their apparent slowness and disorganisation prove the most resilient. Amid all the political quarrelling that the Italians, for example, are used to from Rome, an extraordinary serenity shows itself in the crisis. A people that survived the invasion of the Germanic tribes and the decline of empires in such a way that historians still argue today whether and how the Roman Empire fell at all knows how to put a pandemic in relation to other crises.

Not least the Russians: still memorable to me is the sentence of a Russian dancer at a room party in the theatre in St. Petersburg: “We Russians do not start wars, we end them.” An at once harsh but proud and warm-hearted people, accustomed to extremes in history and climate.

Amid all the prejudices and unjustified fears that swirl through the world in such a time, it is remarkable how people can cooperate across all cultural and linguistic borders — be it generally through news or be it in something as complex as the development of a vaccine. One of the greatest evolutionary advantages of our species remains the independently undertaken shift of perspective.

Especially in small Europe one has profited for centuries from exchange and from the diversity of approaches and cultural peculiarities. That was always the strength of the continent, which through it was always a continent of ideas that flourished in the smallest of spaces. Let us all hope that these abilities do not leave us!

Given the incredible abundance of deep-reaching thoughts in Friedrich Nietzsche, it is hard to find a favourite thought. One that comes very close is Nietzsche’s idea that, on closer inspection, every human being actually has their own philosophy.

That is to say: one’s own life with its experiences from earliest childhood shapes the practical philosophy of the individual to the highest degree. Fittingly, one is then drawn to the matching texts and justifications. In the best case these in turn expand that private philosophy into a larger and freer view of the world.

Formative for me was the destruction of life — perceived by me as self-destruction of one’s own life — in the example of my mother and my uncle Roland. Due to the generational distance, from a child’s perspective, the complexity of their lives will partly remain closed to me, and with it the reasons for the inner despair that in both cases led to alcoholism and physical and social decline; yet it was intuitively clear to me that this was a dangerous maelstrom I had to oppose with strength.

One source of strength to which I have felt drawn again and again in life, to varying degrees, is the Christian faith. Around the age of eight to ten I sank so deeply into it that I also considered becoming a priest. With the extreme determination that was always my own, sometimes hard to distinguish from fanaticism and stubbornness, I attended early mass on weekdays before school began and meditated myself into the praying of the rosary.

The second path to faith led, after the end of my marriage and family and the accompanying feeling of a certain lostness and ungroundedness, through the music of Bach. Suddenly it became clear to me how the music I composed gained a new meaning: in humility before God and his creation. This, it seemed to me, is what made Bach’s music so great above many others: his willingness not to let his talent shine for its own sake, but to humble himself in a certain way, to set of his own free will a frame to whose perfection one now contributes.

Building on this fundamental thought, I now let myself be led and tried to open myself to the path God had chosen for me. And the more real life weighed upon me, be it with unhappy relationships or material worries, the more I gained through meditation and concentration on this path that can only be found in hiding. Thus in a certain way the “Orchester der Kulturen” began, and even more “Spirit of One” and the “Chor der Kulturen”.

It seemed to me that the unhappiness of my mother and my uncle, and in a certain way also of my father, sprang on the one hand from the feeling of loneliness and defencelessness and on the other from the longing for affirmation and love — all utterly human longings that surely dwell in everyone. But what if there is no correspondence on the outside of one’s own person?

I cannot force another human being to end my loneliness. I can well change my life at any time. But what if I lack the confidence to do so? What if I lack confidence in myself? It is easy to project the lack of love in one’s own life onto the partner, onto God, onto society, and, when it is not reciprocated, to make them in turn responsible for one’s own unhappiness.

But perhaps the error already lies in the fraying of the search for meaning? Across so many paths the longing of the self for affirmation and the meaning of one’s own life scatters itself in the vague hope that as many affirmations as possible will ease one’s daily waking.

A radically simple path seems most dear to me: posit a priori that your existence has a meaning. Posit a priori that every existence has a meaning. It is not even decisive what exactly this meaning is: insight, beauty, truth, love… all these are ultimately only sub-answers to the strong assertion: that I am has a meaning. Which one — that will reveal itself in time…

Similar, yet different, is Goethe’s saying that “the meaning of life is life itself”, which however leaves room for a slight absurdity, since it is an insight of a higher instance to which one in a certain way cedes responsibility. What I mean is the willed positing of the individual: I recognise that the search for meaning in every form leads only to unhappiness and self-destruction. Therefore I assert my own meaning.

This thought is after all closer to the much-reviled concept of the Übermensch in Nietzsche. It goes hand in hand with my life experience that, amid all the difficulties of life that can easily lead one into despair and weariness of life, the solution is ultimately always to be found within oneself.

Prayer may sometimes, as an ejaculation, ease the first despair, and hope may carry one a few steps further. But especially if one takes the Christian concept seriously — that the human being is a God-gifted creature — then the highest probability of the solution to any problem is to be found within oneself, or more precisely in the God-gifted part of our being.

And however hidden the solution may be: the conviction that the place of the problem (namely the self) also harbours its solution is the greatest possible power of one’s own life. And since in each of us not only individual life resides but also the universal power of life, we always have — albeit sometimes with difficulty — access to this primordial inspiration of the universe that spans the whole cosmos.

Everyone may develop their own paths to get there: stillness, nature, meditation, prayer, music, art, poetry… they all open paths. Decisive is the inner conviction of being oneself the source of power.

Radically thought and felt atheism leads to suicide. Hence we are mostly surrounded by a superficial atheism that in its dullness can only encounter life in a conventional way: functioning in society, doing what everyone else does, using things and people for one’s own usefulness.

My art is inconceivable without religiosity. Religion in the meaning of the word as being bound back. This does not yet imply the condition of the existence of God. Rather indirectly: through the fact that the people and the culture in whose tradition I see myself have regarded God as indispensable for their own work.

Beginning with Bach, whose music led me back at a decisive point to religiosity and the tradition of Western music and culture. His music is virtually a sounding proof of God. If one can feel it that way, everything else follows from it.

Now everything in life is truly experienceable only with its opposite, and so the other side of this religious certainty speaks from the following sentence of Hegel: “Man is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity, a wealth of infinitely many representations… This is the night, the interior of nature, that exists here… pure self… This night one beholds when one looks a human being in the eye — into a night that becomes terrible; the night of the world hangs before one.”

This empty nothing one can discover in oneself or in other people. The latter has the advantage of perhaps not having to engage so deeply with one’s own abysses. Yet a contemplation of this side is, in my view, spared no human being — neither the modern one nor the pre-Enlightenment European nor that of other cultures. The societal culture surrounding us often tries to keep us away from these abysses with the most sophisticated mechanisms.

When these methods fail, we see the individual thrown back upon themselves. What then follows can easily lead into madness — if not in the feeling of the person concerned, then in the judgement of the surrounding society. To free oneself from this loneliness requires a radical reordering of one’s own person. No easy undertaking.

For the surrounding society is always intent on bringing the individual back into the protection of conventionality. This includes conventional religion too, which unfortunately today can give the individual less and less emotional security, since it too is increasingly seen as a foreign body in an obsessed world.

Deeply felt religiosity, on the other hand, means seeing oneself as part of a cultural line. These may be kindred ancestors, but they may also be the intellectual kindred one seeks out oneself. They can come toward one through their books, their paintings, their music.

This October I let myself drift back to my family roots and undertook a small journey via Marienbad to Silesia, the homeland of my mother’s family.

It all began with my realising last year that I wanted and needed to travel once more, as a grown man, to the homeland of my mother’s family. Unlike many people in Germany whose father or mother was expelled, I was fortunate enough to get to know my mother’s homeland as a child. That had to do with my family’s particular situation after the war. Since the Upper Silesian industrial region lay close to the Polish border, one could also speak Polish and decided to stay after the war despite the numerous reprisals.

So my mother also spoke perfect Polish and had numerous personal contacts from her youth. My parents would then often drive into communist Poland through the even more communist GDR, passing my father off as deaf-mute, collecting works by Polish painters and many other treasures that the customs officers, schooled in real-existing material-scarcity, did not consider valuable.

I was in part left for longer periods with the parents of a childhood friend of my mother on a small Upper Silesian farm where they made almost everything themselves. I still remember the butter churn, the pig slaughter, the gigantic cows I milked by hand, the terrifyingly hysterical turkeys and not least the uncannily deep ponds behind the house, formed by collapsed coal-mining shafts.

When I told people of my intention to travel, the reaction in Germany was uniformly the same: everyone had relatives in the former eastern territories — be it East Prussia, Silesia, the Sudetenland or other regions. Everyone encouraged me to undertake the journey, and everyone admitted that they had never been to their family’s homeland.

Even though I do not know every individual story: I can well understand it. The often unspoken trauma of the lost homeland, the much suffering connected with it — all this never invited one to engage with it anew. Instead one often gave up in the attempt of the younger generation to learn something from the older generation about the unknown homeland in the East.

The further east I drove, the more I noticed how little that was true. To be continued…

As I recalled the names of the fashionable Bohemian spas on the map of my memory and tried to decide whether to visit Karlsbad, Franzensbad or Marienbad, Goethe came to my aid. The “Marienbad Elegy” was still familiar to me as a poem and as an episode from his life. And so the decision fell quite quickly, supported by the easy accessibility from the Nuremberg–Prague motorway.

The Upper Palatinate, which one traverses on the way to Marienbad, is by no means as barren and poor as it perhaps still was in the time of the composer Max Reger. Well-kept little towns with thoroughly modern industrial estates speak eloquently of the dynamic change that the former agrarian state of Bavaria has undergone.

The unstaffed border installations with the Czech Republic are for me still one of the wonders of more recent European history. All too vividly I remember the fanatically precise and almost sadistically seeming border controls of the defunct communist regime.

The Sudetenland behind the border still bears the marks of the exodus of the German population. Compared with the rest of the Czech Republic, the economy here still lags noticeably behind. Sparsely populated, interspersed with often slightly dilapidated small old farmhouses, one experiences here, on the other hand, a tranquillity and romance of the landscape that over in Bavaria, behind the highly efficient bustle, has mostly long since been lost.

The magic of a country road with its delicate birch trees is hard to capture in words. Like garlands the outer branches sway to and fro and double their effect when they reflect in the water of nearby ponds. One is already wholly in the expectation of withdrawn rural life when Marienbad rises like a 19th-century mirage in this tranquil idyll.

A grandezza that is incomparable and beside which the other famous spas of Europe almost pale, rising between the great forests of the area in a wildly romantic valley. The architecture overwhelms in its sense of proportion and beauty. Inconceivable how the whole tragedies of the 20th century could do so little harm to this world. Marienbad is still today a symbol of the most beautiful in European culture.

Thus Goethe’s Marienbad Elegy, in its old-age infatuation that today seems almost grotesque but then swells into unfathomable passion, fits wonderfully into this jewel between the high beech forests of Western Bohemia. The whole place seems utterly removed from the information overload and the imagined or felt catastrophes of the 21st century.

On Sunday there is a bilingual Protestant service, with the priest also acting as organist. A true all-purpose weapon of the Lord, who even transposes the songs at sight into the right key for the congregation. Many songs have wandered between the cultural circles of Europe and show once again how closely this continent is culturally interwoven.

On departure the next morning I feel refreshed in spirit — a word I had almost forgotten. It is hard to know what was the greater solace: the mineral springs bubbling everywhere or the feeling of having arrived in the homeland of my own culture.

In conclusion, a few lines from Goethe’s Marienbad Elegy: In the purity of our bosom surges a striving, to give ourselves freely in gratitude to a higher, purer, unknown being, unriddling the eternally Unnamed; we call it: being devout! — Of such blessed height I feel myself partaker when I stand before her.

After passing through Prague the landscape quickly opens up. A lovely wide land with idyllic small towns. At the latest here the crampedness of West Germany in its building and way of life lies far behind one. Certainly, the history, the style of building, even the food, still make clear to one that one is still in Central Europe. But it no longer has that bustle and haste.

On the ascent into the Giant Mountains nature has even more room despite a few tourist resorts. The magic of the region in its wild primitiveness is preserved. Once again without border controls into what is today Polish Silesia, to Bad Warmbrunn. The little place near Hirschberg has a long history as a spa and shines with a wonderful generous park enclosed by castle, gastronomy and theatre.

On the tourist information boards in the place one can trace the changed dealings with the past. The older boards from communist times try to negate the German history and, with the greatest contortions, attempt to establish a Polish continuity that was not there. The newer boards are, thankfully, also a tribute to the rich German history of the area.

In the inn I then request my tribute to the Silesian cuisine of my youth: potato pancakes with porcini mushrooms, with coleslaw and, as a concession to adulthood, dark beer. A wonderful cuisine!

The next day follows the decisive stage for me, into Upper Silesia and the industrial region around Kattowitz, Gleiwitz and Zabrze / Hindenburg, the homeland of my mother’s family. My mother’s birthplace has unfortunately not shared in the surrounding Polish economic miracle. Like a 19th-century tenement barrack fallen out of time, it still stands there, half decayed.

But what stands out compared with earlier: one can see the sky! Still in the 1980s, after half an hour by car or train, the windows were full of soot and dirt. The coal dust drew into the breath with its biting dust. One never saw the sun. Otherwise it is tangible everywhere how great the progress of the last decades has been. Much of it financed by the EU. But all this would have remained meaningless had not a strong economy formed through the capability and diligence of the people.

A few more winding street-villages, some surprising hills that are almost mountains, then one arrives in Lubowitz, the homeland of the Romantic poet Joseph von Eichendorff. The imposing church of reddish bricks was consecrated in 1907, desecrated by the Red Army, as the chronicle has it, and then gradually restored in all its splendour.

Right by the adjoining parsonage the signposts to the Eichendorff castle begin, which unfortunately survives only as a ruin. Eichendorff’s poems in German and Polish show the way. First to the cemetery, enchantingly idyllically situated, blessed with characterful old trees and the old church bells lying there improvisationally.

Only imperceptibly larger than the other graves is Eichendorff’s grave. When one looks from his grave at the little enchanted gate that opens between graves and trees, slightly angled and askew, to the outside world, one can already feel like a protagonist in one of his poems. All the more so when one continues under the nearby oak to the castle. An oak that has been growing here for over 200 years and has serenely borne all the confusions of time.

The castle park is so enchanted and overgrown that one fancies oneself near Sleeping Beauty’s home. Little frogs in the undergrowth enjoy the fact that so few visitors find their way here. But whoever manages it is rewarded with the feeling of having found something eternally precious.

As Rüdiger Safranski so aptly described in an interview with the NZZ the firewall of National Socialism that separates the Germans from their past: here one has stepped through it, or it simply has no more meaning. And something completely believed lost opens up again: the people of poets and thinkers, beyond ideology and nationalism, beyond guilt and self-denial.

And so I end the day over cabbage rolls with the curious realisation that one finds an entire country of 80 million people like Germany best beyond its national borders.