Hannes and the artists
“Hannes and the artists”
(Homage to a life poet) A kinetic art object by Christian Nienhaus 75 x 75 x 20 cm (W x H x D)
I enjoyed philosophizing with my friend Hannes about life and the poets of our world. But this particular hymn by Schiller, “The Artists”, always ruled our debauched evenings. When Hannes quietly said goodbye after 62 years, I created a tribute to a life poet from my memories. The question of whether art should express a higher lawfulness and freedom at the same time will never find an answer between us in this form, because the life of an artist can sometimes burn out too quickly. The memory of this question “what it’s all about” remains, even if the focus is on other things.
In 1789, Friedrich Schiller wrote the poem “The Artists”, a hymn to human reason, which states:
“How beautiful, O man, with thy palm-branch thou standest at the century’s end In noble proud manhood, With open mind, with fullness of spirit, Full of mild earnestness, – in deedful silence, The most mature son of time, Free by reason, Strong by laws, By meekness great and rich by treasures, Which long thy bosom concealed from thee, Lord of Nature, who loves thy bonds, Who exercises thy strength in a thousand battles, And rose resplendent beneath thee from the wilderness!”
In 1789, Schiller was still firmly convinced that mankind was on the eve of the age of reason. But the more the Jacobin terror destroyed the hopes of the French Revolution, the more he expressed his horror at this barbarism. And he, who only recently was able to write “How beautiful, O man, with your palm branch, you stand at the end of the century”, later reflected on the Paris massacres in the “Glocke” with the words: “But the most terrible of horrors is man in his madness”.
