Journey of discovery
In the midst of the stream of visitors, I lay down on the ground, facing the earth, stretched out my arms and paused.
Norbert Kottmann about the making of the work „… und er warf sein Antlitz zur Erde“ (Gethsemane)
I don’t remember exactly when I first saw that small drawing in the graphic collection of the Städel Museum in Frankfurt that shocked me. There this framed ink picture hung in the dim light of the exhibition, inconspicuously hidden behind glass. With a light hand, more sketching, Albrecht Dürer had literally “thrown down” Jesus there in the Garden of Gethsemane around 1521.
With outstretched arms a man lay there with his face to the ground, like a figure from a piece for “Modern Dance Performance”, … but the long robe, the little angel with the chalice on the upper left and the apostles asleep, however, pointed the picture back to that bitter hour of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Abandoned by all companions, he feels the icy cold breath of death and pleads to his God the Father „… to let this cup pass him by”, … “and he threw his face to the ground”. Unusually, Dürer has implemented this biblical image theme, because conventional representations of the subject at that time show Jesus mostly pleading and kneeling in the Garden of Gethsemane. Dürer is more radical, more challenging.
The drawing is enhanced by the fact that Dürer created it during his Dutch Journey in 1521, just at the time when Luther was on his way back from the Reichstag in Worms. The news of Luther’s disappearance had already made the rounds and even reached Dürer in Antwerp. There was great uncertainty about Luther’s fate; it was to be feared that the imperial henchmen had picked him up. Dürer was inclined toward the Reformation and placed his hopes in Luther. In this distressing uncertainty, Dürer drew the picture – what a moment that is still touching today!
In October 2017, I visited Israel, the “Holy Land” for the first time. Within a tightly organized travel program of the Bavarian Pilgrimage Office under the theme: “In the footsteps of Jesus” we also came to the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. As with almost all “places of interest”, there was a great stream of tourists as well. The tour bus was already waiting, we still had ten minutes, then next, … where were we yesterday? These meaningful biblical memorials, these holy places of Christianity sometimes shrank to arbitrary piles of stones, objects for smartphones. Now I myself was part of that mass, that stream, and now there it was, the Garden of Gethsemane. Thousand-year-old olive trees provided shade in the glare of the midday Oriental sun. The place began to charge and so, in the midst of the stream of visitors, I lay down on the ground, facing the earth, stretched out my arms and paused. I felt secure. I had left my vertical tension. I felt close to him, I got something back.
Biography
- * 1961
- Lives and works in Groß-Umstadt
- Does not like to travel to distant countries, but in 2017 made a pilgrimage to the biblical sites in Israel
