Visual Arts | Walter Herzog: The silence after the end of the Anthropocene

 Walter Herzog, “Steep Steps,” etching, 2007 Photo: Walter Herzog “Looking for lost time again,” Walter Herzog once wrote on one of his early prints, and this leitmotif resonates through all of his work to this day. For him, the search for lost time is always the search for lost places that he has visited throughout his life, drawing and etching, the places of his childhood and his memories.

Walter Herzog was eight years old when he survived the Dresden bombing inferno on February 13, 1945. As a child, he often walked from Mockritz to the destroyed city, past the burnt avenues and the burned-out fields of ruins on the Elbe. He has seen what remains of the splendor and glory of great architecture when a firestorm has passed over it. Nevertheless, he studied architecture and has worked on large representative buildings in the capital of the GDR since the 1960s, at the Foreign Ministry, at the exhibition center at the television tower and at the Palace of the Republic.

But at the height of these professional successes, he said goodbye to the drawing board and computers and bought a copper intaglio printing press in order to devote himself exclusively to his graphic work. When asked about his reasons, he once quoted Brecht's verses "Of Poor B.B.": "What will remain of these cities is the wind that passed through them!"

Since the beginning of his artistic work, Herzog has depicted the landscapes of his homeland: the mountain labyrinths of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, bridges and vineyards, pastures on river banks. Since the early 1970s he has also visited the coastal landscapes of Rügen every summer with his wife Christiane, who printed almost all of his etchings.

I saw these works for the first time in 1983 in the “Berliner Atelier” at the television tower. I knew immediately that I wanted one of the graphics for the book cover of my first volume of poetry with Aufbau Verlag, which I was putting together at the time. In 1984, with my editor Günter Drommer, I visited Walter and Christiane Herzog in their studio apartment at Köllnischer Park. It was a long visit because there were many sheets of Rügen landscapes and it was difficult to choose.

So it happened that in addition to the “Trees on the High Bank” for the cover, we were also allowed to use the “Vineyard near Bosel” and the “Villa Hadriana” for the inside pages. Herzog's Roman ruins and landscapes, from the Colosseum to the Appian Way, also testify to his fascination with Piranesi's work, whose engravings hung on the walls of the studio.

In the spring of 2009, 25 years later, we met again. The GDR had fallen, but our conversation continued as if it had only been interrupted for a short time. The sheets that I saw that afternoon appeared to me to be even more intense in line and light than those from the 80s: seascapes and forest landscapes, but now also animal and human portraits with pencil and pen, with masterly classical precision.

Herzog always worked on the edge of the noisy markets, unimpressed by the zeitgeist and its “emptiness with speed” (Brecht). He has been playing the piano since he was ten years old and the sound of silence that his works capture can be described as the musical quality of his work. It doesn't want to reconcile us with the age-old cycle of growth and decay, but it does help us to see it more clearly - in its beauty and its horrors.

Perhaps for him the “tragedy of the landscape,” which the French sculptor Pierre Jean David d’Angers spoke of in view of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, also consists in the fact that after humans have been wiped out on this earth, no one will be able to see its beauty anymore. "We know that we are temporary / And after us will come: nothing worth mentioning."

Anyone who looks at Walter Herzog's graphics can hear the silence after the end of the Anthropocene. But the hikers who can be found in Friedrich's pictures have disappeared from Herzog. We see a deserted world and understand what connects the previous world with the posterity: it can get along without us.

The sun rises over landscapes no longer torn apart by bombs and bulldozed. Science now assumes that in less than 500 years the ruins of our cities, highways and runways will have disappeared on all continents. Then the light of posterity will shine, undisturbed by the fire of the material battles of an unleashed industrial society. We owe the fact that we can already see it today to the pictures of Walter Herzog.

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