BY ELMAR TANNERT
FÜRTH — In the literary series “Fürther Freiheit,” the Fürther Nachrichten presents every Tuesday previously unpublished texts by contemporary authors who are connected to the city in special ways. In the mirror of the literary scene, an interesting panorama emerges. Today Elmar Tannert has his turn again, who at the 1996 Erlangen Poetry Festival achieved a magnificent debut with his novel “Der Stadtvermesser” and was awarded the Nuremberg Cultural Prize and the Bavarian Literature Prize the following year. Munich-born Elmar Tannert (37) works as a package delivery man and must daily fight anew for the leisure time to write.
The night before last I dreamed I was a candidate on a quiz show. Just one more correct answer, and one hundred thousand marks — one may still dream in D-Marks until the introduction of the Euro on January 1, 2002 — would be mine.
“When you think of Nuremberg,” Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff began — well, what? I stopped watching television almost twenty years ago and don’t know who nowadays… anyway: “When you think of Nuremberg,” asked Kuli, who was naturally wearing one of his typical loud checked jackets, “which women artists come to mind?” I answered: “Um.” And: “Hmm.” The fifty thousand euros — gone. I had known everything up to that point. And now I sat there and couldn’t even name two women artists from Nuremberg and turned red. Nuremberg… women artists… “Well,” said Kuli. “I’ll give you one last chance. Don’t think about Nuremberg anymore. Think about Fürth. Fürth,” he repeated and looked at me hypnotically. “Fürth… Fürth… who comes to mind when you think of Fürth—” I didn’t let him finish. I couldn’t let him finish. Now everything was quite simple. “Barbara Kastura!” I called out. And: “Stefani Schneider!” I called out. The audience cheered. Kuli handed me the check and whispered to me: “Honestly — I have no idea where that’s supposed to be: Fürth. But it must be right, what you said…” I reached my hand out for the check. And woke up. It was three in the morning. In two hours the alarm clock would ring, and in three hours I would be loading packages into the postal van.
Slept poorly last night, I wrote the next day in my diary.
As we know, both unpublished and published diaries consist predominantly of petty banalities, self-absorbed or self-loathing observations, settling of scores with enemies, remarks about the weather, and occasionally interspersed erotic fantasies. One should neither write nor read diaries.
But from the Fürth painter Stefani Schneider there exist Tagesbücher—Books of the Days—which is almost the same as diaries, but something entirely different. From the outside, each Book of the Days is a slender volume. When you open it, an image unfolds like an accordion. Over many years, alongside her work on other pieces, Stefani Schneider has captured the particularity of each day in an image, a drawing, a collage (in old spelling: Kollahsche). So this is another way to keep a diary! thinks the viewer, and is joyfully surprised. Opening one after another, laying them beside each other and on top of each other and all mixed up on the table, looking and leafing through them, one discovers all of life anew and discovers, moreover, a person of great sensitivity and playful, versatile expressive ability. Often when reading ordinary diaries, one gets the feeling: this life was a tea bag. And it was steeped anew every day.
But Stefani Schneider takes a different kind of tea each day. And regarding Barbara Kastura… I must begin again with myself. Even today I occasionally hear stories about how uncomfortable it was for my mother to go to kindergarten parent meetings with me. Apparently every time I remained in complete stillness, watching the other children during gym class. And who knows, perhaps it has a little something to do with why I’m so fascinated by Barbara Kastura. Because she has the gift of movement. She can translate everything with unbelievable presence and intensity into vocal, facial, and physical expression. How nice that nowadays we call this “performance” in German…
And Barbara Kastura paints. About painting she has a similar philosophy to Thomas Bernhard about writing: why should one depict what already exists? And so she observes, for example, the birds in the sky and paints neither birds nor sky, but rather the paths that the birds fly; she translates their movements into swinging lines.
And furthermore, I think that one must experience and see and hear Barbara Kastura, rather than reading what I write about her. Stefani Schneider and Barbara Kastura… these two women artists belong for me to “my” Fürth.