Enlarge image
Karl Heinz Bohrer (1932 to 2021)
Photo:
imago stock & people / imago / Gerhard Leber
I can only write subjectively about the death of such a lively, stormy contemporary.
I see him in front of me.
I'm sure he would laugh at me when I start to "appreciate him."
Most recently he was in a British clinic in London.
It was said that he had lost the language.
Now the rest of the tissues in this waking brain are also extinguished.
One day he comes to me. He wants to talk about the guillotine. It's about the guillotine with which the factions killed each other in the Great French Revolution. The suddenness with which this automated executioner's ax strikes this machine is what fascinates Karl Heinz Bohrer. The ax hits the condemned man, face down, strapped to death. It hits a weak point in humans, the neck. We have no eyes on the neck. With a newborn baby, we have to support our heads. The not yet stable connection between body and head breaks easily. The Mauser pistol in the Russian Terror of 1937 is aimed at the neck area, at the same point where the guillotine cuts through the muscular neck of the revolutionary Danton.Something like that got the precise attention of Bohrer. One of his books is called "The Endangered Fantasy, or Surrealism and Terror".
Karl Heinz Bohrer is a radical.
Someone is called radical when he "gets to the root of things".
This includes rebellious instinct, the desire for surprise and immediacy.
Karl Heinz Bohrer was a specialist in all of this.
In the winter semester of 1968 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung sent him to the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University to observe the rebellious students.
I am quite sure that Bohrer was ideologically far removed from the thoughts and speeches of the student protest movement.
But when I asked him about one of my films about December 1968 and the student protest, he spoke with the greatest respect of the student leader, Hans-Jürgen Krahl.
That was not in the spirit of the paper he was writing for.
Wherever you meet, Bohrer is good for the unexpected. He spoke to no one by the mouth. He prefers to attack and disturb. Uncompromising like Theodor W. Adorno, but more direct in feeling. I miss him. As I said, no one will replace him that easily.