Post photo: Enjoying coffee | © Pixabay
Today is Dead Sunday and the church bells have long since died away. I actually wanted to treat myself to a little break today and gain strength for the remaining weeks of the year. Maybe just briefly look over the last minutes of a meeting, write a post about an event and end the day dancing.
I also know that Detlef Stern has great understanding for the fact that I am not writing about our last, very nice conversation or about its outcome, because, among other things, we talked about shortening the gap. But then I'm sitting comfortably at the table, enjoying the delicacies that my better half has served up, and the most diverse bits of words that I've heard since Friday are pouring in. “Blue-eyedness” (Thomas Zimmerman), “tendentious” (Thomas Randecker), "basically" (Rainer Hinderer), "together" (Herbert Burkhardt) and “Lore-Ley” (Hans Müller).
As already written, the church bells have long since died down and we all have really huge, even earth-shattering problems on the table that can hardly be solved on our own, including a few real wars, an incomparable environmental catastrophe - if you leave the dinosaurs out of it - and from that resulting macroeconomic challenges, which would have to make your own personal problems and challenges as well as those from your immediate surroundings seem small. But it is precisely these small, local problems that affect us personally that actually concern us. And as long as we can continue to help ourselves with mountains of debt, overexploitation and blaming each other, the real life-threatening problems will simply be ignored.
I've never been able to do that before - one of my biggest mistakes - and so I just wanted to take a little break from my (local) problems. Our three major and related religions have not been helping for a long time, on the contrary, instead of everyone pulling together in these times and bringing their few actually existing believers together for their common cause, they are all fomenting - leave it here But I left out Judaism in Germany because unfortunately it has little or no meaning here anymore - fire. And since this Friday, the Heilbronn voice has been stirring things up again.
I fear that if rabbis, priests, pastors and imams do not stand together in unison, at least here at the local level, in these really bad times and bring together their remaining flock to enforce at least a temporary peace, then we no longer need any of them. In days when everything really seems to be going wrong for us, this weekend we are once again arguing about building a new mosque. And I can be glad that our Jewish fellow citizens don't insist on a synagogue - Heilbronn would probably burn!
Religions could actually make the world a better place - but many of their official representatives do the opposite. Democracy would make the world a better place - many of its officials do the opposite. We humans could create a paradise on earth - many of us do the opposite!
And so the words pound into my head Heinrich Heines through your head “I don’t know what it means” — Hans Müller came up with it already to speak days ago. Heinrich Heine In 1824 he created the poem “Lore-Ley”, which deals with a central motif of Romanticism, the vanitas motif. The vanitas idea comes from the Old Testament, certainly had its peak in the Baroque period, but is still valid today: behind the mask of beauty (also here in Heilbronn) death lurks.
Friedrich Silcher put that to music Heinrich Heine-poem as early as 1837 and quickly made it widely known. How Hans Müller wrote that even the National Socialists could no longer get rid of it.
I don't know what does it mean
That I am so sad;
A fairy tale from ancient times,
Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.Die Luft ist Kühl und es dunkelt,
Und Ruhig fließt der Rhein;
The peak of the mountain sparkles
Im Abendsonnenschein.The most beautiful maiden sits
Wonderful up there;
Her golden attire glances,
She combs her golden hair.She combs with a golden comb
Und singt ein Lied dabei;
Das hat eine wundersame,
Powerful melody.The skipper in the small ship
Seize it with wild woe;
He doesn't look at the rocky reefs,
He just looks up into the sky.I think, the waves devour
Heinrich Heine, Book of Songs (1827)
In the end, boatman and boat;
And that has to do with her singing
The Lore-Ley done.
