2024-03-28 15:18:00
A stream flows through the house, or rather: a stream, a trickle. Running water is included in the basement, which was once built directly on the Erzgebirge rock. The cellar was vital, functional like everything in this old farmhouse just before the Czech border: thanks to the heat from the earth, it never got colder than five or six degrees down here. This was how the farmers were able to get through the icy winter up here when the “Bohemian wind,” as they say here, cuts over the ridge.
Do you want the writer? Christian Lehnert in his refuge, we take the regional train from Dresden through the Müglitztal into the mountains, along the river, through places called Oberschlottwitz or Bärenhecke, which are only “requirement stops” even for the slow train. But the picturesqueness is deceptive: during the Saxon “flood of the century” in the summer of 2002, the entire valley sank into mud. Lehnert was a young pastor in Weesenstein at the time and experienced the catastrophe directly as an emergency pastor. “How did it happen that destruction mixed with beauty here too? … Why were evil and good, growth and misery mixed up everywhere?” asks Lehnert in his new book.
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In “The House and the Lamb”, a major theological essay published by Suhrkamp, the farmhouse is an important protagonist. Like the famous one cabin in Thoreau’s “Walden” it is a symbol of another life – beyond civilization and social constraints. Lehnert picks up the guest from the train station by car. He talks about his kingdom with a melodic Saxon tongue; he knows every stone here and especially every neighbor. The scattered farmhouses are officially called “forest villages”. The border is very close, but so is the Dresden-Prague motorway, which, if necessary, takes you back to urban areas in half an hour.
Retreat to the edge
Cora, a collie, is waiting in the house. Twelve years ago, the Lehnerts fulfilled their dream of the mountains; There is some land around it, even a piece of forest from which you can cut your own wood for the fire. Lehnert has now fired him up and there is coffee from the stove. The kitchen, like the whole house, is furnished in a simple, pragmatic way, two pictures by artist friends on the wall, a star radio from the 70s, a small samovar, dry grass, pussy willows, a music stand.
Lehnert’s wife is a baroque violinist and is currently on a concert tour; The two older children have been studying for a long time, and the youngest daughter is graduating from high school this year. The family still has a city apartment in Rötha near Leipzig, but it will soon be given up, as will Lehnert’s job at Leipzig University. “The focus of life has long since been reversed”. The house will soon become his only residence. Lehnert is in his mid-50s – a new start.
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As quickly becomes clear, the narrator of the new book is by no means identical to its author. The radical loneliness of the forest is a literary topos – a very current one in our times of escapism with its prepper fantasies. But even if the deep life crisis that drives his narrator to read the Apocalypse of John in the New Testament is a fictional exaggeration, the existential questions are Lehnert’s own: “This book is an expression of a strong inner ferment.” The retreat to the Rand also brings about a different perception of the world, of time and space. When a writer withdraws from “society,” then that also means from the literary world, and in Lehnert’s case possibly even from the language itself.
In 1997, Lehnert’s first volume of poetry was published by Suhrkamp; His “opus 8” will be in 2022. There are also prose books in which Lehnert has developed a hybrid form of memoir, theological essay and nature writing. In “The House and the Lamb” the everyday life of a modern hermit and observations of nature alternate with biblical interpretations. Lehnert’s informants are called Jacob Böhme or Angelus Silesius, and a Jewish Kabbalist like Isaak Luria (1534–1572) also plays a central role with his teaching of “Tzimtzum”.
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From his reading of the Apocalypse of John, Lehnert derives reflections on the philosophy of history, on the fatal misuse of banal temporal models of the end of the world and the “millennium kingdom”. Lehnert places the old tradition of mystical thinking against secularized end-time ideas from Thomas Müntzer through right-wing and left-wing utopias to today’s climate apocalypse. The end of time is not itself a temporal event; it does not lie in a concrete, let alone a datable future.
This is not theologically light fare. Anyone who likes to be pious and unambiguous when it comes to religious questions is wrong with Lehnert, who appreciates precisely the paradoxes in mystics, where experiences of closeness to God and deep despair go hand in hand. Lehnert now feels like an outsider in the literary world and also in his own, the Protestant church. The pandemic, when he was one of the signatories of a call by scientists against compulsory vaccination, further increased this distance.
“It’s more than discomfort. I have the impression that the company tends to hinder you, influences and norms your writing.” Lehnert does not want to live up to widespread expectations of “religious poetry”. “I have found that my books are incredibly polarizing.” Today, the fact that faith always involves deep doubt is hardly understood anymore. But for Lehnert, the idea of faith and religion as a “fixed possession” is itself an expression of dwindling religious energies in society.
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Lehnert mentions with respect his fellow writer Reinhard Jirgl, who withdrew completely from the public eye in 2017 and is now only working on his legacy: “For me, I am also unsure about what the ultimate driving energies are that move me. Spirituality and religion sometimes occupy me more than writing. Then I’d rather meditate. Then I realize that writing itself is one of the penultimate things.”
Lehnert then takes us through the house, which appears like a living organism with its beams and walls, stairs and nooks and crannies. The previous owners, a very elderly couple, cared for it lovingly, but nothing had been modernized since the 1940s. “The whole house is purely a museum.” The strangest devices were found in the barn, the purpose of which was often unknown. One can only imagine how much work the Lehnerts have invested here in recent years.
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For lunch, Lehnert warms up a soup, the “last pumpkin” from the previous year, with tofu sausages as an accompaniment. Lehnert, born in 1969, talks about his influence in the GDR. For reasons of conscience, as a young man he decided against serving in the armed forces and at the same time against the medical career that his family had planned for him – both parents are ophthalmologists – which had therefore become impossible.
As a construction soldier, he had to toil under health-threatening conditions in the dilapidated chemical plants in Leuna. Shortly before the end of his service, it was February 1989, the then punk fan Lehnert wrote “No power for nobody” on steel pipes, was caught in the “stupid boy prank”, ended up in the Stasi’s clutches and even ended up briefly in a dark cell. A torture experience that Lehnert can now almost casually recount as an anecdote while listening to the cracking wood of the stove.
Nature and logos
He then began studying theology in Leipzig in September ’89, “there wasn’t much studying there.” The “emergency solution” became a calling. He did not grow up in church; poetry had exposed the young person to religious questions. The works of Johannes Bobrowski were his poetic “initiation”. In Lehnert’s poems, nature and language coincide, both outflows of a divine logos. Writing, he says, is “of course creating the world,” a linguistic act. In nature you only see what you can name. “This happens in a very elementary way in poems, but also in prose: when I describe a small landscape, I basically bring it into being.”
After dinner we go for a long walk with the dog, across the meadows, along the edge of the forest. He says that a few years ago he wanted to build a small wind turbine together with neighbors in order to create a self-sufficient energy supply. They failed because of bureaucratic hurdles, which still clearly makes him bitter when he now sees the huge wheels turning on the horizon. He has just found out that a large lithium processing plant is to be built right under his nose – a shock. Landscape protection no longer seems to play a role.
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According to Lehnert, it is such contradictions that fuel the dissatisfaction of many here. In the last local elections in 2019, the AfD achieved almost 30 percent in the district; Mayor of the district town of Pirna became the AfD candidate in December. Lehnert can understand people’s frustration, the feeling of being ignored and taken advantage of by rich Westerners and distant elites. East German voices are underrepresented in the media. He cannot understand why many see the AfD as a solution.
Its nature is not an innocent idyll, and not just because it is threatened by human hands. Everywhere he sees the convergence of creation and destruction, of life and death, the inescapable food chain: “Every square meter of ground here is a stab and stab. Up there,” he points into the air, “the kite is circling.”
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The path goes cross country back to the house. You don’t have to tell the dog Cora where to go. Easter is not far away, we are talking about fasting and abstinence. Lehnert thinks of the asceticism of the monks of late antiquity: “The Desert Fathers had the feeling that they could only find this peace, this balance, if they were not in the hustle and bustle of things.” For him, too, it is about finding one’s own center again, “from that the whole of existence is organized.”
Do you find this inner peace in writing, or does it not lead you away from it – this is the question that concerns Christian Lehnert. “Where do you feel that you are closest to your own longing?” A paradox: the mystics he so admires are only preserved in their writings, and yet he knows: “The ultimate energy of religion actually leads to silence , into the unspeakable.”
Christian Lehnert: “The house and the lamb. Flying Leaves to the Apocalypse of John”. Suhrkamp Verlag, 272 pages, 28 euros.
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In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is necessary, as the providers of the embedded content require this consent as third party providers [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (revocable at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can revoke your consent at any time using the switch and privacy at the bottom of the page.
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