Gerd Irrlitz – dream of everyday life

There are big things to do! » The social utopens Saint-Simon once started his days with the call-and Gerd Irrlitz also lives this high standards. Who, if not a philosopher, should think great thoughts that point beyond the flood of opinions and the abyss?

Irrlitz is one of the few still living Leipzig students from Ernst Bloch, the century thinker. He went his way as an unorthodox Marxist philosopher, following the example of his teacher. Bloch had come to Marxism from the Jewish tradition, brought a “finished work” (Irrlitz) from emigration in the USA to Leipzig, where he received a professorship in 1948. On Bloch, at that time an older man, Irrlitz admires the “youth fresh expectation” that he went out of.

What a teacher affects his students at all has formulated in conversation with filmmaker Thomas Grimm (once a student of Irrlitz): by transforming the student in something of what he accepts. It was the world openings in Irrlitz ‘lectures on the history of philosophy that still have an impact on me today.

In his lecture “The idea of ​​socialism” from 2021, he looks back on it: “Even after the missing dawn of the prolonged new world, the committed intellectuals are no longer easy to speak. But they drew the intellectual line that remains of this age. Their courage and defeats are the notes on which contemporaries dream of their everyday life. »

Of course, the meeting of an idea and its history will inevitably become contradictory. Thinking this contradiction is a matter of philosophy. I heard the first lecture by Irrlitz in 1985. It has remained present to me because it was under the topic “What is philosophy history?” And was a smooth overwhelming. But we were looking for this, because we had enough of pre -formulated answers to worship.

Irrlitz so led us to the unity of ideas, system and problem history since Thales and the beginning of philosophy with the question of the origin of all things. The most important element in this at the same time a wide variety of perspectives remains the problem history. First she establishes the connection between all other areas, it also brings it into the temporal river.

This philosopher distributed every approach of provinciality and ideological simplification with just a few sentences. After all, Stalin had not “left the room” in the GDR until 1989, as Stefan Heym once formulated. Bloch went to Tübingen in 1961, after his forced emeritus.

In the GDR, however, there was a destructive dispute in cultural policy as to whether Bloch was considered a Marxist and texts by Nietzsche were allowed to print. In these arguments, too, Irrlitz proved to be an horrific enlightener who warned that Marxism should not list like a governor who only sees that the child Marxism does not make a loop.

Gerd Irrlitz, born in Leipzig 90 years ago, grew up in a resistant bourgeois environment. His father was one of the co -founders of the SAP in 1931, smashed by the Gestapo in 1935 (Irrlitz ‘father was sentenced to four and a half years of prison). A few years ago, Irrlitz wrote a book worth reading about his father and the anti -fascist SAP (“Resistance not resignation”), an unorthodox party that was never an issue in the GDR.

From 1953 he studied in Leipzig and was sent to the Buna works as transport workers after the Hungarian uprising due to non-party views. The workers should educate him. In a way, they actually did so, because they had respect for young people who bore the consequences of their thinking.

I read the first text of Irrlitz at the age of 14 in a highly official book: “The socialism – your world”, the state gift that everyone received on the youth consecration and replaced the predecessor book “Wide human human”. Irrlitz wrote about Spartacus and the slave uprising. 70,000 slaves that fought for their freedom and human dignity – in vain. Last but not least, from Bloch, Irrlitz has the respect for the poor of freedom and justice of the poor. In them, a radical will fake humanity with which social will to change is accompanied.

At Irrlitz, I learned to recognize basic philosophical problems in history. Above all, the relationship of the individual to society. In his book “The claim of reason” (together with Manfred Buhr) he wrote about it in 1968. For Hegel, the whole thing was the real – critics then accused him of refining the Prussian state, which of course falls too short.

But the line of conflict between those who think from the individual, and those who come from the whole cannot actually be overlooked. In his “lectures on the history of philosophy” she identified Hegel – and Irrlitz wrote an introduction to this work in 1981. He asks who Hegel turned the most extensive in his history. The astonishing result: For Jakob Böhme (autodidact, shoemaker and mystic on the threshold for the 17th century), Hegel needed a total of 36 pages, even called him “the first German philosophers”. So you can do numerous discoveries under Irrlitz ‘instructions.

He never leveled the contradiction between the individual and the whole, but cultivated. Even after the “turn”, when he managed to amazing the company of the German Kant researchers, which was closed and with a book on the intellectual biography of spruce with his “Kant manual”. A person who – again Bloch shows himself as a guide – was also close to the heart because someone there was his own way of thinking out of poorest conditions.

If you don’t want to leave the rule of affects, you have to practice contradictions. Again and again, Irrlitz can surprise his readers with original readers, in such a way in an essay to Mörike’s “fairy tale of securing man”. In what form can a cultural tradition be continuing that, interrupted by the power of the present, expects a better future? The answer from which secret sympathy for romance sounds: “The art is called up against the shadows of the lifetime.”

An idea that continues must always want to make a difference. It demands the energy without which all thinking remains without consequences. Gerd Irrlitz as a philosopher exudes it to this day.