Harald Kretzschmar didn’t look from above, but rather from the side.
Photo: Uwe Steinert
Stay calm? No, that didn’t work. Not with him. Harald Kretzschmar’s movements showed a deliberate, meandering slinking and shuffling, with which he screwed his way into rooms, seemingly humble and clumsy, but behind this was the shrewdness, resoluteness and purposefulness of a lively person. He felt like exploding. And in position! This fellow with an enduring love of flannel shirts knew what he had to offer. A man who, for decades, aggressively attacked the drawing line – the line on which the most naked of all truths are traded. Namely, the knowability, the essence of a person. Harald Kretzschmar captured the outline that tells people mercilessly: Nothing is and remains pure.
Really ruthless? No, because this illustrator, portrait sketch master, also a sculptor and caricaturist for many years, disclosed things, but never exposed them maliciously. The traits of a character never gave him the evil temptation to cynically distort everything. Of course, when he drew he attacked any (boring) regularity of a face, but he refused any malice to dominate a face.
As I said: It wasn’t possible for him to be quiet – Kretzschmar was an alert, choleric person who threw ideas around. He traveled and rummaged around, he exhibited, he wrote books, he was constantly drawing, both current and allegory, and as before in the “Weltbühne”, he was also a stubbornly insistent features writer for our editorial team, always a stroller, and always a layout designer and editor-in-chief in one, a meddler, extremely well versed in the eternal speed course of newspapers. He confidently took the right to simply stand still in the all-consuming word and image race for the latest aesthetic fashion and then grumble at the world, gnashing his fatherly wisdom. Or to adore them.
In his search for truthfulness, the true artist stops a few steps short of the invisible goal. Because there is no ultimate clarity of the goal. Approach is the highest achievable. Harald thought, felt and worked the same way. Unsuitable for comedy, but not for comedy. Comedy is low flying, comedy has shallows.
Harald’s equipment for the drawings and acrylic portraits: delicate lead, incorruptible felt, almost drilling brush, every pen milling – but the perspective of a servant always prevailed. I look at some of his portraits: George Tabori looks like Pumuckl, Peter Handke stretches his neck like an aged flower of romanticism, Thomas Bernhard is red-nosed and friendly, Kafka looks like the demonic part of a demonic castle. Kretzschmar drew artistic greats, but also political greats. The question remained on everyone’s minds: How many brains are there?
Caricature means: seeing things as they are. To do this you have to change your perspective, your perspective. Kretzschmar did not look from above, but rather from the side, which for him was never just a picture book or just the other side. He disturbed without disturbing. This is called respect. Dissecting without cutting into the flesh. Let’s say it: affection. In a holiday home in Schierke in the Harz Mountains, the very young Harald K. saw the writer Bernhard Kellermann sitting, he looked closely at this celebrity, saved the image in his head, shot out, drew, returned. Kellermann was amazed and gave an autograph. Kretzschmar’s professional secret and emotional wavering: What is more important – autograph or drawing?
He was born in Berlin-Steglitz in 1931 and grew up in Dresden. The bright from the Spree mixed with the knee-jerk from the Elbe and finally settled in Kleinmachnow, where he was not just a resident, but a digger: a passionate local researcher. Of course it also became a book – the man had ten fingers, but far more feelers.
He was once a graphic arts student in Leipzig and soon became a worker at the “Eulenspiegel” – his weekly portrait drawings in this magazine (starting with Wolfgang Langhoff) became a cult corner, and by the summer of 1991 the “Celebrity Encyclopedia” had grown to over 1,300 pages. Black and white as the richest color. And volumes upon volumes: »Mimes & Expressions. 50 heads from stage and film”, “Owl People”, “Face to Face” or “Whom the Nose Fits”.
He was one of the pioneers of the Greiz “Satiricum” in 1975, this permanent, truly national collection of caricatures from the GDR, with bridges to history and Europe. Tradition as a gas station. By the way, at the Dresden Kreuzschule, doodler Harald was asked why he had the nerve to draw cultural heroes like Thomas Mann. Quite simply, said Harald, he knew him, he had heard him on the radio. This proves that artists give the most probing answers about the character of art when they are not yet artists.
If someone is said to be one of the best writers among illustrators, but also the best illustrator among scribes, this can be the harshest criticism disguised as flattery. Kretzschmar, however, was decidedly solitary, here and there, the pen always working twice, drawing as well as writing. He looked critically at the zeitgeist in his texts. More recently, he scoffed at identity politics zeal and feared “the virus of obstinate seriousness” when it comes to attitudes and gender issues.
Above all, he wrote vehemently against a sense of history that wants to assign people in the East only one good thing after 1990: to have been taken over. “I always experience the wrong thing” – anyone who titles their memories of the GDR so pointedly and cunningly knows very well what was and remains valuable in life. The book is a confident response to a widespread, foolish zeal in the new federal states – to prove to West Germans: We are just like you! Kretzschmar contradicts and tells us about the only way to belong to this society; it is “the recognition of my dignity as someone with different experiences.”
For many years he also provided the “nd” with captivatingly brooding philosophical cartoons, especially in weekend supplements. On these pages the people are either bursting with imaginary wealth, or they resemble the torn out legs of flies and spiders who no longer want to lie around, put on a hat and begin a dirty life of their own – as careworn prophets, scurrying informers, trembling adventurers, uncertain seekers . An endless caravanserai of time types. Restless people driven by nightmares. A joke of spiritual raven blackness. And people diligently put on a mask for their alienation. Line-light, line-bizarre images in which the tiny dances against the massive, the waiting against the bustling. Those who waver and sway, those who rise and fall, vain and eager, ascended and lost.
Harald Kretzschmar’s attention was on the thin hairline crack on every wall. Because there is an opening to the world, in contrast to any closed worldview. In the last month we spoke to each other on the phone several times, and after these conversations it always seemed to me that I had to check again to see whether I had misrepresented my age. No, he really couldn’t stay calm! Not until the end. So much liveliness, so much urge for expression and participation in the world – a person wonderfully undecided between two options: having to intervene further or finally being allowed to let go. Harald Kretzschmar died last Thursday at the age of 93.