“Leibniz” – how much archetype is in the image?

How do you paint a thinker? “Don’t think!” Says the French court painter, whom Lars Eidinger gives as a veteran parfed inside and outside. He always has the same advice to everyone he portrays. Thinking makes ugly, ruins the noble expression! It is best to look as expressionless as possible. In view of emptiness, nobody can assume anything inappropriate. On the other hand, if you smile on the painting, you would inevitably ask yourself what? And you already get problems. So the short intrigue in painting.

The court painter prefers to place his models on a pedestal, has prefabricated backgrounds to choose from, on which precious robes and wigs can be seen. Only a little thing is still missing: the face. Obviously what is the least important here. Because the beggar also has a face, but only the men in the country have such precious wardrobes as that from brocade and silk.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the philosopher, looks irritated on the white area, into which the actual of him is still putting. Only that the geck of court painter and its well -walking portrait factory obviously sees it differently. Faces together with their natural features could only ruin such a painting, he says. But his face, that is he, rebeled by the otherwise reserved thinker, whose stubbornness is written on the forehead of the great Edgar Selge.

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No, Leibniz does not blend this thread staging. It is easier to say something about the language of the angels than about the relationship of man to his portrait. How much archetype is in the image? So the philosopher asks. Such pointed feelings are annoying. No, this painter and this model do not fit together. “You are the weight on the feet of the angels!” He calls Leibniz before leaving the room angrily and entourage. Then he once had an original moment, and it fizzles out without consequences, the remaining philosopher regrets.

If it were up to Leibniz, of course he would not need a painting. But this is a heart’s desire for Queen Sophie Charlotte von Prussia (Antonia Bill), who was once in love with his student and probably a little in love with him in Hanover. In any case, she absolutely wants to have a picture of him in her porcelain cabinet in Charlottenburg Castle, with which she can then continue to dispute over the “Theodize”. How did God create the world so that it is completely despite all the imperfection? Because, according to Leibniz, this is part of God’s perfection that he also includes the imperfect.

So now another painter, one who takes the fine emotions in Leibniz ‘face seriously, because it is ultimately the mirror of the soul. The Dutch painter (with Androgyner Verve: Aenne Schwarz), whom the queen is now obliged, is characterized by Delft Vermeer – and actually a woman. But painters are not women, although Leibniz immediately noticed the true nature of his counterpart – and agree to it. For them everything is a question of light. Wasn’t it Rembrandt who understood painting as a gradual illumination of the dark? The painter is also not afraid of the infamous “windowless monads” who teach every philosophy student. She makes a visual idea of ​​it, mere abstractions hated Leibniz. And so he says – even a quiet poet – the beautiful sentence: “If you don’t have a face, you are not born, is a sleeping monade in God.”

Edgar Reitz created this wonderful cinematic chamber game – with Leibniz and his painter in the center and the both surrounding Queen Sophie Charlotte, who mourned her earlier carefree life. Leibniz, we learn here, was also a moody inventor who built a computing machine or an anti-pain clamp against the gout. He was interested in plants as well as for architecture and the history of far world areas.

Reitz, who is now 92 years old and received the Berlinale camera for his life’s work last year (“home”), is sovereign, which does not rule out that he is full of youthful curiosity curiosity of this special Kauz Leibniz finally was also a European genius. Edgar Selge shows us Leibniz as a questioner, nothing but a matter of course.

There is experience that keeps his thinking alive. The director is obviously seized by the originality of this thinker, for whom nature was a book in which he tried to read.

This story of the painter and her model is of course a tribute to Leibniz, which does not just understand itself as a thinking head, also as a knowing body (an increasingly sick person). This is strikingly modern in its holistic approach. One can convince yourself of this in the monograph of the Marxist-Communist Philosopher Hans Heinz Holz (Reclam Leipzig, 1983), who died in 2011, which was still worth reading in 2011. In which the individual independent cells are also dependent members of the big picture. «Could this be better formulated today?

The portrait finally fails, which is not due to the painter and her model, but because Queen Sophie Charlotte von Prussia suddenly died in 1705 at the age of only 36 – on a banal sore inflammation. And who needs a painting that the loving viewer has lost?

“Leibniz – Chronicle of a missing picture”, Germany 2025. Director and book: Edgar Reitz.
With: Edgar Selge, Aenne Schwarz, Lars Eidinger, Michael Kranz, Antonia Bill. 104 min.
February 22nd, 9:30 p.m., Colosseum 1

How did God create the world so that it is completely despite all the imperfection? Because, according to Leibniz, this is part of perfection.

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