Heinz Ratz discovered the paintings by the surrealist Wolfgang Lettl in 1992 in the Tuscan columned hall of the Augsburg Arsenal. Agitated, he immediately wrote the painter (1919 – 2008) a letter. “I raced through your exhibition like a firework rocket, falling from one picture to the next, diving wildly and getting lost in the next.” As a result, the two got to know each other and stayed in touch, as Ratz reacted to the paintings with poems.
In the catalog for the current exhibition in the Lettl Museum, the singer-songwriter and writer writes in retrospect that the pictures would have seemed to him like a collection of stories, frozen in their movement and thus elevated to something parable and enduring. “Infinite possibilities opened up to add a before or after.” Which Ratz – long before his career as a singer-songwriter, author or band founder – did. He is now returning to Augsburg to read some of the early poems, as well as new ones, in the Lettl Museum in front of the paintings that once fascinated him so much.
In the early 1990s, Ratz, born in 1968, led a very restless life. Born as the son of a German doctor and a Peruvian woman of Indian origin, he lives with his parents, later alone, in eight different countries. Almost 50 parades and 16 schools are recorded in his vita. For a while – one station during this time is Augsburg – he earns his money as a street artist, does Spanish translations or plays in independent theater groups. And he begins to write poems and set them to music. In 2002 he founded the band as a songwriter, singer and bass player Energy waterwith which he is still traveling today.
Moral triathlon
Ratz asks himself early on what needs to go better in this society so that it becomes a little more human. Invents the “moral triathlon”, runs 1,000 kilometers on foot through Germany for the homeless, swims 1,000 kilometers through German rivers for the sake of the environment, cycles 7,000 kilometers from refugee home to refugee home to draw attention to their needs. In 2016, together with Konstantin Wecker, he founded “BOK”, the office for offensive culture to protect democracy and the environment, a nationwide alliance of artists of all genres.
Wolfgang Lettl’s painting “The Judgment” adorned the poster for the exhibition in the Augsburg Arsenal in 1992 and prompted Heinz Ratz to look at the surreal images.
(Photo: Florian Lettl)
It’s understandable that he got along well with Wolfgang Lettl, who also had an eventful youth behind him. The Augsburger also gave up his studies, earned his money as a construction and warehouse worker, experimented as a painter with different styles before he turned to his surrealistic pictorial worlds. And rated the way people dealt with his pictures as an intelligence test, as he wrote to Ratz in January 1992.
Many of the major themes of our time can be found in his paintings, says Ratz today, naming the “annihilation and exploitation of our fellow creatures, the poisoning of the earth, the massification and simultaneous loneliness of people … the difficulty of building bridges between states, between woman and man…” Lettl’s surreal narrative style leaves it open to the viewer to see the pictures as political suggestions, as subtle hints from an ironist or as a person’s personal needs. And his poems? “Nothing more than a sign of one’s own thoughtfulness, cheerfulness and dismay.”
His name is pointer – poems by Heinz Ratz to pictures by Wolfgang Lettl, reading, Saturday, March 5th, 8 p.m. Lettl Museum of Surreal Art, Augsburg. The exhibition of the same name runs until March 20th.