Hartmut Geerken was an artist, poet, estate administrator – and found happiness in this multitude of people. Now he has died at the age of 82.
If you visited Hartmut Geerken and his wife Sigrid Hauff in their house in Wartaweil am Ammersee, it was like being guests of a whole collective of scholars, artists, collectors, nerds and virtuosos of life. How does a person manage to be so many in such an effortless way? One wondered. Obviously, being many was the key to happiness for Geerken. Geerken was an industrial clerk. He published early avant-garde texts for the publishing house Text + Criticism. He was an orientalist. He wrote poems, essays and radio plays. He made films. He studied mushrooms. He experimented with African and Asian musical instruments and performed with the free jazz legend Sun Ra, of which he owned the world’s largest archive. He managed a huge collection of self-recorded concert recordings from the seventies. And he was the administrator of the estate of the philosopher and writer Salomo Friedlaender alias Mynona, who died in exile in Paris in 1946, and was not completely forgotten thanks to him. the edition of which he brought out with his wife and Detlef Thiel.
Such a rich life has many beginnings. One was the day Geerken in Istanbul stole all of the material for his doctoral thesis from the car. Instead of being a professor, he became a German teacher and later head of the Goethe-Institut in Cairo, Kabul and Athens. In Cairo he founded a jazz ensemble and played theater. He organized poetry festivals in Kabul and showed Rosa von Praunheim’s films in Athens. But there was still time for the writings of Mynona.
Geerken came across the Kant exegete and wild writer in the sixties and could hardly believe that this Jewish thinker, who fled Berlin and died in Paris in bitter poverty, should be done a second injustice through collective forgetting. So Geerken went to Paris and tracked down Friedlaender’s widow there, who gratefully entrusted him with her husband’s estate. She couldn’t have found a better one. It was bitter for Geerken that he failed to convince a publisher to publish the issue. But he didn’t let that discourage him, he self-published them, every letter, every note from the extremely productive author. He almost completed his major work, only six of the planned 39 volumes were missing. Now, two years after his wife, Geerken has also died, 82 years old, and yet much younger than most of them.