Instead of school: war. Gustav Mesmer, born in 1903, survived the First World War. But he remained a prisoner of this war all his life. Mesmer couldn’t graduate from school, so no professional training. All he could do was go to the monastery.
All dizziness! He screamed there in a church service when wine was once again served as the blood of Christ. The hard fact for Mesmer was that he was locked up in the Schussenried Sanatorium. Diagnosis: schizophrenia. He was also certified as having an “inventor’s madness”, but at least his talent for drawing was recognized.
His drawings were plans: for flying machines, musical instruments, machines of all kinds that were not really useful enough and rarely worked, but made every aesthetic happy. He was also thinking about a new world order.
All of this is preserved in his estate, because Mesmer’s story finally had a positive ending: after his release from psychiatry in 1964, he achieved a certain fame. The highlight was certainly the exhibition of his equipment at the world exhibition in Seville in 1992, two years before Mesmer’s death.
The musicians play on strange instruments that Mesmer built
The author and director Andreas Ammer as well as the musicians Markus and Micha Acher and Cico Beck tell about Gustav Mesmer in their superbly composed radio play I try to fly. Not by retelling the life story of this outsider, but by immersing yourself in his world of thoughts, engaging in the ideas of the inventor and thinker, which are not always easy to understand, in the muddled Alemannic singsong in the original sound documents that have been preserved, in the old-fashioned, charming tatters Language style.
Beck and the Acher brothers recorded the music for the radio play on instruments that Mesmer developed. They fit into the cosmos of his flying bicycles and other equipment, in places there are noises like from a large wooden machine with a creak like from ropes that are under great tension. In this way, the four radio play makers create an acoustic cabinet of curiosities. They don’t negate the eccentric thing about Mesmer. But at the center of her piece are the freedom of thought and the unconventionality of this man, not his weirdness.
I am looking to fly, Bavaria 2, August 27, 2021, 9:05 p.m.