Lutherans

"We visited Friedrich's atelier today. Listening to him and seeing his paintings was wonderful. He has some bonhomie which pleases people and his paintings reveal his romantic imagination. As a rule, he expresses in them one thought or feeling, though vaguely. You may meditate over his paintings but not have a clear understanding of them, for they are vague even in his soul. They are dreams or daydreams. He often employs very simple natural things, such as an ice block floating on sea waves, a few trees in a dale, window of his room (facing the beautiful Elbe), knight meditating over ruins or tombstones, monk staring into the distance or below his feet: all this captivates your soul, plunges you into dreams, all invokes your imagination, powerfully though vaguely."

"From time to time I see the painter Friedrich here. He has started a large landscape [the painting 'Cemetery at Dusk'].. .A large iron gate, which leds into a cemetery, stand open; by the gate, leaning on one of his posts and partly covered by its shadow, a man and a woman can be seen.. ..who have just buried their child and in the night are looking at its grave.. ..it is just a little grass mound, besides which one can see a spade, Streaks of mist lie over the cemetery, they hide the tree trunks from sight so that they seem detached from the ground. One can make out other graves through the misty veil, and, above all, natural monuments[!]; an upright stone looks like a grey ghost."

"He never made sketches, cartoons, or color studies for his paintings, because he stated (and certainly he was not entirely wrong), that such aids chill the imagination somewhat. He did not begin to paint an image until it stood, living, in the presence of his soul.."

"In landscape it was Friedrich above all whose profound and vigorous mind, with total originality, laid hold of this tangle of banality, staleness, and tedium and—cutting through it with a mordant melancholy — raised from its midst a distinctively new and radiant poetic tendency."

"What a picture of death this landscape is!.. ..one shudders when looking at it."

"Artists and connoisseurs saw in Friedrich's art only a kind of mystic, because they themselves were only looking out for the mystic.. ..They did not see Friedrich's faithful and conscientious study of nature in everything he represented."

"This picture [ 'Man and Woman contemplating the Moon',] full of sentiment and the quietness of nature, was painted by Friedrich in 1819 and he gave it to me in exchange for one of my own works. Friedrich had to copy it several times, but he did not approve of this, hence others copied it as well. Only the deserved destination for the picture, the Royal Picture Gallery, could convince me to part with it."

"Friedrich, with his somewhat stiff and diffuse but highly poetic manner, was the first artist — in painting as a whole, but more especially in landscape painting — who ever assailed and shook up the philistines of Dresden. There had been a great stir when one of his paintings, a crucifix on a rock beneath dark fir trees and against the dying glow of an evening sky, had given rise to a literary controversy conducted on Friedrich's behalf by his friend Gerhard von Kügelchen [Kügelgen] and on the opposing side by a prosaic dilettante, a certain Herr von Ramdohr — to the latter's eventual discomfiture."

"He [Friedrich] was indeed a strange mixture of temperament, his moods ranging from the gravest seriousness to the gayest humor.. ..But anyone who knew only this side of Friedrich's personality, namely his deep melancholic seriousness, only knew half the man. I have met few people who have such a gift for telling jokes and such a sense of fun as he did, providing that he was in the company of people he liked."

"Here is a man who has discovered the tragedy of landscape."

"[Friedrich] worked in the frigid technique of his time, which could hardly inspire a school of modern painting.."

"Whenever a storm with thunder and lightning moved over the sea, he would hurry out to the top of the cliffs as if he had a pact of friendship with the forces of nature, or even went on into the oakwood where the lightning had split a tall tree from top to bottom, which led him to murmur: 'How great, how mighty, how wonderful!' Thus a friend remembered the wanderings of Caspar David Friedrich as a young painter on the Baltic island of Rugen in 1802. It was Friedrich's favorite posture: Homo romanticus out in the weather, saluting the crag."

"He never made the obligatory journey south to study in Rome; his subject matter was the foggy and precipitous vista, sublimely expansive and filled with premonitory brooding. The writer Ludwig Tieck believed Friedrich was the Nordic genius incarnate, whose mission was "to express and suggest most sensitively the solemn sadness and religious stimulus which seem recently to be reviving our German world in a strange way." Friedrich's work, the Dresden painter Ludwig Richter remarked in 1825, does not deal with "the spirit and importance of nature.. ..Friedrich chains us to an abstract idea, using the forms of nature in a purely allegorical manner, as signs and hieroglyphs.""

"The revolutionaire and seaport scenes of Lorrain [French painter Claude Lorrain, strongly admired by Friedrich] contain many artistic principles which form an important part of Friedrich’s style: melting distances where water and sky merge as one, the portrayal of a dreamlike unreal world beyond, seascapes in which early morning light dissolves into mist which engulfs ships that appear as mysterious aspparations, magically floating in fluid ether. The assumtion that Friedrich is an isolated figure in the history of art is not correct."

"Friedrich is recognized today as the supreme German painter of the Romantic era, but in his own time his genius was not so widely acknowledged. This was not because the aims of his art were foreign to the interests of his generation. On the contrary, his allusions to the spiritual in nature, his close study of the local landscape, and his emphasis on the need for inspiration were all commonplace preoccupations of the period. His art was undervalued because it explored these areas with a new uncompromising vision that was too personal and original to be easily grasped."

"Friedrich's written commentary on aesthetics was limited to a collection of aphorisms set down in 1830, in which he explained the need for the artist to match natural observation with an introspective scrutiny of his own personality."

"The isolation of Friedrich's back-view figures [in his pictures] underscores their importance. They are alone, solitary, in pairs or in a small group, in a natural setting. They are aliens in the elementary coordinate system of nature. One always feels that they have only just now entered the painting, to pause for a long moment and then go on."

"It is significant, as William Vaughan remarks in his introduction to Borsch-Supan's catalogue, that churches never appear in Friedrich's work except in the distance, as unreal visions, or as ruins. The visible Church is dead, only the invisible Church, in the heart or revealed through Nature, is alive. This is part of Friedrich's Pietist heritage, a personal religion that refuses all outward forms, all doctrine. To put a landscape on an altar is an aggressive act, as destructive of the old forms as it is creative of a new sensibility."

"How does Friedrich persuade us, again and again, that we are at the very edge of the natural world, ready at last to immerse ourselves in something that, for want of a better word, must be called the supernatural – a domain of the mystical speculation about human life and afterlife that before the Romantics found a proper home in the church?"

"To see any of Friedrich's paintings as simply nationalist is, however, mistaken. His paintings are not celebrations of German mysticism so much as examinations of it. Friedrich uses the emptiness of the Baltic shore and the Thuringian forest to suggest the hubris of empire. He is not the prophet of German territorial ambition but its satirist. Friedrich's theme is the unconquerability of space. Human beings are tiny interlopers in a world they can never hope to rule. He exposes authority - of the monarchical states, Prussia and the rest, from which German liberals felt so alienated."

"When not converging on literally nothing, his pictorial schemes address objects that are either remote, like the moon, or obdurate, like the battered oak. Human figures intercept our gaze and transmit it into ineffable distance. The pictures don't give; they take. Something is drawn out of us with a harrowing effect, which Friedrich's use of color nudges toward intoxication. What at first seem to be mere tints in a tonal range combust into distinctly scented, disembodied hues: drenching purples and scratchy russets, plum."

"Friedrich empties his canvas in order to imagine, through an invocation of the void, an infinite, unrepresentable God."

"It is … undeniable that no settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the home from which he has been dislodged by the hazards and strategy of the armed conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. The majority of these refugees have come from territory which … was to be included in the . The exodus of Palestinian Arabs resulted from panic created by fighting in their communities, by rumours concerning real or alleged acts of terrorism, or expulsion. It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries."

"He who has an opinion of his own, but depends upon the opinion and taste of others, is a slave."

"The God who created these fair heavens with the same facility as yon green sapling; he who hath bestowed on man a life of toil, of transient joys and fleeting pains, that he might not forget the higher worth of his enduring soul, and might feel that immortality waited for him beyond the grave;—He, he is one only God!"

"Sie haben Diktatur nicht erlebt, Frau Roth! Wenn sich alle einig sind, bedeutet das noch nicht, dass alle Recht haben!"

"She showed the direction, and the party followed her. It was decisive that Merkel appeared human and credible, thereby winning over the trust of the party members."

"It was not a vote for Hohmann or against Merkel - it was a vote for an open society."

"If we're going to have Kati Witt and 'The G.D.R. Show,' why not have a Nazi-era celebrity introducing 'The Third Reich Show'?"

"An interim candidate would not make a radical change."

"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act."

"Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God’s will."

"We want Jesus as the visibly resurrected one, as the splendid, transfigured Jesus. We want his visible power and glory, and we no longer want to return to the cross, to believing against all appearances, to suffering in faith … it is good here... let us make dwellings. … The disciples are not allowed to do this. God's glory comes quite near in the radiant cloud of God's presence, and the Father's voice says: "This is my beloved son; listen to him!" … There is no abiding in and enjoying his visible glory here. Whoever recognizes the transfigured Jesus, whoever recognizes Jesus as God, must also immediately recognize Him as the crucified human being, and should hear him, obey him. Luther's vision of Christ: "the crucified Lord!" … Now the disciples are overcome by fear. Now they comprehend what is going on. They were, after all, still in the world, unable to bear such glory. They sinned against God's glory."

"Before Jesus leads His disciples into suffering, humiliation, disgrace, and disdain, He summons them and shows Himself to them as the Lord in God's glory. Before the disciples must descend with Jesus into the abyss of human guilt, malice, and hatred, Jesus leads them to a high mountain from which they are to receive help. Before Jesus' face is beaten and spat upon, before his cloak is torn and splattered with blood, the disciples are to see Him in his divine glory. His face shines like the face of God and light is the garment he wears."

"The activity will prove to be "peculiar" by leading the active person into Christ's own passion. This activity itself is perpetual suffering and enduring. In it, Christ is suffered by his disciple. If this is not the case, it is not the activity Jesus intended. In this way, the "extraordinary" is the fulfilling of the law, the keeping of the commandments."

"What is the "extraordinary"? It is the love of Jesus Christ himself, love that goes to the cross in suffering obedience. It is the cross. The peculiar feature of Christian life is precisely this cross, a cross enabling Christians to go beyond the world, as it were, thereby granting them victory over the world. Suffering encountered in the love of the one who is crucified — that is the "extraordinary" in Christian existence. The Extraordinary is without doubt that visible element over which the Father in heaven is praised. It cannot remain hidden; people must see it."

"Distant or near, in joy or in sorrow, each in the other sees his true helper to brotherly freedom."

"Man seeks, in his manhood, not orders, not laws and peremptory dogmas, but counsel from one who is earnest in goodness and faithful in friendship, making man free."

"Sickened by vermin that feed, in the shade of the good, on envy, greed, and suspicion, by the snake-like hissing of venomous tongues that fear hate and revile the mystery of free thought and upright heart The spirit would cast aside all deceit, open his heart to the spirit he trusts, and unite with him freely as one."

"When the spirit touches man's heart and brow with thoughts that are lofty, bold, serene, so that with clear eyes he will face the world as a free man may; when the spirit gives birth to action by which alone we stand or fall; when from the sane and resolute action rises the workd that gives a a man's life content and meaning — then would that many, lonely and actively working, know of the spirit that grasps and befriends him..."

"Beside the staff of life, taken and fashioned from the heavy earth, beside our marriage, work, and war the free man, too, will live and grow towards the sun. Not the ripe fruit alone — blossom is lovely, too. Does blossom only serve the fruit, or does fruit only serve the blossom — who knows? But both are given to us."

"Nicht aus dem schweren Boden wo Blut und Geschlecht und Schwur mächtig und heilig sind, wo die Erde selbst gegen Wahnsinn und die geweihten heilgen uralten Ordnungen hütet und schützt und rächt, — nicht aus dem schweren Boden der Erde, sondern aus freiem Gefallen und freiem Verlangen des Geistes, der nicht des Eides und des Gesetzes bedarf, wird der Freund dem Freunde geschenkt."

"There remains an experience of incomparable value. We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated — in short, from the perspective of those who suffer."

"We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds: we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remoreseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?"

"Greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one."

"Neither protest nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradicts one's prejudgment simply need to be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental."

"Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous."

"One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless."

"Cross and resurrection, suffering and the overcoming of death were central themes in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's exegetical and theological work. Again and again during his lifetime … he focused on these themes, trying to disclose their relevance for human life and actions, and to answer the question regarding just what Christian life really is."

"Bonhoffer offers an insight into friendship. He notes that it is not easy to classify this relationship sociologically, unlike the relationships which derive from, what he refers to as, the divine mandates, namely marriage, work, the state and the church. Because it cannot be classified or defined as such, friendship cannot be protected by the courts or society in general. Rather, friendship develops in freedom, or as Bonhoffer says, friendship appeals to the necessitas of liberty. Friendship is defined by "the binding content between two people." … The Christian's service of God entails service of one's neighbor. The community united in worship is a manifestation of God's presence. In worship we "rehearse" or "act out" what we are to become as God's people, namely "One." Moreover, in a sense we "worship one another," in that we are aware that each member of the community is an image of the living God."