Michael Krüger Obituary for Harry Kaas 1940-1989
"I am not saying that I am alive": On the death of an unusual person
Harald Kaas is dead. Harald Kaas? Only a few people are familiar with his small body of work, but anyone who has immersed themselves in the shimmering, abysmal world of his stories will never be able to forget them. "Clocks and Seas" [Uhren und Meere] was the title of the volume published exactly ten years ago, with the wide-open mouth of a monster from Bomarzo Park on the cover. "I'm not saying I'm dead. But neither do I say that I am alive," says the mentally ill poet Arnulf Seegans in this book, a brother of Büchner's Lenz, who balances on the fine line between normality and madness, talks to the animals and the stones and finally ends up in an asylum, to meet his end: "He killed himself on a March morning when La Paloma was playing on the radio. He had jumped through the window. The body lay in the courtyard with his arms outstretched. Like a bird, said the gardener, who was the first to arrive. Like Icarus, thought the young chief physician, wanted to say it out loud, but fell silent when he saw the others. But the pious gardener said loudly so that everyone could hear: 'As if they had taken him down from the cross'."
Harald Kaas, born in 1940, was himself crazy, schizophrenic. After studying at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, he lived here and there until he settled in Munich, close to his parents who lived in Augsburg. When he was not undergoing treatment - and he often had to go to the Max Planck Institute, where he could be found in the company of his fellow patients in a friendly, subdued manner - he was one of the most ingenious and intelligent conversationalists. The range of his interests, documented in many radio essays, extended from the pre-Socratics to Robert Musil, from the Russian anarchists to problems of logic.
Tertium datur was one of his favourite phrases; for him, there was a dimension beyond positive knowledge that we, the normal people, could only guess at or read about in his highly poetic stories. Time, about which he wrote so much, had long since released him from its linear order: "There are seconds that last years and, conversely, years that disappear like seconds. The strokes of the clocks haunt me. Impossible to be in the right place at the right time. Out of place everywhere, in the way here and there: that's how I strive forward, with no goal in sight." As time went on, it became increasingly impossible to follow his movements, which finally only took place in his head; the illness had absorbed him more and more and separated him from the others that this loner so desperately needed. The evening phone calls with which he frightened his few friends became shorter and shorter and more and more confused, their messages more and more monstrous: the weaker he became, the more fabulous his plans became, the more violent his slipped fantasies. It was difficult to hear the cry for help that lay hidden in these delusional messages. Could he have been helped?
What remains, apart from the memory of an unusual person who had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the cultural scene, are his texts. I reread the uncanny stories, the essays on already yellowed manuscript paper and his clever epilogue to Däubler's poems, which ended with lines that sound like an obituary for himself: "Anyone who wants to rediscover him would do well not to be put off by pompous posturing and ado, but - reading against the grain - to listen to Däubler when he speaks in a collected, childlike, simple way or, trusting the assonances and associations, prophetically: a mighty singer who masters the mythical registers with intuitive erudition or, where he is completely with himself, knows how to spell out the silence with a few words, so that the reader hears what few poets are able to say - the answer of silence."
First published in DIE ZEIT No. 24 of 9 June 1989.
Author information from "Clocks and Seas"
"Harald Kaas, born in Eger in 1940, grew up in Bohemia, Saxony and Bavaria. Studied at the School of Design in Ulm. Lives as a freelance author alternately in Munich and in Aystetten near Augsburg. Radio plays; poems and prose in magazines; articles and essays on literature, philosophy and problems of schizophrenia. Received the Marburg Literature Prize, first awarded in 1980."
The book also contains some texts that were already written in Ulm (see also Erdmann Wingert's retrospective in this volume).
