There is hardly an artist who was active in such diverse fields as this world-traveled poet, musician, archivist, exhibition maker and disc jockey, filmmaker, editor, lumberjack, composer, mycologist, poster and backdrop painter, shiitake and bumblebee grower, actor and sound engineer .

As the author of poems, prose, radio plays and essays, Hartmut Geerken wrote the most uncompromising, broad-based thinking and articulating literature and is one of the most important radio play makers worldwide with "bunker", "kalkfeld" and the trilogy in exile "Measures of Disappearance". The "Edition Salomo Friedlaender / Mynona" edited by him and Detlef Thiel comprises 33 volumes. There are also five volumes with studies on Friedlanders. It's a Herculean work. As co-editor of the important series “Early Texts of Modernism”, he saw and preserved the literary legacy of the classic avant-garde.

Geerken was interested in international myths and rituals as well as contemporary history, as found in “phos” (2005) autobiographical expression. Grandfathers and aunts who knew how to make their contribution to world history: for example, his great-great-uncle Carl Schenk founded modern Japanese mineralogy at the end of the nineteenth century and was later "significantly involved in the construction of the 'golden gate bridge'", his aunt Helene Around 1910, Lorch preserved “large amounts of spinach for the young physicist Albert Einstein”, who “developed the theory of relativity with the help of this so-called brain food”. Johann Mannhardt, a "maternal ancestor","Was the inventor of the minute hand of the tower clock and a guillotine."

Self-perception turned into literature

If he wasn't staying in distant countries or on the Greek island of Gavdos for years, or was on the way to a concert with his numerous musician friends such as Famoudou Don Moyé or the Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble, there was not a day on which Geerken did not work in his archives, his The Salomo Friedlaender, Anselm Ruest and (worldwide most extensive) Sun Ra archive, which administers the estates, or his inexhaustible music archive with recordings of concerts since the seventies, which he has published on numerous international labels over the past twenty years, mainly due to the better quality as a long-playing record. He was himself an archive from which he continually distilled his books. This archive consisted of memory work and the many notebooks that he always had with him.His books are the most radical testimony to an uninterrupted self-perception that has become literature, which always recognizes the other and the other in its own. Dreams were just as important to his books as taking notes of the surroundings and the situation in which a new book was created. In a conversation with me he once said: "If I write about a topic and an arrow from wild geese flies over me, then they also appear in the text.""If I write about a topic and an arrow from wild geese flies over me, then they also appear in the text.""If I write about a topic and an arrow from wild geese flies over me, then they also appear in the text."

With the view of the ethnologist and oriental scholar, he transformed autobiographical snapshots, everyday and highly cultural, foreign biographies turned into homage or (jazz) music in its ecstatic forms into wondrous texts.

The years in Cairo (1966 to 1972), Kabul (1972 to 1979) and Athens (1979 to 1983), where Geerken worked as a lecturer and Goethe Institute director, his travels to Pakistan, India, East Asia, Africa and Australia, to Algeria and to Turkey led to artistic collaborations and changed its aesthetics.

The strict order of the leap of thought

In a single pulsating sentence Geerken was able to connect continents and centuries, the reader goes on an associative free flight and is amazed at the new order of time and space that his unrestrained literature creates. Books like "Obduktionsprotokoll" (1975), "mappa" (1988) - together with the magnum opus "kant" (1998) (all by Klaus Ramm in Spenge) and "phos" (2005) his most important - or "moos" ( 2010) are mind reading machines, aggregates of consciousness, perceptual hodgepodge, memory and reading protocols, hybrids of prose and poetry, texts and metatexts. A knowledge that can be called encyclopedic and a strict order prevail in them: that of association, analogy, the leap of thought, the great anacoluth.

The Geerken compendium “research etc.” (Waitawhile, 2006) with texts from thirty years gives the best overview of the thinking and writing of the artist, who was born in Stuttgart in 1939 and who has lived in Wartaweil near Herrsching am Ammersee since 1983.

As it has now become known, he died there on Thursday.

Michael Lentz

lives as an author and musician in Berlin.

His last publication in 2020 was “Innehaben.

Shadowfroh and the pictures ”at S. Fischer.