Christhard-Georg Neubert

( in parts )

The „Auschwitz cycle“ on view here seems inconceivable without the preparatory work done in the Job cycle. Here too, the artist again formulates that personal, vastly intensified crisis, which left behind countless people, the fundaments of their faith in God shaken, feeling weak and uprooted, having lost their reason over all the promises of meaning. And yet Gero Hellmuth´s new works mirror hope in the possibilities of a meta-morphosis, a setting off into the open, from the muteness of the figure branded with the convict’s number towards a new trust „that they may live“.

It is this confidence and this aspiration to overcome the horror, which allows Gero Hellmuth’s Auschwitz cycle and the cantata he inspired „…that they may live“, by Joseph Dorfman to melt together as a „Gesamtkunstwerk“. The relationship of these works to one another is that of two mirrors, their focus summarising the Hesekiel quotation in a credo. Just as Gero Hellmuth traces the development of the destruction of man to his liberation in his ?Liberation Triptych“. the centre piece of his „Auschwitz cycle“, so also Joseph Dorfman aspires in his music to achieve the dissolution of darkness leading into translucency.

The reftection on our common roots, the thematic treatment of connecting and separating aspects in jointly organised cultural projects, has become more than ever the central task of today’s societies, and the declared goal of the St Matthew’s Protestant Cultural Foundation. In this context, the promotion of Christian-Jewish dialogue acquires top priority…