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PROBING THOUGHT
On Kurt Kocherscheidt's ideas regarding moments of vision, surfaces, bodies, and the ineffable and how pleasantly "Russian" he felt certain things to be

in: Kurt Kocherscheidt. The Continuing Image.
Exhibition-Catalogue
MAK - Austrian Museum of Applied Arts Vienna
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König Köln
german/english
Vienna - Cologne 2003
With contributions by Peter Noever, Kurt Kocherscheidt, Rudi Fuchs, Christian Reder, Johannes Meinhardt.

 

PROBING THOUGHT
On Kurt Kocherscheidt's ideas regarding moments of vision, surfaces, bodies,
and the ineffable and how pleasantly "Russian" he felt certain things to be

To write the way Kurt Kocherscheidt painted won't work, though this question might well have been a topic to discuss with him. For he would not let a thorough approach be blocked by allegations of naivete. What was important to him about his essential element, color, was its potential to come close to the essence of things and yet to indicate the distance that remained. And what emerged more markedly with every stage of the work was his persistent effort to go beyond the literary as a narrative technique, a method, and to move toward a silence packed in compact shapes. His paintings keep exploring that point from which they start to be 'something', when they begin to have something about them and to emerge from nothingness. Their mysticism is radically secularized. They need no metaphysical overtones. They are about unapproachable realities, not about fictions. They stay ahead of commentary. What may come closest to the perplexing insight they afford (though they still remain open to different ways of perception) are persuasive subtexts. One of Kocherscheidt's central preoccupations was how artistic thinking could be made productive so as to enable "insights" - insights of a kind that he himself only had a vague sense rather than knowledge, of; where they came from remained unclear. He applied all his efforts to breaking away from aestheticization and moving into foreign, pathless terrain in order to work on vision as such and to develop reflective formations stripped of all messages and translatability.

"There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world", Vladimir Nabokov once presumed, "a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic." (1) It also seemed plausible to him that, while "the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time." (2) This one point is the point in question here: It is a metaphor representing specific moments and strived-for positions. It is a speculation about determinant factors of insight and about the differences between an artistic and a scientific approach striving to get a grasp of time and space, fiction and knowledge, vision, thought, and sensation in their polyvalence. This is the basis of an idiosyncratic working method to explore what is possible, and what is possible for oneself. Separate spheres require precision, and channeled thought cannot but explore the channel.

For Igor Stravinsky (in keeping with notions derived from Russian constellations which Kurt Kocherscheidt much appreciated in many ways) composing simply meant "putting into an order a certain number of sounds according to certain interval-relationships" (3), i.e. treating them as points of sound and time in a coordinate system. One thing was certain for him: "The more controlled, limited, and tormented art is, the freer it is." (4) Dimitrii Shostakovich took a similar view, though with a stronger emphasis on anticipatory, conceptual thinking and trial: "Composing a work is a long and complicated process. You start writing, then consider what you have written. Not always does it come up to the initial intention. If the undertaking does not succeed, leave the work as it is and try to avoid previous mistakes next time." (5) He admired Stravinsky as one of the "truly great composers of our age" (6), but felt estranged by Stravinsky's westernized sense of self-promotion, for "important moral positions have be abandoned" (7).

He was convinced that "music, and art in general, cannot be cynical." (8) Chekhov, whom he liked particularly as a highly musical author propagating an uncomplicated style of writing, was a "model of purity and modesty" (9) for him. "He considered immortality, life after death in any form to be rubbish, superstition. He postulated that one must learn clear and bold thinking." (10) For both of them, death was not a subject of their art, but people who begin to think about death early are "less prone to folly" (11).

Such messages with Russian postmarks on them could, it seems, be instrumental to broaden, in time and space, the approach to Kurt Kocherscheidt's thinking since they evoke intense recollections of analogous subjects of conversations with him. For him, it was existential to keep moving, mentally and spiritually, within "his" geography, always including the East and the South; always interested in remote viewpoints locally and intellectually. What he referred to as "Russian" were all sorts of things that impressed him because of their un-artificial directness. In "Russian" combinations of his works, hung plainly next to one another with no space in between, he created vigorous new ensembles and kept developing challenging sensibilities for himself. His large painting entitled "Russian Cabin" of 1985 marked the beginning of his preoccupation with picture-objects. The production and presentation of his works was meant to be perceived as labor. Using a painting style that revealed the act of its creation and grasping that which is concealed without concealing it , Kocherschedit tried to relate style to materiality, without using "representation." He sought to get beyond compositional techniques like those mentioned. The material quality of intense, accentuated color is intended to activate sounds of color, spaces of thought, constellations of sensation. "The paintings get close to music" (12), he once said about the basics of his work, close to a kind of music that integrally incorporates different stages of reworking into the work, as in the case of his friend Wolfgang Rihm. While the quest had once been for "the individual life of the single voice" which the one tried to find in music, the other "in painterly form", as Kandinsky wrote in his famous first letter to Schönberg (13); the important thing now is to attain the real "materiality" of a picture or piece of music. For Wolfgang Rihm, invoking "the free-est" music of the 20th century(music by Varèse, Schönberg, Feldman, or Nono): "What is on the paper must not simply be a sequence of dots, strokes, and relations". He too needed "physical contact" with his material to give materiality to the un-nameable. With its "tremendously open and radical view", Kurt Kocherscheidt's art, he says, "greatly helped my imagination" (14).

Such were the problems of a New Modernism, - in music, painting, or language - that Kocherscheidt addressed. Approaching a material specificity from the fraying edges of these disciplines, he extrapolated a core of rigorous standards in the shared territory of visual, sculptural, musical, and literary production. Sincerity was a keynote of his work. His mental range encompassed pre-modern influences and the darkness of modernity itself, capturing them in painting from today's perspective. The stage of exploration by drawing continued to probe inner and counter worlds. This spatial outreach is present in many pieces, but time remains nevertheless palpable, as a moment or an infinite dimension. Kocherscheidt worked in a very compressed way, involving many emotional levels, leaving previous stages discernible. He vigorously attempted to test, in consecutive layers, forms of indirect, non-representational expression, in which the laconic, the banal, and the weighty necessitated one another. Technical matters were a concern for him, but only in order to get beyond them. His struggle with surfaces made them ever rougher, wilder, more material. The questions he raised about art revolved around beginning and ending; around pictorial sequences; around control; around ways to utilize and to break automatisms; around simplicity and fragmentation; and around a view of the world as a whole of spheres invisible to the eye. "Completing a picture", reads a programmatic text of his, "is much more difficult than beginning it; in fact, it is impossible. I see the development of a picture as a flow of images, halted almost arbitrarily. An idea, or even just a thought, is ripped open, compressed and overlaid, splintered and bundled again, readjusted. The moment when a brief loss of control occurs, a little turn is taken that interrupts the paralyzing fixation, in short, when the picture gains independence, finding an opportunity to strike back, is a good moment to stop." (15)

This assessment of his practice is clearly evidence of the intensity of his preoccupation with the transitional phenomenae of seeing, thinking, sensation, and action. What was important to him in working as an artist was the abundance of possibilities, the freedom of exploration; a much more open field compared to other professions which appealed to him precisely because he was such an analytical and political character. Still, he had no use for grandiose attitudes. The point for him was to think as universally as possible, to think in painting like others do in writing or composing. Implementing this was something he basically saw as a craft. Utterly excluding arguments foreign to art would have stood in his way of addressing transformation processes, his constant attempt to furnish views of simple things with background material. To negate this would mean to stylize him into an artificial figure. Nekrasov's pre-revolutionary maxim still fit him: "A poet you may not be / but a citizen you must …" (16) He appreciated the harsh and self-critical analysis of Isaac Babel, one of his favorite writers, for the way it undercut the bombastic resonance of such claims; about the Red Cavalry of 1920; Babel dryly wrote: "Many-layered: rag-looting, bravado, professionalism, revolutionary ideals, savage cruelty. We are the vanguard, but of what?" (17) Daring as Kocherscheidt was, he respected such courage and missed it among others in the art-scene. A specific state of affairs could infuriate him, whereas solemn "we" feelings were something that he, the loner, deeply distrusted. He advocated tolerance in human relations, but in art, he thought, it was not good for anybody. Throughout his lifetime, he found that the political climate accepted in Austria was stifling, and getting worse in many respects; the crassest manifestations of this, as were common in Carinthia where he had grown up, made this particularly evident. "Today, you can hear people say things, it's inconceivable", he told me in a conversation published in 1986 (18), "it is unbelievable what kind of ideas you find here and how weak resistance against them is." The sanction that he - and not he alone - imposed on the forces condoning current politics resolutely distanced himself from them, long before such measures were deemed appropriate even on an international scale. He was shaped by social hotspots of a different dimension: two years in England in the brutal atmosphere of the London East End, and one year in Latin America where he got to know "the mechanism in a very direct way."

All this had a lasting effect on his self-image: "If I should try to give a definition of the artist at all", he remarked, "then it would most likely be a person whose profession, as it were, involves the constant reconsidering of one's own situation, continuously analyzing, continuously 'reworking' it. In the face of the threat all around, one is continually tempted to give in, to think it's all senseless. But you have to keep going, keep doing your thing consistently - as a counterforce - even if it all were over tomorrow." He wanted clarifications that paved the way for further steps. The invocation of the cult of pain, death, and self-pity; of the body and its decay (allegedly a matter of mentality and hence inescapable in traditionally Catholic environments) was not for him, though, from his early years, a heart disease had threatened his life and eventually caused a premature death. What kept him grounded was to see his oeuvre being cultivated by the Morat Institute at Freiburg, Germany, with exemplary and tranquil care. Having reached the point in his career when he was just about to make his breakthrough to international attention with his participation in the 1992 documenta 9 (at this time he was long recognized as one of the most important Vienna-based artists) he only had a few months more to live. That he would yet have had a most compelling oeuvre ahead of him is thus reduced to a hollow and hypothetical certainty. "Literary painting" had become increasingly impossible for him. To outline his artistic path, he sought to get beyond aesthetic playfulness, even beyond "the brushstroke as such", for the sake of an "austere shape". "I often start from a kind of ornament - mostly in black and white -", he characterized his mature approach which aimed for "making the most essential statement possible in a pure language", "and then close in on them, covering their complexity up until there is only left what is supposed to be left."
His studio house in the Austrian province of Burgenland was reconfigured as he wanted it and he shared it with the photographer Elfie Semotan, the woman of his life, and their two sons. It permitted a style of living otherwise only known from Russian literature, as he sometimes ironically remarked. He enthusiastically referred to the asphalt patches that could be seen on the frequently mended narrow road leading up to the house as examples of a very direct, tough, material style of painting that stands for itself, simply is there, in anonymous finality, as it were. The text that I wrote for the Budapest exhibition of 1989, the year of the fall of the Iron Curtain, and in which I took up this thought, was considered by him as going in the right direction. "Before intellectualism can seduce him to sophistries", I wrote, "he rather resorts to tenacity. This tenacity becomes visible everywhere. Still, it won't have anything to do with bitterness. Thus are created shapes beyond memory or invention. Dull, darkish, dim, opaque colors convey a sense of light as it may have been before or after some natural disaster. The black-brown-grayish spots could be sky, earth, water, darkness and cosmic otherness or something utterly undefinable and hence unreachable. As surroundings, they close in on the objects that are visible at a given moment. However, there is nothing threatening about this - often pervasive - closeness. Any fear is devaluated, neutralized, chaos is divested of destructiveness with pervasive warmth. Stark layers of color applied with coarse strokes let previous reductions shine through. The surfaces don't seek to be any different from rough-and-ready house painting." (19)

His mysterious elemental pictures, fragmented landscapes, object configurations, thought grids and vistas are about nature only in an indirect way. They are about a nature without humans, an imaginable humanless world. The absence of humans from the picture gives rise to the question of what is going on here: What is happening? The attempt to get beyond the human gaze, to see things with different eyes, those of some other being, for example, is an expression of the struggle for a broadened perspective. The generally human does not have priority here. The subjective and, as a counterpoint, the "whole" explore their fragility and questionability. Nabokov's delicate artistic point, "arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones", is radicalized. The thinking eye itself turns into a microscope, a telescope, some unknown device, - and even this is only the beginning. Kocherscheidt's pictures of the world with their dimensional distortions and strange shapes take unknown viewpoints so as to actualize depth perspectives and body-surface relations as perplexing moments of
vision. The impulse to confront - from a situation of indecision and suspension - the laws of nature and the condition of the human (the being that is capable of anything while allegedly the only one acting on a sense of responsibility) and additional intermediate forms, produce pictures that incorporate this approach in thought-loaded allusions and signs notwithstanding any experience of futility. Still, Kocherscheidt can do without associations of an apocalypse caused by natural forces unleashed by man, as in Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker" (1979).In fact, they would be all-too prejudicial. His underlying attitude is that while it may seem that all has been said and done before, one must rely on one's doubts and convey these feelings of uncertainty. Striving for perfection would be absurd; in fact, perfection is the enemy. The point for Kocherscheidt is not to get things "completed", rather they have to be "right" in a different way. His formal solutions verge on disintegration, as they resist categorization. Many of the colors he uses can be identified in a very broad sense only. Bold and light colors suddenly reappear. In "Augenecho" ["Eye Echo"] of 1985, with its large macular spots, viewpoints, eyeballs, which might also be celestial bodies, the micro- and the macrocosm seem to make themselves heard simultaneously as spherical sounds. There is something that vaguely shines through heavy layers of black such as in his 1987 triptych "Große Teichruhe" ["Great Pond Calm"]. The variations of "Im Raum drinnen" ["Inside the Space"], "Das Schwarze Meer" ["The Black Sea"], or "Chinesische Mitte" ["Chinese Middle"] (all 1991) confront the viewer with never-before-seen bodies whose magic is beyond all recognition. What was hidden is brought to the surface from back sides, undersides, from inner spaces and zones unknown. The fact that the work nevertheless takes such determinate shape poses a challenge. Kocherscheidt undercuts familiarization with such inverted perception using strangely altered, transparent statics. There is much that seems to come from another world, from several different worlds.

Kocherscheidt was fascinated by nature not as a refuge, but as a counterforce with its very foreignness. What touched him most about the elemental whether in a rock formation, as lava, in an entanglement of roots or a weathered surface; in the smallest detail, was this patient and silent power to create, to alter, and to destroy. His idea was that nature's shapes and shapeless forms - confronting the eye with objects not of human making - permit the individual gaze that is preoccupied with various sensations and influences, a glimpse of things un-nameable, of things beyond description in the true sense of the word, outside the reach of language. Clearly, Kocherscheidt aimed for the artificial, for insight rather than imitation. He wanted his work to become ever more concrete and complex, not more fictional. To operate between the spheres made it possible to advance into yet-to-be-explored zones, beyond the commonly known. Frequently, he emphasized the powers that would have preferred to see him leave off; but he felt that what gives the artist his true social function was the devotion of his self to things not fully comprehensible and
the continued commitment to keep working on himself.

As Gottfried Boehm pointed out in an important essay (20) for the Kocherscheidt exhibition at the Vienna Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts
(1986), Kocherscheidt at some point discovered "nature as an instance", as "an indomitable force that is not content to willingly supply raw material to human labor"; his gaze was directed at the "far side of the world", so as to "comprehend it from the aspect of things", at "that side of reality that looking cannot bring before our eyes". Because of the "disharmony between inside and out", the paintings turn into "sites of scrutiny, struggle, and failure". Heinz Liesbrock takes this up in a catalogue text (21) to state that Kocherscheidt "does not want to speak of himself, but of an encounter with the world"; "the painter must create, in the picture itself, the vis-à-vis he cannot find in the empirical world", "so as to arrive at the closest approximation to his inner reality", to enter into a "dialogue with the world" that all his attempts pursue. This dialogue, one might add, does not have much to do with everyday interaction, though it may well deal with everyday issues; nor does it require actual speaking, no matter in which language; meeting gazes can be of much greater intensity.

Kocherscheidt countered the self-referential talk of the inescapability of art's aestheticizing workings, of the end of painting and the finite picture with his typically austere subversiveness. For him, color was a material for experimenting with physical-mental effects. The fact that painting was considered to be "on the wrong track anyway" and that only art-scene mavericks went on with it despite "the painting ban" - two observations by Gerhard Richter (22) and Per Kirkeby (23), which might as well have come from him - could not keep him from staying his course. Accidentally, Richter found it good if, in a picture, "all the layers stay as they are, so that you can see everything, if a dimensionality unfolds that admits of multiplicity and complexity." (24) And Per Kirkeby noticed in his own overpaintings "that the underlying layer always comes through, even if a new layer on top of it is entirely different in motif and color". He took special interest in zones "between nature and art, half belonging to one sphere, half to the other, moving between states" (25). In underlying thought and intention, these ideas converge with those of Kocherscheidt. Their respective results, however different, converge in a common quality, that is, their mysteries of persuasion, their power of reflection. In conversation, Kocherscheidt himself referred to the consistency and purity of Zubarán, rather than Verlasquez' cryptic symbols, or to Goya's "Desastres de la Guerra." As Elfie Semotan remembers, he felt a particular affinity with the ideas of Robert Motherwell and his handling of surfaces, hard-edged black-and-white shapes, transitions from staticism to fluidity. The sculptures/objects he made in his last years are even more straightforward in seizing space. In these extremely reduced shapes of raw planks and beams, the material itself, rather than color, becomes the essential formative element. They are what they are, leaning, casually against a wall. There are no platforms or pedestals. Despite the weight - physical and mental - of these large-format pictures and objects, they all convey an inner lightness, a sense of stored energy, a dynamism that might turn into motion any moment. As mentioned above, this is what Kocherscheidt called their potential to strike back. His frequent contention that he did what he did because he could not do - or did not know - anything else impressively translates upon his works as objects detached from their maker and sustained by a force of their own. What remains of all these personal overtones is merely an echo.

The paths that Kurt Kocherscheidt followed undeviated in his thinking are those Isaac Babel had mapped out in a draft letter. In perhaps consciously, halting words: "… the ones will make the Revolution, and I shall, shall sing of what is on the side, of what sits deeper, I've felt I shall be able to do this, there will be time for it, and room." (26)

 

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References

  1. Vladimir Nabokov: Novels and memoirs 1941 - 1951, New York: The Library of America 1996, p. 503.
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  2. Ibid., p. 544.
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  3. Igor Stravinsky, Igor, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1947, p. 37.
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  4. Ibid., S. 212.
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  5. Die Memoiren des Dimitrij Schostakowitsch. Herausgegeben von Solomon Volkow, Frankfurt am Main 1981, S. 202.
    Engl. Edition: Testimony : The Memoirs of Dimitri Shostakovich, ed. by Solomon Volkov, New York: Limelight Editions 1979.
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  6. Ibid., S. 71.
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  7. Ibid., S. 175.
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  8. Ibid., S. 227, 132.
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  9. Ibid., S. 230.
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  10. Ibid., S. 232.
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  11. Ibid., S. 233.
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  12. Kurt Kocherscheidt, Kurt Kocherscheidt, Salzburg, Vienna: Residenz 1992, p. 14.
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  13. Jelena Hahl-Koch, ed., Arnold Schönberg - Wassily Kandinsky, Briefe, Bilder und Dokumente einer außergewöhnlichen Begegnung, Salzburg: Residenz 1980, p. 19.
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  14. Wolfgang Rihm in: Heinz Liesbrock, ed., Brustrauschen, Zum Werkdialog von Kurt Kocherscheidt und Wolfgang Rihm, Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz 2001, p. 75, 78f, 87 (quoted from: Wolfgang Rihm: Ausgesprochen. Schriften und Gespräche. ed. by Ulrich Mosch, Winterthur 1997, vol. 1 and 2).
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  15. Kurt Kocherscheidt, Kurt Kocherscheidt, Salzburg, Vienna: Residenz 1992, p. 5.
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  16. Nikolay A. Nekrasov in: Testimony : The Memoirs of Dimitri Shostakovich, ed. by Solomon Volkov, New York: Limelight Editions 1979, p. ???.
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  17. Isaac Babel: The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, ed. by Nathalie Babel, New York: Norton 2002, p. 403.
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  18. Bis übrig ist, was übrig bleiben soll. Kurt Kocherscheidt im Gespräch mit Christian Reder. in: Falter, Vienna, 23/1986.
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  19. Christian Reder: Härte, Distanz und Nähe.Über Kurt Kocherscheidt. Exhibition catalogue "Land in Sicht. Österreichische Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert", Mücsarnok Budapest (Germ./Hung.), Vienna-Budapest 1989, p. 161ff. Reprinted in: Kurt Kocherscheidt, exhibtion catalogue Vienna Secession, Vienna 1992.
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  20. Gottfried Boehm: "Die Rückseite der Welt", in: Kurt Kocherscheidt, Bilder 1976-1986, Morat Institute and Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts: Vienna and Waldkirch 1986, p. 17ff. Reprinted in: Kunstforum, Cologne, vol. 89, 1987.
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  21. Heinz Liesbrock, "Bildgewinn - Bildverlust", in: Kurt Kocherscheidt, Bilder 1987-1992 and Fotografien aus Südamerika, Münster: Westfälischer Kunstverein 1994, p. 9ff.
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  22. Gerhard Richter, quoted in: Werner Krüger, Wolfgang Pehnt, eds., Künstler im Gespräch, Cologne: Artemedia 1984, p. 125.
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  23. Per Kirkeby ,Siegfried Gohr, Per Kirkeby im Gespräch mit Siegfried Gohr, Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch 1994, p. 23.
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  24. Ibid., p. 122.
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  25. Per Kirkeby, Loise horn, eds., Per Kirkeby, Übermalungen 1964-1984, Munich: Künstraum München 1984, p. 1f. (quoted from: Per Kirkeby, Bravura, Bern, Berlin: Gachnang und Springer 1984).
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  26. Isaak Babel, Tagebuch 1920, ed. by Peter Urban, Berlin: Friedenauer Presse 1990, p. 159
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© Christian Reder 2003