GemalteWorte

Carl H. O. Ruthenberg Biography 1899-1988

Carl Ruthenberg 100 Jahre 1899-1999

Letzte Gemalte Worte
My father's Last Words written in his own hand about 1987 or 1988...

Er wollte die Worte selbst gesagt haben/ he felt that the words of Adlai Stevenson summarized it all...

Father came to realize that no one listens to him, to his words; he was an artist, he concluded, he draws and paints,
and when I was a child and a boy, we went into the countryside and there was not much to say, but we draw and painted and for father, it was the wealth of colours of the countryside that always impressed him - anyone who has seen his Murals and remembers them and sees the New England landscape in the fall, the colored leaves...will know, what father was talking about with his colours... And then, when I studied American Literature, wasn't the colour once more in the writing? didn't Emily Dickenson draw those paintings my father was not able to talk about?

"Ich bin ein Zeichner, ein Maler, auf meine Worte hat nie jemand gehoert!"
(I'm an artist no one ever listened to my words!) And the older he got, the more he thought about and mentioned his father Carl (1860-1952) who had settled in Hamburg...

The few drawings left here that my father draw and painted when he was twenty-one years old, that was the time also when he played the violin with his one friend from Sweden and with the other one from Denmark. These were his life long friends, who help after the War. And when my parents wanted to visit his friend Gustav for an anniversay in Lund back in 1957, for some reason they didn't manage, but they send flowers instead. And the flowers, unknowingly, had arrived just on time for the funeral of my father's friend...

Father (standing) and his life-long friends from Art School in Munich, 1921
left his friend from Denmark, on the right Gustav from Lund, Sweden
Carl Ruthenberg (1899-1988)

Carl Ruthenberg erster Versuch

Carl Ruthenberg ...letzte gezeichnete Worte um 1987-88

These are my father's last written, drawn, painted and admired words;
few weeks before he died on August 16th 1988, 89 years "young", as he always said,
he admired some drawings of his youth he kept looking at, mentioend the steady hand that once was,
felt and said that the words of Adlai Stevenson deserved a steadier hand and father kept on trying...

Carl Ruthenberg Handschrift 1921 der Inschrift des Christus Kreuzes in Deisenhofen

Von der handschriftlichen Aufzeichnung des ein-und-zwanzig jaehrigen Kuenstlers Carl Ruthenberg im Jahre 1921, gerade mal fuenf Jahre nachdem der verwundete siebzehnjaehrige aus dem Schlachtfeld kam....und dieser nun letzen Schriftzeichnung( etwa 1987-1988) meines Vaters, ist ein enorm "grausames Leben" von ihm durchlebt worden, das er "keinem Menschen und Lebewesen auf Erden so etwas wieder goennen moechte!"

He wished no human being, no creature on earth to experience ever the cruelties his generation lived through.

Die Machtlosigkeit und die Unmenschlichkeit der Menschen hat ihn immer wieder ergriffen. Er wunderte sich ueber die nie endenwollende Gemeinheit.
Helplessness and Hopelessness seem, alas, to perpetuate themselves and he was mazed about the never ending vileness.

Am Ende schwieg er; ich hatte ihm immer jede Menge Buecher gebracht, denen er nie ueber wurde. Buecher waren fuer ihn Befreiung. Er bedauerte, das er kein Schreiber war: "Ich koennte der Welt viel vom Menschenschicksal erzaehlen!"
Er spielte ab und zu seine Geige und der Fritz verkroch sich schnell unters Bett:" Na ja, ich versteh' ihn ja, ich spiele nicht mehr so wie frueher!"

Towards the end, father withdraw into his books I brought for him from the university. He only saw a future in books, in thinking, regretted that he was not a writer, mentioned often and remembered his father always reading, reading for the rest of his life and when my father looked into the mirror, and with each day he looked more like his father, he said.(my grandfather would be 141 years at the end of December 2001).

Manchmal weinte er, weil ich mein Leben fuer ihn "opfere," ich mit dem "Alten" festsitze, die "Andern" sich nicht um mich kuemmern, "Alle" alles immer falsch verstehen, dass selbst das Gute und die Besten immer wieder von Neuem, im Nichts enden.
---
Sometimes he cried, because his son gives his life away looking after him, that "I'm stuck with the ol' man"he said, and nobody cares about his son who looks after his old father, that everybody gets it wrong again and again, that the good and the best, again and again, start over and over with nothing, end with nothing.

"Ich bin ein Zeichner, ein Maler, auf meine Worte hat nie jemand gehoert!"
Carl Ruthenberg 1899-1988

"I am an artist, a painter, nobody ever listened to the Words I had said!" Carl Ruthenberg 1899-1988