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Sentimental Strolls Through Werschetz

Dušan Belča

From the Werschetz Report  (Vršačke vesti), June 20, 2005

    Perhaps fifty years have passed since I have seen the first reproduction of the painting by the artist Marc Chagall, in which a couple could be seen fleeing the city of Vitebsk in Russia, the birth place of the painter.  Chagall had dedicated many paintings to his birth place and that remained until his death perhaps his unique and most effective inspiration and artistic obsession.  It is no wonder that because the artist had seen the light and the colors of the world for the first time in this city and had there begun the grasping of life, he would never forget it.  And the farther he was from Vitebsk, the more he was in it; and the better was his understanding of it.  From the memories of the painter one can experience much.  This is not the primary theme intended here though it was briefly in my thoughts during my strolling through Werschetz.  This occurred on the day that I received a CD to review on which there were, among other things, “remakes”, as one would say today, of well-known artists of the world.  But these two fleeing people are not fleeing from Vitebsk, but from Werschetz.  This picture, as the other 59 pictures on the CD, was painted by someone from Werschetz. 

    We are accustomed to speak of well-known and famous painters of Werschetz  such as Nikola Nešković, Josif Rajkov, Paja Jovanović, Franja Radočaj, Svetislav Vuković to same a few, and still a few names from our time an which one should rather think about than mentioning here in order not to be unfair some others.  As we know, artists are vain.   It wouldn’t occur to the people of Werschetz that someone out there in the world would paint and celebrate his city more than living artists of Werschetz do.  Moreover, the great artists mentioned have scarcely painted one or two pictures of the city of their birth.  But Robert Hammerstiel paints Werschetz wherever he can -- in his town of Ternitz where he lives, in Vienna, in Paris, in New York, in Amsterdam, in Berlin, or in solitude.  Anywhere in the world when he paints anything, whether a city scene or a landscape, he will add a church or a hill from Werschetz.  Simply stated, he always paints Werschetz, and if he doesn’t have anything else to do, he will paint his beloved countryside with five churches and the Werschetz mountain, over a letter or post card someone sent him.  Wherever he goes he takes Werschetz with him.

    Who is Robert Hammerstiel?  We run into him many times in recent years.  He rushes to Werschetz for one, or two days, either alone or with a TV crew that is recording a film of him -- for who knows how many times – as he is a famous and beloved Austrian painter whose life and works are of interest to the whole world.  This appears not to be important to him.  For him, Werschetz is important.  He wants to portray and describe this city:  from the history of his childhood and his father’s bakery; the Werschetz market where he and his friends, Alexander Bobik and Nikola Kalapisch had sold their Kipfel pastries; about Alexin street, where he lived in the heart of Serbian Werschetz, where Serbian, Hungarian and German was spoken and of course, also cursed; of all the best memories that remained with him.

    I certainly know that Robert Hammerstiel, now much older, comes to the city of his birth to find his creative power because the source where he can again find it is here.  This is well known to me because another great person from Werschetz, Vasko Popa, came to Werschetz in the last decades of his life to drink in new energy from the Werschetz spring. He then wrote another five books of poetry.

    Robert Hammerstiel is a remarkable person, since he not only comes to the place of his birth, but to the place from which he was banished and in which the Golgatha of his childhood had begun.  This fortunately did not end with death, but rather led to an illustrious life and a life of fame.

    People of Werschetz speak in a variety of different ways about their German fellow citizens with whom they lived together and shared everything that citizens of a city could experience while living together for nearly two and a half centuries.  The lived together next to each other, they have endured hard times together, they learned each others language, they learned to understood each other, they married each other, but they have also hated each other.

    In time of crisis that were caused not by the citizens of this city, but by distant and immeasurable forces, who knows with what goals and desires, they endured the hapless times and fell in that dreadful turbulence from which they could not easily break free and whose consequences they still feel.  Even today the feelings are still shared and sometimes, by one as well by the other, yet with a total and remarkable lack of understanding.  This wanderer too had the opportunity to feel the intolerance, as much from the Serbs as from the Germans; and I get the impression that these people still want to live in the hatefulness of the past.  Whereas they were previously manipulated by others, they now in actuality manipulate themselves.

    An old Werschetz chronicler wrote about the mischief of his contemporaries “One should forget everything the past”.  How many times could one could repeat this line.  But this chronicler is wrong.  It would be better to remember everything, it would be easier and more understandable and thus the harm and suffering of the past times and all the wounds would not be as sore and the colors of the past wold be more pleasant. 

    Robert Hammerstiel had grasped that fact.  He had buried all of the horrors and suffering of his childhood with the best that he could give – with love.  And for what can one feel greater love, for a more intimate familiarity than for one’s homeland, one’ place of birth.

    From this city of he birth, the boy Robert Hammerstiel, as one of German nationality, expelled with his mother, with his younger brother, and thousands of old people and children and banished to the Banat concentration camp.  He described his totally horrible Golgatha and odyssey in his book “Of Icons and rats”; and without a single spark of hatred and intolerance, even though he was reporting the horrid scenes of hunger, sickness, and death.

    Exposed to all of this adversity, the boy goes with open eyes, he sees and understands more that one might expect from a child.  In his book Hammerstiel leaves behind the evil of those times and he again finds his way back, alive and well, fully equipped with creative power inspired by his city. 

    As he found himself far from Werschetz, in Austria among the many mountains much higher than here, with mountains with peaks of ice, and among people cooler that those with which he grew up with in Werschetz, there awakened in young Hammerstiel, the baker’s helper, the creative drive that he brought with him from Werschetz. 

    He began to paint, after having first completed the study of art.  The talent  “was a family matter” as had received the artistic gene from his father.  It is unusual (but what is unusual in Werschetz anyway):  Even though the elder Hammerstiel, the father of our painter, and a baker on Alexis Street, was a god baker, he especially loved to paint icons in the manner of the Orthodox.  And still today his son cannot resist the beauty of the medieval Serbian church art and the beauty of icons.  In particular, the pictures of this newest icon painter brought him to ecstasy.  He sees in them the energy that took his father away from the flour dusted workplace and brought him to the canvas on which he painted the faces of the saints, even though they were not of his religion.

    As a sign of the piety of his father, but also to the painter’s art that brought him an income, Robert Hammerstiel himself painted icons as they are a inseparable part of his artistic world and which embodies the energy that he needs.

    Separated from Werschetz he had painted the city and carried it in his fantasy and his dreams, and waited all of 26 years to return again to the city.  And when that happened in 1971, he wrote the following:  “After 26 years I see once again the city of my birth, Werschetz.  Every thing is as in my dreams and I feel as did the artist, Marc Chagall as I float over the terrain.  Nothing has changed in the section of the city in which I once lived for 12 years.  The houses are still here.  As are my school and the church.  Nothing has changed, it is like a dream.  I strode through the streets of my childhood.  Everything came close to me, as if it wanted to come over me.  But just as remarkable it is as I try to preserve it in my dreams.  I see old women framed in the windows, unknown faces.  Or, are they really old women who have been standing for 25 years at these windows.  Everything seems to be petrified, but in motion, as on a raft floating downstream. Isn’t that my mother standing in the doorway?  Children are there running around and I imagine myself being one among them. In the end I am a child of this city, that had to shed so much blood.  Those are the tall towers and the low gables of the houses and I feel that I am floating over the towers of my city.”

    Thus the feeling of flying over Werschetz belongs not only to the birds, but also to the artist, and all those who carry this city deep inside and in their dreams.  Floating over this city and the hills, among the clouds, over the churches and houses, is only the dream of Robert Hammerstiel, but of all those who are far away and who have a longing for this place, for this world and for their childhood.

    For Hammerstiel it was not only the description of the encounter with the birth city, it was also his artistic effort that he began to actualize from that moment. He painted small houses on the flat ground, old women and children, all depicted as silhouettes, small evening glances of humble Werschetz families on the periphery of the city.  In these pictures that are mostly pictorial graphics one feels the atmosphere of his childhood, also the atmosphere or our own early childhood.   In his pictures the painter tells stories about  family circumstances, about visiting, about guarding, about sickness, about unrest, about festivals and games.  In them are perhaps all that was around him, as were those he loved or who were close to him, but also those he feared.  In these pictures there was worry, threats and seldom joy.  And very often, especially in his woodcuts, we recognize the Werschetz cityscape, from which he could never escape and which he carried throughout the world, and which he compared with other cities.

    And thirty years later, in 2004, he decided to paint what he had described, namely the flight from Werschetz.  He could finally express in pictures that which apparently had dominated him for so many years. These appeared in his collection “Meine Mahler (My Painters)”.  In sixty pictures he depicts his love for the painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which he paints using their themes and styles, complemented by something in his own style. Van Gogh, Gauguin, Repin, Munch, Carra, Beckmann and many others are included; and in the pictures are the things of which I am writing. The pictures are chosen in such a way that he can insert his own details and vision as additions that fit completely with the originals.  Hammerstiel did not wish to be the imitator of his role models, even though he could well do it.  Much rather he wished in his way to pay homage to the painting he loved and from which he had learned.  But more still.  He wanted to bring something of his childhood in Werschetz into the pictures of the great predecessors!  What else could his contributions be than memories of the Werschetz times, of the frightful years of the Second World War?  Is that not a double homage: to the famous painters and to his homeland?

    For me the central picture of the whole collection of Hammerstiel’s visions is the picture of Marc Chagall.  That too is my daily theme.  It has occupied me for months already because it is also my personal creative credo.  I too float undisturbed over Werschetz, together with old Werschetzers, and also in the long forgotten times; and I always endeavor to take my readers along on this flight. 

    PS:  I have just learned that the painter is again coming to Werschetz for a few days.  Does he come flying along with the clouds or will we perhaps see him with a flock of birds or will he perhaps sketch a picture of a famous painter?

Dušan Belča

Translation from Serbian by Stefan Barth

Translation from German by John Michels

Dušan BELČA i Njegovo visoko preosvestenstvo Episkop Banatski

Hrizostom STOLIĆ sa predsednikom SO Vršac Miloradom DJURIČEM