For Navid Kermani is Caravaggio’s painting “Doubting Thomas” of 1595 a key work of Christianity.
Among the me known German writers of our time Navid Kermani is the only one in which I can read the word “West” without a sense of inner defense. For this son of Iranian immigrants born in Germany knows that Luther’s words “the East” for the region, came out of the Magi, is older than the emulated him word “Occident”. This word has for him, therefore, a comprehensible place in the context of East-West exploration, which he dedicated most of his writings.
The first step in the intellectual biography of this extraordinary man of letters was that he was at home in the German literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The great works of Goethe and Kafka between influenced his spiritual world. Only from here, he explores the cultural and religious richness of its origin – from its literary side, as his standard work on the aesthetic beauty of the Koran shows
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Christianity from the inside understand
Its East-West exploration did not move about from the Koran to Kafka, but the reverse of Kafka on the Koran. This approach was necessary for the author to turn to Christianity in the next step: His new book as a series of meditations “on Christianity” to announce, however, is exaggerated. The author could have quietly confess to the fact that he is meditating “about my Christianity”; often enough he reaches in his book about this turn of events. Understated, however, is the main title. Because it is not the “unbelieving astonishment”.
Kermani is a wanderer between worlds faith of east and west, which are seen at every step, a true passion for the faith. His subjective view of Christianity is therefore also there sympathetic, where you want to contradict her. Because he considers Christianity not only from the outside, but seeks to understand it from the inside.
The criticism of the barbaric goes nowhere
The Islam he sees as scriptural religion; Christianity on the other hand he approaches via the visual arts. For important decisions were made by a grant from the Villa Massimo in Rome. The baroque imagery that he encountered at this time, led him to a number of “image views” that initially in the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung”, then in the novels, “Your name” has been published and now a third time will be taken up. The fact that he called in a “picture” to an altarpiece by Guido Reni, the representation of the crucified Christ as blasphemous, put to him in 2009 in the dispute over the Hessian Culture Prize as an insult of Christianity.
© dpa This year’s peace prize winners Navid Kermani.
This year’s peace prize winners Navid Kermani.
That Kermani Reni Painting with the astonished exclamation commented for the first time he could even think of a cross, on reading some critics. Therefore, they were missing the theological justification: Here suffering Christ not to relieve God, but to give expression to the action of an abandoned creation
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In his new book published today is dedicated Kermani the Crucifixion by Guido Reni in a separate chapter. But just refereed considerations can not be found there; Rather, they are moved to a completely different place. Here Kermani assigns his criticism of Christian theology of the cross of a modern cross representation (without the body of the crucified Christ), which dates from the sculptor Karl Schlamminger. The criticism literally recorded running, the cross hypostasiere barbarously the pain is body hostile and ungrateful towards creation, into space.
Much fades into the background
Surprisingly repeated Kermani face of this contemporary, abstract in the best sense of the word cross, what he had said elsewhere with a view to Renis figurative representation of the crucified from the seventeenth century : “For the first time I think I could believe in the cross.” An attentive Kermani reader can find out that the double by “copy & amp; paste” “the first time” came about. But the reasoning changed. The cross, as it is now, “is not for the incarnation in just one person, it is the principle.”
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