Meltha Magazine Online

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1996, Volume 2, No.1(5) pages 34-35

THE ART OVER HOSTILITY

By lrina Sutokskaya

In the summer of 1992 I happened to attend the 11th European Conference on nuclear disarmament in Brussels. The theme of this impressive forum and even the place of its venue, in the capital of the future Common European House, produced an unbelievably close unity so uncommon in the time of permanent confrontation and strife's tearing the human life apart. People of different nationalities, professions, age and convictions gathered to confined in sore points of modern life and to look for a method to break the deadlock over strife and hostility.

Unanimity and good nature were felt commonly not only during session work in the Hall of Congress and in the Europe parliament building, but even during mealtimes as well. One day at mealtime I was sitting next to a very popular painter Dietlind Bertelsmann. We began to talk and soon felt sympathy for each other. So I went to visit her studio the following day, and after the conference she invited me to come and stay with her for several days. Those days were wonderful indeed. As we talked we became closer. And it was when I for the first time in my life could see a book of her father's pictures, a German artist Jurgen Bertelsmann. He had sent them to the family from the Russian battlefield.

My father just was lost in combat on the Russian front in 1942, said Dietlind.

In 1942, you said? My heart sank, because my own father, a man of humanitarian profession, actually he was a teacher, he was a volunteer all along in the wartime and perished in combat.

"Oh, my God, I prayed in thought, "Oh, please, don't say this might happen in the same place at the same time and yet they "might be shooting at one another".

Fortunately Dietind's father was killed in combat under Leningrad, in the north of Russia, while my father, Russian, Vladimir Ivanovich Sutoksky was lost in the vicinity of Kharkov, Ukraina. Both left a young wife with a little daughter.

And now here we sat, two daughters of the war past, who lost their fathers fighting each other in the cruelest war of all times. So we sat in a warm embrace crying over our fathers whom we even did not remember well. And in the tears that fell there was something meting something that once was hard in the heart and that worked coldly on the, chest especially when you remembered hearing the heavy boots of marching German soldiers or their military commands uttered in a strong cold voice. This something that you felt when you played the unexcelled Shostakovich 7th symphony and it seemed this something was running in the veins of Russian children who survived this cruelty of the war and who would render the words "fascist" and "German" all the same. But now after a long while there is some new feeling being born in the heart, hostility and strife's (actually those feelings were deliberately kindled to keep in the nation the image of the It enemy) are being replaced by mutual confidence and necessity to live in peace.

With this feeling then I was looking over the book of sketches made by Dietlind's father. In his pictures and letters it seemed that the artist was very much interested in Russia, its people and its nature. I felt he comprehended the tragedy of both Russian and German peoples drawn against their will into the cruelest war just because of somebody's political ambitions. Yet I saw a regular Russian village with the beauty nobody had ever seen before, I saw afar and wide plain, the last snow, the face of a child. Anyway it seems true that art and hostility never go along together just like genius and evil are two "incompatible things". Therefore I never found a picture in Jurgen Bertelsmann's book, even a trace of hostility toward the people whom he was fighting with then in the war. . Hostility can only reproduce itself, and that is all, but it's only love that forgives a1.l and ~very one, and yet "covers everything, believes in all and hopes for ever", as is said in the Bible. That was this love I felt in Jurgen Bertelsmann's letters, and I found this love again in my father's letters to my mother from the front in 1941 to 1942 just shortly before he was killed. My mother was left alone for the rest of her life. So she keeps the letters as a good memory .On the victory day, 9th of May, she usually picks them up to read again and again.

This love gives new hope for a better future now free from wars, hatred and violence. In one of his last letters Jurgen Bertelsmann said "The young trees derive new energy from the past " . Also, he wrote to his wile that he would want to visit Russia again but this time like a friend. His widow, Anne- Mary Bertelsmann now lives in Bremen. She spent a lot of time, and energy on publication of this art book including her. father's sketches and home letters in Germany in the full comprehension of its general significance.

Let us consider this Russian publication of Jurgen Bertelsmann's book the fulfillment of the artist's desire to visit Russia again. He has returned to Russia with his pictures and letters putting his personal art in line with the work of goodwill people to bring both nations together.

1 -Preface to the book "Jurgen Bertelsmann Pictures and Letters to the Wife. Northern Russia 22.06.1941- 28.05.1942"

2- In reference to "The Arsalan Family" in the section "Our intellectuals"