19th- Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2. 2011
The first horse to which I can remember, stood snorting and pawing the stable of the blacksmith. A spotted horse, the whinnying and against the wooden gate occurs when the Smith adapting another horse with dull beats the horseshoe. As a tot I spent like the acrid smell of hot metal, was fascinated by the size and power of the animal, which naturally had a name. Not all animals with which I grew up in the country had a name. Nameless, the voles, which I began with traps to to get hold of its tail twenty centimes, and the chickens ran beheaded my Grandmother, as well as head-nameless around in the garden before they landed in the pot.
animals had to be large enough to transcend their genre and maintain an individuality. Every year I longed so after the knee with the circus elephant incident, whose names and character traits I had noticed. A critical size were the rabbits, which killed my grandfather for the holiday meal. Even though I fed them every day, they had no name and no separate beings. Because I could not eat the rabbits, I realized that they were nevertheless become my friends.
The horses, elephants, tigers and lions embodied a longing of mine, the desire for strength that I lacked as a boy. I dreamed myself into it with me and completed their properties. At the end of my childhood at the end of the game-rich age tale, too, I found myself suddenly surrounded by animals again. Now they had turned up and appeared as cartoon characters, as a movie monster, as a sign or emblem as a mark in my life.
Even in my adult life, they form a continuous vanishing point: As a creature, they are the epitome of innocence, which we appreciate the degree of our Socialization and involvement seen. We can eat animals or despise their flesh, we can grow industrially or issue appropriate to the species in zoos: First of all our animals remain silent companion, and as such they are an indicator of our "One World Indians." The question of vegetarianism does not affect this basic monitoring and reflection. People have always revered the animals, not just slaughtered and eaten in cults, to incorporate their properties. This is Einverleibenwollen speaks not only the memory of our origin, but also the desire to own animals to be back.
The animals form a parallel society, which commented on the ongoing process of our civilization. Animals were once part of a large, barely eingrenzbaren family, they were removed in the industrial revolution from the side of people, both to be found as an ornament and pleasure, on the other than commercially produced food use. The image of George Stubbs (1724-1806), "Hunter Bay by a Lake" describes a crucial phase of our animal relations. It shows the falling out of the animal from his natural environment. Stubbs' horse is lonely, isolated, melancholy there, and his body - which reveals not only his undulating tail - is to give pleasure. From its wildness there is nothing left. Stubbs 'transfiguration of the animal is on the background of Descartes' verdict course, that animals have no souls and therefore are equivalent to machines. Stubbs painted his horse in that moment, as it is on track to become an emblem. It could always be of the artist is suspected painter undoubtedly an avant-gardist, as his most famous photograph, "Whistle Jacket" is an anticipation is the product logo, as is now a chocolate or decorated car company. The awakening of industrialization longing for the animal breeding and does not prevent his recovery.
The animals, however, that we grow up, are the sonar our deepest longing for otherness. In them we practice early on in dealing with a stranger. An animal to look at is, always, to the wholly other - the unimaginable others - to face what is never completely without fear and horror. Much more than the encounter with the animals in everyday life promised the circus animals coming into contact with the wild and untamed, this one feels as a child in itself.
I would hope that the lions and tigers were really dangerous, to increase my admiration for them. The longing for otherness can conversely show a disgust I could never, for example, without shuddering with his hand on a Dog fur slip, and the dog FEEDING to grab his mouth, I was always disgusted. Maybe my fear is behind it, "to the touch to be recognized by them," as Walter Benjamin put it. The child's desire to stroke an animal, calls this ambivalence between fear and attraction as always new. Especially in the contact we sense something of the mystery of the speechless animal. In his silence, we will ourselves to the puzzle. If the animals we humans ever lose sight of the fact we will be even stranger and finally lost in space walk.
If the animals are about to remove to and farther from us? Or they turn next to last us to transform itself?
The longing, the Stubbs painted his animals appears in today's utilitarianism to have used. However, our dumb friends are the last to be able to give in ungodly hours to inform us. Urgent reason, the question remains, how we want to live with them. Today, they embody the horror as rotten meat, which we actually ahead of us and should have what we have made of the creation.
The writer Martin R. Dean, born 1955, lives in Basel.
2003 he published his novel "My Fathers" in the Carl-Hanser-Verlag.
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