German original: “Helke Sander war eine enge Vertraute, bis in die Puppen stritten wir ob die Frauenfrage unabhängig von der generellen sozialen Revolution lösbar sei und auch ob es richtig wäre, dass die Chinesen in der Kulturrevolution den klassischen Pianisten die Hände abhackten. Sieh Dir mal ihren Film REDUPERS an. Es hat sich herausgestellt, dass die Frauen nicht warten müssen bis die ganze Welt gerecht ist. –– Die Black Panther waren in der DDR wichtig? Darüber wüsste ich gerne mehr!”
German original: “Ich war noch nie in Ramallah. Mein Korrekturprogramm ist so doof, dass es diesen Ort nicht kennt. Könnten diese Programme nicht nachts sich bei Wikipedia weiterbilden, so wie früher die Arbeiter?”
★ Harun was not only a football lover. He also was a traveller, questioner, listener, and observer. He was an interlocutor, essayist, analyst, non-ideologist, intellectual, and non-academic. A bibliophile and language-lover, he was an image-surgeon, image-worker, work-partner, family guy, a German-Indian born in Czechoslovakia, a project-maker, beer-drinker, smoker, collector of T-shirts, commentator, and advisor. As a non-fan of large dinners, he was still a great conversationalist. He was an admirer of some of Adorno’s music compositions, and he was a filmmaker. And Harun was a friend of utmost social and intellectual generosity. Certainly, the sequence of Haruns is incomplete. Many Haruns remain missing. And the sequence is written without hierarchical order. Rather, it depicts the manifold radiance of a person whose various formations could all emerge during one evening.
Defying and repressing his physical absence, I can see him watching, reading, and listening to the abundance of tributes to HF, the filmmaker. Harun the person would now perhaps lift his arms up to his chest with open hands. Then he would move them slightly up and down with a gesture of modest but vehement clearance, saying “enough, enough,” as if to defend himself, like a convict, against the laws of a culture that commemorates in public. With open hands that indicate intimacy, which HF demonstrates in The Expression of Hands, he would smile, and perhaps his gesture would serve as a call to attention for a discussion of an article he had just read.
Archives of books, gestures, and thoughts remain to be watched, held between hands and translated into images. Harun would dislike nothing more, though, than if interventions into the thought-constructing systems of the world we live in today stopped taking risks, stopped producing something new—if we were to get too lazy to precisely investigate the politics of our post-humanly cybernetic era to turn its strategies against itself.
Nothing would make HF more discreetly upset than if we were to forget to educate ourselves during the night like the workers did in the past.