On the death of Aldona Gustas – Send me an apple from the afterlife

On December 8, 2022, Lithuanian poet and graphic artist Aldona Gustas passed away in Berlin-Kreuzberg. We will miss her very much.
Bright and cold, the full moon stands high in the Berlin sky on this Thursday evening shortly after eight. Inside in the warm parlor, Berlin painter and poet Aldona Gustas has returned what was lent to her since her first breath 90 years ago. Now she breathes, the last great feat of strength of a woman whose life energy fueled boundless love and uninterrupted artistic creation for decades. In a quiet mood among friends, the letting go succeeded.

“Not to be / on the water / on the land” reads the final stanza of her 700-plus stanza lament, which she wrote to her beloved husband Georg Holmsten during the final stages of his eleven-year dying. A collection of poems she published in 2012 in a book titled UNTOTER – UNDEAD –  Speech and Search Poems with his illustrations. Now, a decade later, she has set out herself to “not be”, which for Aldona Gustas is not nothingness and not the end. This is how she saw it in life and in her poetry: “I hate dots like the plague anyway, my poems have no dot because there is no end. There is no end after death. There is no end.”

Aldona Gustas says this and much more in an O-Ton TV interview with Kaunas Local Television on the occasion of an exhibition of a series of drawings from her Mouth Women series in the country of her childhood, Lithuania. To hear this, to see her speak with determination, is very rewarding. One learns and understands immediately why and how she seeks and implements spontaneity, simplicity and brevity in her way of drawing and in her poetry. In the drawings of her mouth women, the minimalist style, the reduction of the face to the speaking, always different looking red mouth line is definitely also strategy. She draws against the clichéd depiction of “female beauty” that she found far too often among fellow artists. And in her poetry, which is rich in imagery, as the titles of her poetry volumes already show, it is succinctly about condensation, to “get to the core or the dream of the thought”. (Olav Münzberg)

 

   

Aldona Gustas, drawings from the series “Mouth women”.

Aldona Gustas once spartanly pointed out cuts in her biography in a poem:

“i was long 1932 / i was long 1945 / i was long 1952 / i was long 1962 / i was long 1972 / in the years between / i lived short ”

1932 – Childhood in Lithuania – Soul and Nature

Aldona Gustas was born in 1932 in Karceviškiai, a village in Silute County in the Memel region of Lithuania. Childhood memories from Lithuania – beautiful and traumatic – shape Aldona’s entire life and her literary and artistic work. The mother, of German descent, felt predominantly Lithuanian. The father, Lithuanian, thought more Prussian, but sometimes it was the other way around. He was Catholic, she Protestant, everything fit together, identities were something fluid. Playing and roaming in the Lithuanian meadows and forests of her early childhood, preferably with boys and with her father, fostered a special connection to nature. Throughout her life Aldona collected feathers, stones, flowers, leaves, loved trees and sometimes talked to them. Her paintings testify to an animistic worldview, the primal, and what she sees as fluid boundaries between human and creature. Somewhere in between, neither in the air nor on the land, always in the becoming between sea and beach, angelic beings rise. Always accompanying Aldona in her effort not to crust into a cliché. Everything is in flux.

“when I / was friends with birch trees/ and amber animals/ with sparrows on my shoulders/ walking through drafty woods/ when I/ was connected/ with birch trees/ and amber animals/ with/ the environment/ when I was still a little girl/ something eternal seemed to begin in Silute/ already daily/” (In: Air Cages. A Lithuanian Childhood. Berlin: Edition Mariannenpresse 1980)

In 1939 Aldona’s family was caught between the fronts of the German war of conquest and extermination and the Stalinist occupation policy of the Soviet Union. After the recapture of the Memelland by the Germans in 1939, the family flees to Vilnius (Wilna). Here, 8-year-old Aldona witnesses the occupation of the city by Soviet troops in 1940. In the spring of 1941, the family arrives in Rostock as part of the Nazi resettlement of Lithuanian Germans. That same year, her beloved Uncle Johann is arrested by the Nazis and murdered in the Groß-Rosen concentration camp in 1942. As a teenager, Aldona witnesses bombing and destruction in Rostock. When she sees the dead lying in the streets, she almost wants to lie down next to them. Even as a 12-year-old, she has had enough of the misery of this life. At the end of the war, with the entry of Soviet troops into Rostock in May 1945, the family is separated. The father is presumably captured by the Russians and interned for several years in the Soviet Gulag in Siberia. Aldona, her mother, and her one-year-old brother flee Rostock on foot and by horse-drawn wagon out of fear of the occupying Soviet troops.

 

Aldona Gustas, Photo: Dietmar Bührer

1945 – War and flight – traumas that remain

In 1945, Aldona Gustas came to Berlin as a war refugee. From then on, she wanted to live in Berlin and only here, even though she never forgot her Lithuanian roots. The soul is Lithuanian and the mind German, she said herself. Until she was nine years old, she spoke only Lithuanian at home. With the resettlement to Rostock, that was thoroughly over. She had to learn the German language first. Later, she wrote only in German.

“Aus litauischen Wäldern / kommend /ging Berlin/mir unter die Haut/als Stadt öffnete sie/mir die Häuserarme/und ich entschlüpfte/meiner Flüchtlingshaut” (Aldona Gustas. Berliner Tagebuch Gedichte)

“Coming from Lithuanian forests / Berlin / got under my skin / as a city it opened / the arms of houses for me / and I slipped away / from my refugee skin” (Aldona Gustas. Berlin Diary Poems)

Although still long in ruins and divided by the Cold War, the post-war island of Berlin is refuge, home and boundless freedom for Aldona.

This feeling connects her with other creative people of the war generation, whom she later brings together under the umbrella of the Berlin Painter-Poets.
Their literary and artistic expression, the “Berlin Notations,” was summed up by Karl Kraus in 1974 as follows: “All this exists here in one way and no other: people like trees, dreams like boldness, exuberance like moisture that comes from the weather and from alcohol, streets, street corners, and the paths of fantasy, the turgid representationalism, the dimensionality and beautiful audacity of the real and the harebrained, the crazy and aggressive, embrace and resistance, noise and triviality or sensitivity to life.”

„Das alles gibt es hier so und nicht anders: Menschen wie Bäume, Träume wie Keckheit, Übermut wie Feuchtigkeit, die vom Wetter und vom Alkohol stammt, Straßen, Straßenecken und die Wege aus Phantasie, die pralle Gegenständlichkeit, die Dingfestigkeit und schöne Dreistigkeit des Wirklichen und das Hanebüchene, das Verrückte und Aggressive, Umarmung und Widerstand, Radau und Trivialität oder Lebens-Empfindlichkeit.“

1952 – Georg Holmsten – Love for a lifetime and more

In 1952, Aldona Gustas met the journalist and writer Georg Holmsten in Berlin. Holmsten was involved in the assassination of Hitler by the military resistance. On July 20, 1944, he was in the Bendlerblock and was one of the few to escape the wave of shootings by going into hiding. The traumatic experiences he then has as a medic come back with power and fear in his old age. Previously, he has also processed them in books.
He, the literary man from Estonia, encourages Aldona to write. She marries him still in 1952. Both are determined not to have children, but to devote their lives entirely to each other and to writing. Berlin, politics, art and literature are common interests that unite the two for decades until his death on July 21, 2010, and of course their passionate love. Aldona remains faithful to Georg beyond his death. Writing becomes her refuge when her husband falls seriously ill in 1999 and she is the only one with whom he exchanges and reveals himself over the years. Asyl im Gedicht (2001) and Untoter (2012) tell of this.

Aldona Gustas, drawing from the series “Mouth women”.

1962 – Breakout into the poem

In 1962, Aldona Gustas published her first book of poetry, Nachtstraßen, in the Hermit Press of her mentor Victor Otto Stomps, with woodcuts by Hans Sünderhauf.
As a poet, Aldona Gustas published her work in several dozen volumes of poetry in smaller bibliophile publishers, most notably in the Hermit Press of V.O. Stomps and in the Corvinus Press of Hendrik Liersch. Her works have been set to music and translated into Lithuanian, Polish, Spanish, French, and other languages. The German National Library lists 25 own publications and 21 book participations – a breathless creative power drove this petite woman.

Female identity, eroticism and sensuality are important themes in Aldona Gustas’ lyrical and visual work, which she also combines in numerous publications such as (1993) Sphinxfrauen (1999) or Würfelwörter (2013). Sometimes playful and fantastical, sometimes laconically punctuated, she puts lines and words to paper. Paradoxes populate many of her linguistic images – androgynous figures in which body curves transform into fish or birds. Unlimited female sexuality and subjective artistic expression are her sites of freedom: Asyl im Geschlecht (1990).

Aldona Gustas 1987,  Photo Copyright Renate von Mangoldt

Even though she did not call herself a feminist and for herself man and woman were rather fluid categories, androgynous traits can be seen in herself and in her paintings, Aldona was committed to feminist goals: full gender equality – in art and in life. In order to empower women in art and literature, she joined Gedok (Association of Women Artists and Art Lovers) and headed the literature department for 4 years. She was first attacked for her erotic poems and the publication of a dtv anthology of erotic poems by women. Her self-confident initiative to found the Berlin Painter Poets as an interdisciplinary group of artists also brought her trouble at first: “Coming from Lithuanian forests and forming this idiosyncratic group was an imposition on some colleagues and other people.” (Literaturport)

1972 – Berliner Malerpoeten – Berlin Painter Poets – Symbioses

In 1972, Aldona Gustas founded the fourteen-member group Berliner Malerpoeten (Berlin Painter-Poets) with friends Günter Bruno Fuchs, Robert Wolfgang Schnell, Günter Grass, and other painters who write and draw (all of them later wonderfully portrayed by her friend, the photographer Dietmar Bührer). She has been friends with some of them since the early 1960s, and has also been encouraged by them to draw. Horst Strempel and Matthias Koeppel teach her graphics and painting. From 1970 she works as a visual artist, first producing watercolors and some oil paintings, later mainly drawings, which she publishes in her numerous publications and rarely in exhibitions. She realizes her interest in combining literature and painting by founding the Berlin Malerpoeten.

Berliner Malerpoeten – Berlin Painter Poets  v.l.n.re.: Karl Oppermann, Joachim Uhlmann, Joachim Zeidler, Aldona Gustas, Artur Märchen, Kurt Mühlenhaupt, Photo: Nickie Galliner

She is the head, curator and manager of the group, the only woman. Her attempts to bring other women artists into the group fail because of the men’s resistance: they are “too feminist” for them, they would mess everything up. Only at this point can the strong-willed Aldona Gustas not assert herself, bowing to the democratic majority decision of the group. On most other issues, her colleagues follow and trust her. It is to her credit that this association of highly individual artistic personalities always finds its way back together, despite distances and conflicts. She writes letters, mediates, links and, supported by the Goethe Institute, organizes exhibitions abroad: in Brussels, Caracas, Medellin, Buenos Aires, Rome, Nancy, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, etc. She makes the Berlin painter-poets known inside and outside Europe and edits several anthologies for them. For this she is highly appreciated by her friends and colleagues.

In Berlin, the Berlin Malerpoeten exhibited at the Freie Berliner Kunstausstellung in the 1970s and celebrated their 10th and 20th anniversaries in 1982 and 1992 with two exhibitions at the Rathaus Tempelhof. The city never offered a big stage to the group, notoriously disinterested in its cultural heritage, original Berlin art and culture of the postwar period.

2014 – Aldona Gustas and Berlin Painter Poets – Renaissance

When John Colton and the Browse Gallery, in search of traces of buried Kreuzberg culture from 2010, also the Berlin Painter Poets come into focus, Aldona Gustas does not take long to snatch their life’s work from oblivion with new exhibitions. With her support, she is once again curating an exhibition for the Berlin Painter-Poets. Pulsating Life – Pulsating Death opened in 2014 amid great public interest and media attention in the then Browse Gallery spaces, on the balcony of the Marheineke Markthalle. Directly following there also follows a solo exhibition of Aldona Gustas with numerous unpublished drawings from the Mundfrauen-series.

     

With these exhibitions, the visual work of Aldona Gustas and the Berlin Painter-Poets receive new national and international attention. Both exhibitions travel to Wiesbaden and especially in Lithuania the interest in Aldona Gustas’ graphic works blossoms. In 2015, the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art in Kaunas shows Aldona Gustas – I am a Part of Nature, drawings. In 2016, Aldona Gustas, I am We, an exhibition of paintings and drawings, follows at the M. Žilinskas Art Gallery. In the same year, in a cooperation between Browse Gallery and the Goethe-Institut Lithuania, the two-year traveling exhibition Aldona Gustas and the MUNDFRAUEN will start touring museums and libraries in Lithuania. Stops include Kaunas, Silute, Klaipėda and Vilnius.

2017 – Oxymora – Time of Black Snowflakes

Before Aldona Gustas retires, she will accomplish one more Herculean task in 2017. She will publish her last book, Zeit zeitigt, and present it at the Leipzig Book Fair in the spring. Here she also shows a small exhibition with large-format portraits of the Berlin painter-poets sketched by her. The actual large exhibition of the Berlin Painter Poets takes place in parallel at the Leipzig Baumwollspinnerei as part of a double exhibition with 8 contemporary textile designers and Aldona Gustas as a link. Oxymora, curated by John Colton (Browse Gallery) and Virginija Vitkienė (director of the Kaunas European Capital of Culture 2022 festival), was part of the presentation of Lithuania as the focus country of the Leipzig Book Fair 2017.

        

Aldona Gustas at the Leipzig Baumwoll Spinnerei February 2017, talking and reading from her book Zeit zeitigt, Fotos: John Colton

It was sponsored by the Goethe-Institut Vilnius and the Lithuanian Cultural Institute. Both invite Aldona Gustas and the Browse Gallery to Lithuania on the occasion of the opening of the Lithuanian traveling exhibition in the National Library of Vilnius in April 2017. There, Aldona joyfully goes in search of traces of her childhood and consciously says goodbye, already suspecting that her memory is weakening.

2022 – Not to be

Back in Berlin, Aldona Gustas exhaustedly takes a place in a senior citizens’ home in her beloved Kreuzberg.
From there, Browse Gallery plans further exhibitions and projects with her. In 2021, the painter-poets are part of the large exhibition The Invention of Kreuzberg at Kunstquartier Bethanien, curated by Martin Düspohl and Ulrike Treziak. In 2022, on the occasion of the 90th anniversary, the exhibition Aldona Gusta’s Kreuz-berg 100-10 will follow at Galerie Salon Halit, the anniversary exhibition 50 Years of the Berlin Painter-Poets at NOSBÜSCH & STUCKE in Fasanenstraße, curated by Jochen Fey, and another anniversary exhibition for the Berlin Painter-Poets at the Bavarian Museum im Steinbruch Solnhofen, to which Joachim Zeidler, a member of the Berlin Painter-Poets, bequeathed his lithographic collection.
In recent years, Aldona has also lost the last companions of the Berlin Malerpoeten, Günter Grass in 2015, Christoph Meckel in 2020 and most recently Hans Joachim Uhlmann in 2021 and Karl Oppermann (2022).

Finally, of all the memories of Aldona’s spiritual horizon, only her archangel Sabine remained, faithfully and lovingly seeking mediation between the splinters of inner and outer reality – until her death on December 8, 2022.

The Browse Gallery will continue to help ensure that the cultural legacy of Aldona Gustas and the Berlin painter-poets is not forgotten.
Aldona Gustas has been honored for her cultural contributions with the Rahel Varnhagen von Ense Medal (1997), the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1999) and the Medal of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Lithuania (2006).
Since Aldona Gustas, like her mother and also her husband Georg, wishes to be buried at sea in the Baltic Sea, there will be no gravestone commemorating this wonderful artist. Berlin could damn well honor her and make her visible in the cityscape, with a street or square named after her.

From the afterlife she laconically gives us an apple. According to her wishes, the obituary will read the following:

ich bin ein blauer Apfel
der zu keinem Baum gehört

ich sterbe aus
A.G.

I am a blue apple
that does not belong to any tree

I am dying out
A.G.

Oxymora knew how to use Aldona masterfully in her lyricism up to this point.
We are missing these and much more now. That hurts.

John Colton, Sabine Drwenzki, Duscha Rosen, Browse Gallery 10. Dezember 2022

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More about Aldona Gustas

More picture examples, exhibition details and other things in various blog articles and pages about Aldona Gustas and the Berlin painter-poets in this website

Emphatically apt and really nice to read are the poetry reviews and interviews with Aldona Gustas by Waltraud Schwab in the taz, e.g. 2007, 2012 und 2014

A comprehensive background article on her life and artistic work and especially her connection to Lithuania, was written by journalist Vytenė Stašaitytė on the occasion of Aldona Gustas’ visit to Lithuania in April 2017 for the business newspaper Verslo žinios. In a German translation by the author, the article appeared on the website of the Goethe-Institute Lithuania and in the Annaberger Annalen.

In the context of the Kaunas European Capital of Culture 2022 festival, a documentary film on Aldona Gustas is currently being produced by the Kaunas Regional Museum, which will premiere at the end of January 2023.