Günther Förg / Günter HerburgerDie Trilogie der Tatzen

After the volume “Watercolours” with Arnold Stadler, in 2008 Günther Förg invited a further literary voice, Günter Herburger, to accompany him and his work. Here, however, the procedure was a different one: whereas Stadler, in his inimitable way, had aimed his text of assembled fragments and splinters of thought from the orbit of his new novel “Komm, gehen wir” (let’s go) at Günther Förg’s watercolours, Günter Herburger gave, in a small trilogy, an outline of the places and phases of the artist’s life, to which the latter responded with a series of monotypes. The particular attraction for Günther Förg lay in the fact that Herburger placed picture stories after his three texts, stories that wanted to call out to the viewer, “it has all been here before.” What emerged is a dialogic project between the disciplines of a kind that has not existed in recent years. As an author, Günter Herburger became known above all for his novel “Die Messe” (1969) and the volume of prose “Die Eroberung der Zitadelle” (1972). His “Thuja” trilogy (1977–1991) was praised for its “disillusioned social criticism and its at times almost Valentinesque lunacy”; Günter Herburger became popular with his children’s books “Birne kann alles” (1971) and “Birne brennt durch”(1975).