Certainty.visionFrancke Today

• AboutIntroduction from the Curator

  Around 1700, in the Prussian province of Halle, August Hermann Francke began a project of reformation that remains singular to this day in its international reception and influence...

• EventsWednesday, 22-01-2014, 6PM

  "Music and the Brain" Exhibition tour and talk with Via Lewandowsky.

• Recent PressMDR Kultur 25-09-2013

  "Die Künstler griffen die Ideen Franckes auf und brachten sie mit der Realität des 21. Jahrhunderts in Dialog. Was bedeuten Franckes Visionen in unserer globalisierten Gegenwart..."

• Adela Babanova

  
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  Sybille AnderlAstrophysicist

  We first have to distinguish astrophysics and astronomy in the strict sense from cosmology. Cosmology deals with the universe, trying to understand the universe in its development and in its essence. Astrophysics, which comes from astronomy, attempts to understand what we see in the universe: stars, galaxies, black holes – what lies between the stars. But we cannot manipulate the objects that we are studying. This is a handicap for the path to certainty. If you can manipulate something, if you can interact or see how objects react to influences, you begin to feel that you can develop certainty. In other words, one might understand things better then...

• William Basinski

  
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  Manfred von HellermannPhysicist

  Essentially, I engage in spectroscopy in nuclear fusion. The exploration and scientific research on nuclear fusion began in the late 1950s. The controlled nuclear fusion was once one viable alternative energy source, but now it has become understood as the only option. The motivation has shifted significantly. »The fast track to nuclear fusion« has recently been formulated by Sir David King, the scientific advisor to Tony Blair: In order to prevent irreversible climate change, we need nuclear fusion not later than 2050/60.For four years I have been working as an external scientific advisor to the project ITER 1, the international nuclear fusion project...

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  Jochen HörischMEDIA SCIENTIST

  Nothing is as certain as the fact that everything is uncertain. With visions you can never know whether it is an exceptional psychiatric circumstance or whether it’s a legitimate vision. It seems that a vast number of people have a kind of need to have something like a guiding vision. You have to realize that to have visions means that you have a blueprint for the future, one that can be made plausible. It has to be convincing to others. First we need to be certain, what kind of visions we need. I think that there is something like a collective learning process: on the one hand you realise that the epitome of sadness is a large group of people who just don’t know anymore what it is that they want exactly, who don’t know themselves anymore and whether they are needed or not; this is often also the epitome of medium disasters...

• Marc Bijl

  
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  Karin KneisslENERGY ANALYST

  I do sense as a teacher, as a writer, the renewed search among younger generations for just such certainties and the concomitant tendency towards, let’s say, a firmer, more conservative worldview. I like to pun that orientation comes from the Orient, which is to say that we have always looked to the East for new ideas, thoughts – whether classical philosophies or the alphabet, it all came from the Orient. Over the past thirty years we have been able to observe in some Arab-Islamic countries that there was also a certain vacuum there, above all an ideological one, a societal one, and one response to this, among others, has been political Islam. Doubtless, the roots are manifold, but if I had to elucidate a single cause in greater detail, it would be this: that political Islam – a new, extreme, conservative, political Islam...

• Sergey Bratkov

  

• Esther Ernst

  
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  Helmut ObstTHEOLOGIST

  General consensus has it that little is certain these days. Our era, many feel, is distinguished by the dwindling of certainties and fixed points of reference. Of course there are various causes for this. But still one has to ask if it is truly taking place. Certainties, I am persuaded, always have to do with paradigms and ideologies. Without a corresponding ideology there can be no certainties. And already this was so with Francke in his time. Francke’s certainty, of course, arose from his Christian-Biblical worldview, and that determined his life, his thought, his actions and also his vision. Now if someone has another worldview, for instance a materialistic one, his certainties, his vision, will ultimately have a very different character....

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  Philipp OswaltArchitect

  We believe in more certainties than actually exist. Through the stability of our social system, and I’m very thankful for this, we’re very strong, I think; but historically this is also a very uncommon situation! I’m a West German, I should add, born in 1964. That means: from 1945 onwards, peace and growing prosperity without any major crises – this is the world I grew up in. It’s an experience of continuity that has something seductive about it. To an extent, I already have the impression that this development won’t be endless and that we’re generally taking up a lot of certainties that will then undone in this generation, the next or the one after that. And there are some really clear points where this becomes apparent to me. Some everyday occurrences, for instance, obser­ved with a little bit of internal distance...

• Christian Jankowski

  

• Via Lewandowsky

  
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  Günther ReimannECONOMIST AND JOURNALIST

  Great ideas have always played an essential role in history and will continue to do so. But they only become an actual political force in society in times of revolutionary upheaval, when the passionate belief in a certain idea motivates those who come to positions of power in the state and can exercise their influence. At present the world is in an international vacuum. The western world order dominated by the US disintegrated after the collapse of the Soviet empire. A new world order has not yet come into being. Instead there is a kind of interregnum. The growing consumer needs of senior citizens and of higher income brackets require rapid progress in productivity at sites of industrial production...

• Gabriel Machemer

  

• Christian Niccoli

  

• Serkan Özkaya

  

• el Seed

  
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  Jorinde VoigtArtist

  For me as an artist, certainty and vision go together – at the beginning of every new project they’re at the heart of the matter, so to speak. Sometimes you wait a while until you have a feeling of certainty about what you’re starting. But another part of this is the vision of what is possible to begin with. Which is to say there is a vision for the meaning of the work: first you delineate the subject or maybe you’ve already known for a while that you want to address it, but not how to go about it. And then there are different methods to get closer to it, to come to the point of certainty that this is the right approach to unpack this subject. Sometimes it happens almost incidentally and you suddenly realize: I’ve got it! As soon as this moment of certainty is there, sometimes I can work for four or five months at a time on a single subject...