An extraordinary man has left the earth. Standing at the grave of Helmut
Rückriegel his friends conceive the whole truth of the discernment that with
the death of a man there is a whole world that perishes. What pertains to
everyone is most evident for such an overabundant nature as it was with our
deceased friend Helmut. He was allowed to live a long life, and, we can say,
to live in mindfulness and intensity. He finished the wine of life completely
and entirely, including even the very last and then most bitter drops.
Furthermore it was granted to him to maintain his entire strength of mind until
his last moment; in complete alertness he witnessed his time and all its
phenomena until the last moment. His participation in the world was
insatiable; he was a pious Christian - the archaic term ‘piety’ in its
comprehensive meaning like the antiquity knew it was adequate for him. A
life in the presence of the supernatural and a joyful discovering of this
supernatural in the inexhaustible statures of the created world - but without
suppressing the reality of the mortality of all life on earth, he lived as if there
was no death.
Until his painful last sickbed he was seized with the fascination of languages -
recently he started to learn Turkish, a language that is extremely far from all
Indo-Germanic familiarity - joyfully entering into a totally different kind of
thinking and feeling. I always wondered why he, whose sense of language
was infallible, did not write himself. But in return his sentiment for the great
German poetry was so profound that the verses of Goethe and the Romantics,
of Hölderlin and Stefan George constituted deeply and totally his inner life.
He was the reader and reciter that poets desired, drawing from a great pool
effortlessly the most remote lyric creations to engender an awakening to
melody and life.
His artist's nature became apparent in the invention of his garden that he
created in Niedergründau, the village where he came from, after the end of his
working life: he cultivated rambler roses, growing into the old, partly
withered apple trees high as a house, to create real snow avalanches of white
blossoms; in May and June they were phantasmagorias of surreal, sheer
beauty. Here, the gardener who planted hundreds of sumptuous roses, turned
into a wizard. ‘Il faut cultiver son jardin.’ are the last words of Candide,
Voltaire's wicked satire in which the hero, after having underwent the horrors
of a world falling to pieces, is forming the conclusion of his experiences. And
it was in this awareness that Helmut created his garden. The experiences of
this great connoisseur of the art of living had made him learn, no less clear
than Voltaire's Candide, that the earth is not a peaceful place, not a paradise.
As a pupil and young man during the years of Nazism he thanked his teachers
for the discernment that Germany was ruled by criminals; in these years he
also experienced the Catholic Church as a place of resistance against the
despotism. As a diplomat he travelled widely; but his most important
positions for him were in New York and Israel - in the Holy Land, this small
spot of earth, where also in his life all spiritual and demonic forces that agitate
us as well today, collide; there he found the proximity of the truth of his faith,
especially there, where it seemed to be completely unreachable. And very
early he discovered for him the obligation to serve the Roman Catholic
Church, his mother, for whom he saw himself as a faithful son, in her great
crisis in which she had fallen after the Second Vatican Council. Helmut
Rückriegel, who loved the oriental Churches, especially the Orthodoxy, the
friend of many Jews, who - together with his friend, the great Annemarie
Schimmel, admired the Sufism; he was a Catholic, as ‘the tree is green’ to say
it with a word of Carl Schmitt. From his universal culture, from his
enthusiasm for the masterworks of language, from his detailed knowledge of
history and the cultures of the world Helmut Rückriegel was convinced that
the Roman Church was - by its cult which has been transmitted from the late
antiquity - a melting pot of all beauty and holiness that is possible on earth. In
a decades-long friendship with Josef Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI., he
helped to ensure that the Church did not completely abandon this treasure that
belongs not to her alone, but to the whole mankind.
Helmut Rückriegel the diplomat must occasionally have been rather
undiplomatic - he was full of passion, a battler who did not spare himself and
his adversaries. A man made for being happy - but still often enough
desperate of the vainness of all struggles of the best, putting up resistance
against the spirit of the times. The old Helmut Rückriegel did not become
wise of age - a wonderful trait he had and that conjoined him with his younger
friends. A consistent one, also in his matrimony that lasted nearly fifty years:
after his rich life that she shared for so long with him, Brigitte Rückriegel
accompanied him faithfully unto death - for this long companionship and the
synergy during the working years in many positions she is, as she told me,
profoundly grateful, and Helmut's friends have today to be grateful to her for
all that she did for him, especially during the darksome days.
The cosmopolitan German patriot Helmut Rückriegel embodied the best
aspects of Germany; to have known him is for me and certainly for many
others an infinite well of encouragement and hope.
[Translation from the original German provided by Dr. Johann von Behr]
