Disremembering Wolf - 7 Jan 2025

by Roger F Malina

My best friend, Wolf Rainer, died just a day after we talked on the phone. Such predictable
sadness. I met him in the 1970s on a bus on the way to San Francisco from Berkeley. It turned
out he had met my roommate Bill Fawley when they were both at Princeton.

I just got interrupted by a phone call from a colleague. I took it I think instinctively to move my
attention. This morning, I listened to a talk by my good friend and colleague Cassini Nazir; he
was presenting his work on the study of curiosity at our Center for Brain Health.

Why do I mention this. Surely because I don’t want to pay attention to my sadness about never
seeing Wolf again, having learned, while taking a break from reading my emails, that Wolf was
dead:

I have sad news.
Wolf died in the past few days in his apartment in Innsbruck.
Reacting to New Year’s greetings, he had reported severe heart problems and planned
to see his doctor (which maybe never happened).
We just found out because a mutual local friend called all hospitals yesterday and went
to the house today - she found the apartment already sealed, a neighbor had called the
police yesterday. He usually had day-to-day contact with some neighbors, so they surely
started wondering.
As we are not related, not much more information will be forthcoming for the moment I
fear. These are the rules.
Please tell all people you know that should know, I am not in the loop concerning all his
American and old-time fellows and maybe keep me cc:ed. I will look for more mail
contacts probably tonight, I am currently on the road.

Thanks and best wishes
Klemens Polatschek

I remember endless deepening discussions with Wolf at our family home, No 17. He was well
read and had had a Jungian fixation. He had done research on his Nazi father, and what he
found in the archives was distressing. He left home in Innsbruck when he was 16 on the
invitation of Mormon missionaries and moved to Utah. He attended high school and then
Princeton University, where he worked at the library as a student.

When I met him in San Francisco he was working in the tourism industry accompanying people
on boat trips on the Danube and in the Florida swamps. Then he got free travel tickets and
decided to go around the world. In a restroom at the train station in Bangkok his life took a turn.
He met someone who was working in the refugee camps on the border where a war was
ongoing.

When he arrived at the refugee camp, he learned that there were no schools, and all the
children were apoplectic and sad. So, he decided to build schools without permission of the UN.
There were hundreds of refugee teachers available and walls of bamboo. In a few weeks they
built their first school, and the children were emboldened and remotivated.

He became an international school builder in refugee camps and a UN election observer. He
organized exhibitions of art made by refugee children.

Once when I met him in Paris, he was playing songs that he had written with a guitar on bridges
of Paris, and I visited him playing in basement bars along the seine.

He discovered his brothers and sisters didn’t all have the same parents; and learned too much
about the Nazi regime in Austria, where he was born, and where, in Linz, he planned to create a
capital museum of the world with stolen artworks from Jews and others.

I met Wolf in Linz several times because I served on the Ars Electronica jury for several years. I
remember doing things with him that are important but insignificant.

I wouldn’t say he was “at peace with himself,” but he achieved Jungian “wholeness”.

Jungian psychology, also known as analytical psychology, is a psychotherapeutic approach
based on the idea that true mental health comes from a balance between the conscious and
unconscious mind. 

The goal of Jungian therapy is to help people integrate the unconscious into their conscious
experience, and to achieve a state of wholeness. It can be used to treat a variety of mental
health conditions, including anxiety, depression, grief, stress, relationship issues, low self-
esteem, and trauma.

I, myself, am not a Jungian but thank you Wolf for being my friend for 18,253 days, 438,000
hours, 26,280,000 seconds, 1,752,023 moments of attention.

I have been working on the concept of dis-remembering with a colleague, Thom Kubli, in Berlin,
as well as the idea of sonic thinking. The idea of dis-remembering came to me through a
conversation with Rick Bretell, former director of the Dallas Museum of Art, who had visited Wolf
and me in Paris to convince me to take a position as professor at University of Texas at Dallas.

When Bretell learning my family connections about Gyorgy Kepes he told me something that is
not in any of Kepes’s biographies (all the Kepes books are in our living room at No. 17).

It turned out that Kepes had lived for a couple of years in Denton, Texas, about 50 miles from
where I am working now. Rick said that because Kepes was Jewish, he had had to live on the
other side of the tracks in Denton, with the African-Americans and poor whites. And to teach he
had to cross over the tracks on foot to go lecture in the classroom.

Wolf’s whole life was on the other side of some tracks, but he was whole. He had a Nazi father
and polygamous mother. Was rescued by Mormons but was a Jungian atheist. He cared and
helped refugee children. He engaged in sonic thinking on the bridges of Paris to become whole.

The sun is shining in Dallas in the office tower I am breakfasting in.
Roger Malina

Written in the High Tower café,  https://maps.app.goo.gl/Ff6ku3ykgvjkcmV2A(link is external)

Hymn for Wolf

Verse 1
By fate, by chance, by threads unseen,
Through time and tide, you walked serene.
A friend in moments, calm or wild,
With laughter purish as a wandering child.
You never grew angry, though life could sting,
You carried the weight without a fling.
When Al locked you out beneath desert skies,
You walked away without goodbyes.

Chorus
Oh, Wolf, you lived without regret,
A soul we never will forget.
With humor, heart, and hands so kind,
You left your mark on many minds.

Verse 2
In refugee camps where schools were raised,
You gave your strength, your hands, your days.
From Habitat’s walls to a Parisian night,
On a billiard table, clothed in light.
In San Francisco, on that veranda bar,
With a young Swiss friend beneath the stars.
Even her parents’ fury and glare,
Couldn’t dim the joy you shared there.

Chorus
Oh, Wolf, you lived with few regrets,
A un Christian “soul we never will forget.
With humor, heart, and hands so kind,
You left your mark on many minds.

Verse 3
Devout not to gods, but dreams and lore,
A Jungian sage who sought life’s core.
Symbols and shadows, you loved to explore,
With one-legged Johnny, you laughed all the more.
Longevity, trust, no anger, just grace,
You taught us all how to embrace
A life lived free, a curious quest,
In every moment, you gave your best.

Chorus
Oh, Wolf, you lived without too many regrets,
A dis-soul we never will forget.
With humor, heart, and hands so kind,
You left your mark on every mind.

Verse 4
And now we stand with grief and cheer,
For though you’re gone, you still feel near.
By synchronicity, Bohm would say,
You’re woven in life in a timeless way.
To Klemens, to Alan, to friends you knew,
To all whom your generous spirit grew.
Wolfy, you lived a life so wide,
With every step, you walked in stride.

Final Chorus
Oh, Wolf, you lived without regret,
A soul we never will forget.
With humor, heart, and hands so kind,
You left your mark on many minds.