This text has been translated with DeepL (www.deepl.com).

Wolfgang Eilenberger

I. The Appearance of the Revealed

Two sheep stand in the pasture. A long, ruminating silence. Suddenly, one says: ‘Baa!’ And the other: ‘Hey, that’s exactly what I was about to say.’

This joke sprang to mind when, at the end of February, with the days still dark, I dared for the first time to check which of Bach’s cantatas had been assigned to me for Trogen: ‘Hear, O Shepherd of Israel’. Good heavens, dear curator Barbara Bleisch, I thought: spare me this cup of reflection!

Israel, shepherding, servitude, pleading for divine tribal protection. In spring 2026, of all times. And me, of all people.

For, if there is one theme that has kept me intellectually engaged over the past years and decades, it has been the question of which ways of speaking and listening might well be capable of freeing us from a state of servitude akin to that of sheep – and raising us to a state of self-determined maturity. Or, to put it in other words that have become quite sacred to me: how might we achieve a ‘way out of self-imposed immaturity’? As Kant put it, this is also known as the Enlightenment.

Enlightenment – the exodus of the human race from Arcadia.

It’s so easy to slip back into self-imposed immaturity, into the eerie comfort of the herd. All you really have to do is stop thinking for yourself; stop wanting to speak with your own voice, to hear with your own ears. And instead, say over and over again: ‘Hey, that’s exactly what I was about to say.’

II. Apparently, deaf

Well then: ‘O Shepherd of Israel, hear!’

If one listens to the cantata a second time, and with a more benevolent ear, it is not primarily about servile submission. Rather, it is about people who turn to a higher power with the plea that it should appear once more. He – It – had, then, already shown himself before. And indeed, without having been specifically called upon, but unexpectedly. As the event of His revelation!

Such things apparently happen, now and then. And when they do, something genuinely new – or indeed genuinely old – enters our world. Something sublime – for which we have yet to find the appropriate words and sounds, concepts or melodies.

We as the human race must surely have gone completely to the dogs, become completely deaf, not to be able to perceive such events any longer.

III. False Friends

You notice it, I notice it: the temptation, on the occasion of this pastoral by Bach, to slip into the pastoral mode oneself is enormous. Just as Germans, as experience shows, especially abroad, tend to preach moral sermons to others. To become, as it were, the ‘pastor alemán’.

Please forgive this loose association with the ‘pastor alemán’. But I am, in fact, writing these lines, this reflection, in Spain. More precisely, in an Andalusian village where, in just a few hours’ time – it is Good Friday – men wearing white lace hoods will be carrying altars weighing several tonnes through the narrow streets. The Passion of Christ. From my terrace, I can already hear the brass bands.

Above all, however, ‘pastor alemán’ is a prime example of what linguists call a ‘false friend’. In other words, an expression that threatens to mislead you when you first hear it. For the correct translation of this Spanish phrase is not ‘German pastor’, but ‘German shepherd dog’.

For the topic we’re discussing today, that certainly makes all the difference. For we all know from our own experience that where there is talk of benevolent shepherds, controlling surveillance tends to prevail. That where the lambs are promised boundless pastures, the butcher is already waiting behind the gate. And where the vigilant freedom of a Christian is formulated as an ideal, in truth dog-like obedience remains the requirement.

IV. On the maturity of dogs

Could it be a coincidence that the dog – this supposed ‘man’s best friend’ – is portrayed in our cultural circles as a creature as immature as it is godless? As an animal with which no thinking being would voluntarily swap places. I am now going to tell you something that one should otherwise only confide to one’s therapist: personally, I would sometimes quite like to swap. Recently, even more and more often. With dogs, I mean. Sometimes I even think I am one myself (just in the wrong body), or at least that I once was, in a previous reincarnation.

In any case, my daily life is shaped by the experience that the dogs I come across almost without exception seem far more likeable, attentive and even more self-assured than the people I meet. Like kindred spirits.

Just look at the phenotypic diversity of this genus! More varied than that of any other species on earth. In other words: dogs are born pluralists! And, bearing that in mind, have you ever wondered how a common wire-haired dachshund manages to instantly recognise and accept, say, a fully-grown female Great Dane as one of its own? Any guinea pig, any fox would, it would seem, be closer to it. And yet it manages it. A true, everyday miracle! Quite clearly, dogs possess an unerring instinct for their fellow creatures. And one that has absolutely nothing to do with human concepts and classifications, indeed is virtually immune to them.

Let’s call it: a form of supreme, language-free certainty of recognition. Which, incidentally, also applies to the dog’s relationship with humans.

V. Bobby, the Kantian

The most famous reflection on dogs in post-war Western philosophy also deals with this kind of unconditional, non-conceptual recognition. It was penned by the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas and stems from his time as a prisoner of war in a camp in northern Germany. In this camp too, Stalag XI-B, the Jewish prisoners were separated from their French comrades-in-arms and labelled with the abbreviation PJ (for: prisonnier juif). Marked in this way, Lévinas recalls, ‘even to the children and women of the neighbouring village, we were no longer regarded as part of their world’, ‘but as beings’ who were ‘imprisoned in their very own species’.

With the exception of a stray sheepdog crossbreed, who greeted the prisoners with a wagging tail every morning on their way to their work assignments, and again every evening when the guards led them back to the camp. Only Bobby, as the prisoners soon christened him, still saw them for what they were. And so, for the few precious moments of his appearance, he restored to them a sense of their own dignity . “Without his brain needing any maxims or generalisations of its own, Bobby was the last remaining Kantian in Nazi Germany,” Lévinas concludes his recollection. “For him, there was no doubt that we were human beings.”

Throughout his life, Lévinas was a true shepherd, a true friend of Israel. Like Bobby the dog, quite clearly, a true friend of humanity.

VI. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

No living creature can perceive everything with all its senses. That is why we need our diversity. And however keen their ears may be, dogs, for example, pay for their infallible sense of smell with a sheer incomprehensible deafness to the sublimity of music – in particular: classical music. Such as: the music of Bach. It is of no concern to them, does not move them. My own canine soul, if I may be so frank, also suffers from such a limitation. Or rather, it suffered from it for a very long time. Until, a good two and a half years ago, a sort of epiphany occurred regarding Bach, and a gateway opened up for me into the wordless realm of truth within his art.

It happened in Bethlehem. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Bethlehem is one of those small American towns, with a population of just over 70,000, which American election analysts keep a particularly close eye on every four years. This is because it lies at the heart of a so-called battleground state: 50% Republican, 50% Democrat. You’re no doubt familiar with the saying: ‘As goes Pennsylvania, so goes the nation.’ And demographically, Bethlehem is an almost perfect reflection of this state.

Bethlehem was founded in the mid-18th century by the so-called Herrnhuters, or Moravians; a Anabaptist-Protestant denomination that still exists today, whose members once set out from Bohemia for the New World. As if they had drawn their political convictions from Bach’s Pastoral Cantata BWV 104, they sought to build a new Arcadia there. This meant: renouncing private property, organising their community into so-called ‘choirs’, living as strict pacifists, and resisting all forms of slavery and the extermination of Indigenous peoples.

To this day, stones bearing Indigenous names can be found on the flat graves of Bethlehem’s cemetery, right next to those of the Hutterites. It is also more than mere legend that second-generation Moravians played a decisive role when the Declaration of Independence was drafted and adopted in nearby Philadelphia in 1776. To this day, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, home to the oldest and finest Bach choir in the USA, is populated exclusively by local residents.

VII. A New Hope

So there I sat, a German visitor, listening to this choir as they rehearsed. Ninety of them, as they say, perfectly ordinary American men and women. With grace and intense concentration, they brought Bach’s music to life. I felt like crying, so sublime was it. For that was, quite clearly, the best conceivable version of this land of the free; that was the sound of the united, polyphonic States of America. That is how it could be. That is what was hoped for. ‘E pluribus unum.’

As I said: two and a half years and another presidential election have passed since that new beginning. Or – depending on how you count – two and a half centuries.

Let me nevertheless, or perhaps precisely for that reason, conclude on a note of hope. The cantata ‘Du Hirte Israel, höre’ was first performed on 23 April 1724, Misericordias Domini – Shepherds’ Sunday. Exactly two weeks after Easter, Bach has his ‘ ’ (Leipzig Shepherds) ask the Most High and Sublime One to appear once more: ‘Appear, thou who sittest above the cherubim!’

What Bach could not have known on that Sunday, any more than any other mortal: the shepherds’ plea had once again been answered just a few hours earlier. A new child had been born into the human race. He lay frail in the manger, barely able to breathe, with his strangely sunken chest, which was indeed to cause him great distress throughout his life. Perhaps that is why his parents chose to name him ‘God be with us’. Or rather: Immanuel.

No invention. No fake. It really happened, yes, ‘I will sing of the Lord’s mercy for evermore’.

On the evening of Saturday, 22 April 1724, Immanuel Kant was born in the East Prussian city of Königsberg, now known as Kaliningrad. And with him came thoughts so clear and enlightening that no human being had ever before expressed them. A sublime, unconditional law found voice through him. A law that claimed to stand far above all cherubim; endowed with the power to transcend all the boundaries we had previously drawn, as well as the hope of binding every human spirit in free self-determination. Because of its perceived absoluteness for us, Kant also called this law the categorical imperative. It is the most sublime thing we can know: in its clearest formulation, it reads: O shepherds of Israel, hear!

‘Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.’

As an invocation, this radically universal, Enlightenment-era law still appears so obviously correct and groundbreaking today that one might even read it as a kind of revelation. And indeed one ought to. To find, once more, a way out of the darkness of our own time. To be there for one another in peace.

VIII. The Ram

Ah, I, an old German billy goat – now it has turned into a moral lecture after all.

That’s what you wanted to say, isn’t it?