Descriptions of Wohl vary a great deal. Indeed the few we have tend to contradict each other. The most detailed comes from the diary of April Ponsard, a student in Paris during the mid-1950s. She’d been to a seminar given by Sartre at the Sorbonne. After a long and rather rambling disquisition on the unethical behaviour of those who did not take responsibility for their own choices in life, Sartre asked for questions. Two students leapt in with convoluted and poorly prepared queries that the sage dealt with in a cursory and almost brutal manner.

Ponsard writes: ‘As he smoked his second cigarette the room became very quiet and the still air seemed to solidify around us. I noticed in one corner, slightly separate from us, a shabbily dressed but very elegant figure. His short grey hair, receding around two deep bays, framed an unruffled brow, a firm nose and a neat faintly-smiling mouth. A grey moustache and goatee beard completed a picture of someone alert, sensitive and rather removed. A kind of familiar strangeness hung about him. Part of this strangeness was the clarity of his eyes, almost the colour of dry hay in vivid sunshine, and the oriental set of his features. But he wasn’t Chinese or Mongolian or Korean because he spoke French with a German or an English accent, but he could have been a cousin to Li Po or Tu Fu.’

Ponsard describes the growing embarrassment of Sartre’s audience as no one spoke and the master waited. Eventually the familiar stranger slowly nodded his head and spoke softly: ‘Sometimes we have to accept choices that are made for us. The apple falling on a particular day and hour did not choose the head of Newton upon which to fall. The child does not choose a mother, but loves her nonetheless. The poet does not choose his muse or the dream that fuels his poem. The teacher does not choose her pupils but lavishes care upon them all. The philosopher does not choose his audience but they have chosen him and so often go away disappointed.’

At which point Sartre stubbed his cigarette on the plastic tabletop and took a gulp of water from the glass before him. All eyes were on the stranger who nodded gently, smiled very sweetly and turned to leave.

Sartre at his most caustic called out: “And who my friend, are you?” To which the stranger replied, courteously: “I am from another country. A fact over which I have no choice. My name is Wohl and I choose to leave. Au revoir.”

Sartre sneered as he often did and asked for more questions. But there were none that could be spoken. But silent questions were in everyone’s minds: who was the polite stranger with the endearing smile? where did he come from? and why was Sartre so irritated at what he’d said?’

Ponsard notes a few pages on in her diary that she met a librarian two weeks later who’d also been at the seminar and recognised the stranger as ‘Heinrich Wohl, a poor scholar and itinerant philosopher from somewhere outside France.’

On the back of an old photograph, perhaps a Venetian montage, Wohl has written: ‘we all live in the shadows under a bridge between here and there, between now and then, between this world and another. We yearn to cross over the bridge. But the bridge is only a reflection formed by shadows on water.’

A rare verbal snapshot of Wohl comes from a concierge at a small ivy-walled Paris hotel who remembered, ‘an oriental German who spoke French like an Englishman. Always courteous, very tidy and quiet, but never seeming as if he belonged.’

A gallery owner in Rotterdam remembered, ‘the inscrutable smile of Herr Wohl and the clear eyes that noticed everything’. A wealthy couple, who held dinner parties for ‘interesting’ characters they and their friends met on their travels, remarked on the curious well-mannered guest who sat through three such parties, eating sparingly and listening intently, but never saying a word, except ‘good evening’ and ‘goodbye’.

Wohl is reported as occasionally taking on the persona of an amateur painter. He was seen in Paris and Amsterdam at well-known tourist spots making paintings which were never completed. Most of his time seemed to be spent in long conversations with passers-by, who complimented him on his technique but were puzzled by his reluctance to finish anything. One or two brave souls asked if they could buy a painting, offering quite large sums for a completed work. Wohl’s response was on each occasion the same. He quietly pulled from his paint box a heavy old pistol and fired it into the air, saying he would shoot himself if he ever saw them again. Not surprisingly these transactions, like the paintings, were never completed.

Amongst Wohl’s papers there’s a passage torn from Chesterton’s small book on St. Francis. Written on the obverse side, in an excited scrawl, is the following short note. It casts a faint light on the process whereby Wohl’s writings and thoughts emerged out of his readings of an odd assortment of sources:

There was not a rag of him left, only a foolishness – a small fool maybe – but a ragged fool, luminous with unknowing, speechless with feathered sense of light and transparency. In a world hanged upon nothing what can be written except in invisible ink on paperless pages? We cannot say. Writing is a beautiful pretence, a foolish pleasure, a small building of walls to catch the dust and light.

It is possible that Joseph Beuys’ ‘coyote’ action of 1974, in which he lives with a wild coyote in a New York gallery for a few days, was inspired by Wohl’s experiment with a spider in the mid-sixties. He is reported to have spent 24 hours in a dark cupboard with a live tarantula. Friends who maintained a vigil beside the cupboard in Wohl’s flat could only remember one unusual incident during the event. About halfway through the ordeal Wohl was suddenly heard to recite Blake’s ‘Tyger, Tyger, burning bright…’ in perfect English. This was followed by versions in French, German, Italian and rather poor Spanish.

When he emerged 12 hours later, unharmed but hungry, he pointed out that the spider, which spent most of the time rubbing its body against Wohl’s neck, seemed to make no distinction between the 5 versions of the poem. The broad grin which accompanied this information did not obscure a puzzled furrowing of the brow, which suggested Wohl himself thought his joke had a potentially serious dimension.

Interestingly Wohl always stored his books with their spines to the wall claiming that it made for more adventurous reading, and just as you should never read the title of a painting before looking at the painting itself, book titles should always be placed on the last page of the book, ‘where they do least damage’. He was once caught carefully removing the titles of pictures from gallery walls in a public museum in Munich. After a brief but polite protest he was ejected from the building. Two weeks later he was caught in the same gallery in the act of sticking back the titles he had removed on top of titles that were already on the walls. Needless to say he was carefully replacing the correct titles with incorrect ones. Brought before a local magistrate and amidst much laughter Wohl said quietly he had been performing a public service for which he intended making no charge. The good-humoured magistrate let him off with only a warning.

One day in late April 1971 I was astonished to receive a note in a re-used envelope with a London postmark. On a small sheet of crumpled paper I read the following type-written note: ‘Interested to hear of your interest in my work. I’m in the UK for a month researching moths & clouds. If you wish I could perhaps give a talk at your art school. In the spirit of Sherlock Holmes please post a note for me in the personal column of the Guardian newspaper and suggest a date for my visit. I will contact you again in due course. Heinrich Wohl’. At first I assumed it was one of my friends, but they all denied any involvement and I realised I had only mentioned Wohl to two close friends who I trusted completely. It seemed impossible that he could have heard about my interest in his work, let alone find out where I lived and be curious enough to want to contact me. I was a nobody and he had argued with Sartre for God’s sake! But I kept thinking, hardly anyone knows about him, perhaps he’s pleased to hear of my solitary advocacy for his ideas, maybe he’s never been to Wales and this is a remotely plausible reason for a visit.

After a few days I decided I had nothing to lose by putting a brief ad in the Guardian. I wrote: ‘Herr Wohl, thank you for your note. We would be honoured if you could speak at a symposium here on the 8th May. We could pay your expenses and a small fee. Best wishes, JD’. Over the next few days I waited and read each day’s personal ads over and over again. But there was nothing. I began to realise that it had all been a practical joke and I racked my brains trying to work out who could have done it. Then, a few days before the event, I received a telegram from London: ‘ARRIVE CARDIFF STATION 1500 THURSDAY WEARING SPOTTED TIE PLEASED TO PARTICIPATE IN SYMPOSIUM GOOD WISHES HEINRICH WOHL’.

The next few days passed in a blur of imagined meetings, handshakes and introductory speeches to the symposium crowd. But, as I should have guessed, all my imaginings were short-lived and in vain. Wohl didn’t arrive. His absence was nevertheless the pivotal moment in the symposium. I delivered a short nervous statement about Wohl and his work. I read out his telegram. For years afterwards, on the odd occasions when we met, friends and acquaintances from those days would ask me about Wohl. Had I heard from him? Was he still alive? Where could they get his book? But I had heard nothing more from my enigmatic correspondent and I have no idea what became of him. But his absence is profound and occasionally I come across brief sayings of his which I add to my small collection. One day I might try to publish an account of how I nearly met him and how important he has been to me.

This site is dedicated to the memory of Heinrich Wohl – sceptic, mystic & provocateur.

I will use the blog to post further notes and quotes about Wohl from the material I have collected over the years and to which I still add as I find occasional scraps of information and thoughtful remarks.

I hope you will find the archive to be of interest and that you will return to the site from time to time.

For more information please read the about page and the biographical notes.