Schlitten (sledge) (Schellmann 12)

One of Joseph Beuys' most iconic art works, Schlitten presents a wooden sledge with fat, felt and a torch light strapped to it. A metaphoric survival kit, the flashlight represents the sense of orientation, felt for protection and fat for food. The elements of Schlitten are fragments intrinsically linked to the core of Beuys' personal narrative and symbolic universe, his now mythologised near-death experience during the Second World War. Beuys had joined the Luftwaffe in 1940 and trained as a Stuka pilot. While flying over the Crimea in 1943, his plane came down during a snowstorm and, according to the artist, he as the only survivor had been rescued from certain death by nomadic Tartars who had brought warmth back to his body by rubbing fat onto it and wrapping it in felt. As he regained consciousness, the smell of the fat and the texture of the felt became ingrained in his memory, subsequently becoming a central feature in his most important works, such as Das Rudel (The Pack), in Neue Galerie in Kassel.

'The most direct kind of movement over the earth is the sliding of the iron runners of the sleds... This relationship between feet and earth is made in many sculptures, which always run along the ground. Each sled carries its own survival kit: the flashlight represents the sense of orientation, then felt for protection, and fat is food.' (Joseph Beuys, quoted in C. Tisdale, Joseph Beuys, exh.cat., the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 1979, p. 190)