The KLEINERVONWIESE gallery is opening its new rooms in the Villa Erxleben in Berlin Grünewald with the exhibition “bonum et malum”.

The monumental and simultaneously playful Wilhelminian period building from the year 1907, with its magnificent park, is the size of a grand collector’s villa. It is debatable, however, whether it was ever such a building, for the traces of its once very affluent owner, the banker Julius Erxleben, have faded over time.

A personal relic from his life is an ex libris he applied to the works in his library. It shows the Tree of Knowledge rooted in old books and the snake winding round the tree trunk. Similarly, a banner, high up in the air, snakes round the tree, bearing the prophecy from the snake’s mouth: “Eritis sicut deus scientes bonum et malum” – You will be like God, knowing good and evil. In those turbulent, exploratory years of the Wilhelmine period at the beginning of the last century, Julius Erxleben chose this precise passage from Genesis as his favourite: “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.” A kind of guarantee, which Goethe’s Mephisto also wrote in his student’s album.

A self-fulfilling prophecy, we would say today. Because today we really are like God, and perhaps we’ve even gone a step further. On our incessant hunt for the lost Paradise, we paint good and evil grey – just as we do with gender – and we are therefore both: simultaneously liberating and destructive and courageous and arrogant. We eat muck, but are otherwise liberal and unisex, living through the Anthropocene together, in next to no time, godlike.

An age that bears no resemblance to any that has gone before, and in which the human being threatens to celebrate his future existence in a self-created, global cesspit, surrounded by recycled air, recycled water and recycled earth! And in fact as a sensitively constructed, hybrid being consisting of natural and artificial intelligence with an everyday mixture of digital and virtual reality, whose predominantly white male existence, lengthened to 200 earth years – and, on top of that, expanded to include a pixel avatar –, will be lived out within a precisely calculated glass radius.

The next question is: “Is this the end of temptation?”

But in the passage he chose from Genesis, was it perhaps the snake that Julius Erxleben, a man who did not hide his wealth, liked best of all? And did he also like the fact that Eve’s curiosity was stronger than her fear of punishment? Perhaps he also liked, above all, the idea that God had created much more than Paradise?

This is what we read as his very personal logo. Because an ex libris is nothing other than this. It signals the mindset of the person who uses it. Similar to the motto we attach to our WhatsApp or Linkedin account today.

We do not know today whether the prediction from Genesis was met with enthusiasm by Julius Erxleben, or whether it actually made him feel melancholic. The fact is that he seemed to attach great importance to it.

“You will be like God, knowing good and evil”, says the snake, holding the apple out to Eve, who cannot help but bite into it. And then God expels Adam and Eve from Paradise. At least, that’s how the story we all know goes.

But what if the Fall from Grace actually liberated Adam and Eve? Liberated them from the enclosure of Paradise and redeemed them from the eternal symmetry of harmony?