Aftermath

Karl Hofer, Ruinennacht (Night of Ruins), 1947

Georg Heym, Die Stadt (1911)

Sehr weit ist diese Nacht. Und Wolkenschein
Zerreißet vor des Mondes Untergang.
Und tausend Fenster stehn die Nacht entlang
Und blinzeln mit den Lidern, rot und klein.

Wie Aderwerk gehn Straßen durch die Stadt,
Unzählig Menschen schwemmen aus und ein.
Und ewig stumpfer Ton von stumpfem Sein
Eintönig kommt heraus in Stille matt.

Gebären, Tod, gewirktes Einerlei,
Lallen der Wehen, langer Sterbeschrei,
Im blinden Wechsel geht es dumpf vorbei.

Und Schein und Feuer, Fackeln rot und Brand,
Die drohn im Weiten mit gezückter Hand
Und scheinen hoch von dunkler Wolkenwand.

Bernhard Klein, Berlin 1943 (Burning City), 1947

Georg Heym, The War (1911, last two stanzas)

An important city, chocked in yellow glow,
jumped without a whisper to the depths below,
while he stands, a giant, over glowing urns,
wild, in bloody heavens, thrice his torch he turns 

over stormstrung clouds reflecting fiery brands,
to the deadly dark of frigid desert sands,
down he pours the fires, withering the night,
phosphorus and brimstone on Gomorrha bright.

Adrian Ghenie, Jumping off the Reichstag, 2008 


Georg Heym, Der Krieg (1911, last two stanzas)

Eine große Stadt versank in gelbem Rauch,
Warf sich lautlos in des Abgrunds Bauch.
Aber riesig über glühnden Trümmern steht
Der in wilde Himmel dreimal seine Fackel dreht,

Über sturmzerfetzter Wolken Widerschein,
In des toten Dunkels kalten Wüstenein,
Daß er mit dem Brande weit die Nacht verdorr,
Pech und Feuer träufet unten auf Gomorrh. 

 

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Book Cover for Georg Heym's "Umbra Vitae", 1924

 

Walter Gramatté

 Walter Gramatté, Self-Portrait with Red Moon, 1926

Walter Gramatté was born 1897 in Berlin. He served in the German army during World War I but was released from military duty in 1915 due to poor health. In the same year he enrolled at the Königliche Kunstschule des Kunstgewerbemuseums in Berlin and became a friend of Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

Walter Gramatté, Funeral, 1917

In the 1920s, Gramatté produced many oil paintings and watercolors but he was particularly interested in experimenting with etchings, woodcuts, lithographs and drypoints. Most of his work is portraiture and he created 200 self-portraits and 120 studies of his wife, Sonia. 

 Walter Gramatté, The Man on the Skid, 1920

Sonia married again after Gramatté's death, was then named Sophie Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté and lived in Canada as a renowned musician. To remember her and her former husband Walter Gramatté The Eckhardt-Gramatté-Foundation was established in Winnipeg, Canada (you can see more of his works there).

Walter Gramatté, Portrait Rosa Schapire, 1920

Tragically, Walter Gramatté suffered from continuous poor health and died in 1929 at the age of thirty-two. In 1932, a memorial exhibition opened at the Art Association in Hamburg and then travelled to nine other cities in Germany before it was closed prematurely by the Nazis because they considered his work "degenerate". A special exhibition of his paintings with the title Rediscovered: Walter Gramatté 1897-1929 took place in Hamburg's Ernst Barlach Haus in 2009. You can see more of his work in my Flickr set.

Arthur Segal

Arthur Segal (1875-1944) was born to jewish parents in Jassy, Romania. In 1892 Segal studies at the Academy of Art in Berlin, taking master classes with Eugen Bracht. Two years later he continues his studies at the Académie Julien in Paris, attending Ludwig Schmid-Reutte and Friedrich Fehr’s painting school in Munich one year later, after which he takes up studies with Carl von Marr at the Academy of Art in Munich, where he is active as a freelancer from 1899 before moving to Berlin in 1904 and taking part in the 1909 and 1913 exhibitions of the Berliner Secession. His first woodcuts are published in Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm in 1911, followed a year later by an exhibition in Walden’s eponymous art gallery. 

Arthur Segal, Der Sündenfall (Fall of Man), 1920

In 1914 he emigrates to Ascona and becomes acquainted with Hans Arp, Alexei von Jawlensky, Hugo Ball, and Leonhard Frank. In 1916 he has an exhibition at the Cabaret Voltaire of the Zurich Dadaists, returning in 1920 to Berlin where he opens his own painting school, with Nikolaus Braun and Lou Albert-Lasard among his students. He is a member of the Novembergruppe (November Group), being on its board of directors for some time and repeatedly participating in the group’s exhibitions from 1921 to 1931. His Berlin studio is the place of regular meetings of Adolf Behne, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters, and George Grosz. Together with Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Käthe Kollwitz among others he is active in the trade unions’ campaign "For an eight-hour-day". In 1925 he is the co-publisher with Nikolaus Braun of the treatise "Lichtprobleme der Bildenden Kunst" (On the Problem of Light in the Fine Arts). In 1933 he emigrates to Mallorca and three years later to London where he opens a painting school. In 1944 he dies of heart failure during a bombing raid of the German Luftwaffe.

Nikolaus Braun

Nikolaus Braun (Miklos Bela) was a German/Hungarian artist and sculptor who was born in 1900. In 1920 he became a student of Arthur Segal at his painting studio in Berlin. Segal and Braun were members of the Novembergruppe (November Group) and the studio of Segal was a regular meeting place for artists like Adolf Behne, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters and George Grosz. Braun exhibited with the November Group from 1923 on. Both, Segal and Braun were also associated with Der Sturm (The Storm) and the December Gallery.

 Nikolaus Braun, Berlin street scene, 1921

In 1924, Braun participated in the First German Art Exhibition in Moscow. In 1925, Braun and Segal published a treatise entitled, “Lichtprobleme der Bildenden Kunst” (On the Problem of Light in the Fine Arts). This volume was an exploration of the meaning of light and form in their work. This book is extremely rare and only four copies are known to be in libraries worldwide. Both , teacher and student were strongly influenced by Viking Eggeling’s early film experiments. In 1924, Braun and Segal, along with Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo Peri, Erno Kallai and Alfred Kemeny were in attendance at Eggeling’s presentation of the Diagonal Symphony. In 1938 Braun emigrated to Budapest and later, in 1949, he moved to the United States. He died in New York in 1950.

Otto Dix - Street Fight

Otto Dix, Street Fight, 1927

This painting was destroyed in 1945. There is an interesting collection of "Lost Art" here. You can see more paintings by Otto Dix here on my Flickr page.

August Sander The Painter Otto Dix and his Wife Martha, 1925

Max Radler

 Max Radler, Radio Listener, 1930

Max Radler (1904-1971) was born in Wrocław. Until 1918 he was an apprentice to a carpenter shop in Oppeln (Upper Silesia). Subsequently he was trained as a decoration painter in Zeitz, Saxony. In 1923 Radler settled in Munich where he painted theatre decorations and studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule under Georg Schrimpf and Otto Grassl. 

 Max Radler, Cityscape, 1930

In 1930 Radler joined the artist group Die Juryfreien. Nearly all his works were destroyed during a bombing raid in 1945. After the war Radler became a regular contributor for the satirical magazine Simplizissimus for which, in 1946, he produced this remarkable illustration about the "white-wash" of "former" Nazis:

Max Radler, Black becomes White, Automatic De-Nazification, 1946

It was published together with the following poem by J. Menter:

Springt immer rein! Was kann euch schon passieren,
Ihr schwarzen Böcke aus dem braunen Haus!
Man wird euch schmerzlos rehabilitieren.
Als weiße Lämmer kommt ihr unten raus.
Wir wissen schon: Ihr seid es nie gewesen!
(Die andern sind ja immer schuld daran – –)
Wie schnell zum Guten wandeln sich die Bösen,
Man schwarz auf weiß im Bild hier sehen kann.

More paintings by Radler are here on my Flickr page.

Franz Radziwill

 Otto Dix, Portrait of the Painter Franz Radziwill, 1928

Franz Radziwill (1895-1983) was born as the first of seven children in Strohausen near Rodenkirchen on th e lower Weser on 6 February 1895. Before turning to art Franz Radziwill first completed an apprenticeship as a brick-layer from 1909 to 1913. He studied architecture at the "Höhere Technische Staatslehranstalt" in Bremen until 1915 and also attended evening classes in figure drawing at the "Kunstgewerbeschule". 

Franz Radziwill, Beach of Dangast with Flying Boat, 1929

He was introduced to artist circles in Fischerhude and Worpswede by his teacher Karl Schwally, where Franz Radziwill met Bernhard Hoetger, Otto Modersohn, Heinrich Vogeler and Clara Rilke-Westhoff. He also studied works by Van Gogh, Cézanne and Chagall.

Franz Radziwill, Conversation about a Paragraph, 1929

After returning from a British prisoner-of-war camp in 1919 Radziwill settled in Berlin for a couple of years where he joined the Freie Secession and the Novembergruppe. He moved to Dangast on the North Sea in 1923, and had his first one-man exhibition in Oldenburg two years later, in 1925. In the same year, Franz Radziwill increasingly abandoned the Expressionist style of his early work. He developed a friendship with Otto Dix in this year, who introduced him to the "Neue Sachlichkeit" circles and worked together with Dix in his studio in Dresden until 1928.

Franz Radziwill, The Strike, 1931

He participated in the large "Neue Sachlichkeit" exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1929. Radziwill joined the NSDAP in 1933 and took over Paul Klee's chair at the Düsseldorf Akademie. However, the Nazis forced him to resign two years later and banned him from practising his profession. He fought in the war a second time from 1939 to 1945 and then returned to his house in Dangast, where he began painting religious subjects. 

 Franz Radziwill, Total War, 1939

The Oldenburg Kunstverein organised a large exhibition of Radziwill's work on his sixtieth birthday, which toured sixteen German cities. The artist was awarded the Villa-Massimo Prize in 1963 and spent some time in Rome. Around the mid 1960s Franz Radziwill began changing his older works by painting over them. The two most important exhibitions during the last decade of his life were the jubilee exhibitions on his eightieth birthday at the Landesmuseum Oldenburg (1975) and the so-far largest retrospective exhibition, with four hundred works, at the "Staatliche Kunsthalle" Berlin (1981). 

 Franz Radziwill, Alter Friedhof vor der Werft, 1954

More paintings by Franz Radziwill can be seen here on my Flickr page.