Karl Goetz

This article deals with the medalist Karl Goetz. For other people see Karl Götz and Carl Goetz .

Karl Xaver Goetz (born June 28, 1875 in Augsburg , † September 8, 1950 in Munich ) was a German medalist .

Life

Karl Goetz was born in Augsburg and began training there at the age of 13 with the engraver Johannes Dominal. His journeyman's pieces were awarded by the city of Augsburg in 1892. Learned as a journeyman and Goetz worked at the mill until 1897 in Dresden , Leipzig , Berlin and Dusseldorf . After two years in Utrecht , he lived in Paris for five years before moving to Munich in 1904, where he lived until his death in 1950. Goetz was a member of the Munich Artists' Cooperative and the Numismatic Association. On April 27, 1912, Goetz married Margarete Stangl. The three children Guido, Brunhilde and Gertrud came from the marriage.

Work

Early work

In the 40 years of his work, Goetz produced a total of 633 medals, some of which were distributed in large editions. He often created the early works of the prewar period in Paris in the style of French Art Nouveau , especially portraits of people from the bourgeoisie, such as doctors, industrialists or church figures. These medals are considered to be his most artistically valuable, but are less well known today than his later propaganda work . In his first years in Munich, Goetz worked with the expressionist Ludwig Gies , among others . In many of his private works, such as his wedding medal or his birthday medal from 1935, Goetz expressed his attachment to his hometown Augsburg by depicting a stone pine nut . In Munich, Goetz often worked for Augsburg clients and designed, for example, the mold for a 195 gram bronze medal with the portrait of Bishop Maximilian von Lingg (1905), a bronze cast plaque for the Augsburg gymnastics teacher Josef Georg Grotz in the year of his death (1906) or the medal for the 100th anniversary of the Lotzbeck'schen Tabakfabrik Augsburg (1912).

The "satirical medals"

During the First World War , Goetz increasingly turned to war propaganda. From 1913 to 1923 he created a series of 82 medals, now known as the " satirical medals," which comprise his most famous works. These medals are assigned to Expressionism and always served the pointed dissemination of a political statement. The spectrum ranges from the obvious glorification of German achievements to exaggeration of ridicule. Some of his medals clearly have racist traits. His embossing “The Black Shame” (1920) shows a bound woman; on the other side the caricatured head of an African soldier is shown. The propaganda was directed against the African units of the French army deployed in the occupation of the Rhineland .

Sinking of the Lusitania , medal from Karl Goetz

Goetz's best-known work is the Lusitania Medal, which shows the sinking of the passenger ship RMS Lusitania by German submarines on May 7, 1915. Goetz mistakenly marked May 5, 1915 as the date of the torpedoing . Originally, the coinage was a purely private initiative by Goetz, which only came into being in 1916 and initially only comprised a few hundred pieces. However, when a copy was discovered by the British Foreign Office and a picture published in the New York Times caused a sensation, the British government decided to use the medal for counter-propaganda. By the early date, the sinking of the civilian ship, in which almost 1,200 people died, should be presented as a planned attack. Over 300,000 imprints were issued, which can be recognized by the English spelling “May” for the month of May. A version with a corrected date was then reissued on the German side. The Lusitania Medal is part of many museum collections worldwide, such as the Imperial War Museum , the National Maritime Museum or the Australian War Memorial . Other well-known works by Goetz from the “satirical series” are, for example, the “Mousetrap Medal”, which is dedicated to the 14-point program and Woodrow Wilson . On the 1917 Verdun medal , death drives the (French) sower before him.

After the German defeat, Goetz also made critical motifs. For example, a mocking medal from 1919 shows as obverse Wilhelm II and in the reverse a war invalid with a grieving wife and crying children as well as a saying of Wilhelm as a legend shared on both sides : “I am leading you - ( obverse ) towards glorious times! ( Reverse ) ".

At the time of the Weimar Republic , Goetz also created a medal on which he depicts the Hitler putsch in an unfavorably satirical way. The coup plotters with swastika flags are portrayed as dancing dwarfs who play stupidly into the hands of the Social Democrats . In later works nothing can be seen of a critical attitude towards the National Socialists.

Later work

Paul von Hindenburg

Goetz later gave up his expressionist echoes in order to adapt to the requirements of art under National Socialism and created medals in the neo-classical style. Numerous portrait medals of politicians such as Adolf Hitler , Paul von Hindenburg or Franz von Papen and of well-known soldiers such as Manfred von Richthofen , as well as commemorative medals for special war events, such as the airborne battle over Crete, were created .

Karl's son, the sculptor Guido Goetz (October 18, 1912 - March 9, 1992) also appeared as a medalist. After the Second World War , in the style of his father and partly under his guidance, he created commemorative medals for important post-war events, such as the Berlin Airlift , the currency reform of 1948 or the founding of NATO .

literature

• Gunter W. Kienast: The Medals of Karl Goetz . Artus Co, 1967.

Web links

Commons : Karl Goetz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• The Artwork of Karl X Goetz , www.karlgoetz.com
• Markus Meinold: Embossed memory - medals as a propaganda medium for the First World War (PDF; 2.7 MB) . Art texts, 1/2009. With detailed descriptions of some of Goetz's medals and their historical context
• Medals from Karl Goetz on the website of the German Society for Medal Art (DGMK)
• Australian War Memorial, shaping memory Sculpture at the Australian War Memorial , medallions (English)
• Allied Propaganda Copy of Karl Goetz Lusitania Medal (The Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library; English)
• Goetz Mouse Trap Medal (Woodrow Wilson; English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Karl Goetz: a famous medalist . Augsburger Allgemeine, December 1, 2011.
2. ^ Steve Pellegrini: Goetz Auction in Kassel . The Newsletter of Medal Collectors of America, Vol. 9, No. 6, June 2006, pp. 4-6.
3. ^ L. Forrer: Biographical Dictionary of Medallists . Götz, Karl. Volume VII. Spink & Son Ltd, London 1923, pp. 379 ff .
4. ^ Steven Roach: Karl Goetz: His World War I Satirical Medals . PCGS World Coin Library, April 26, 2000.
5. ↑ Benjamin Weiss: Medallic History of Religious and Racial Intolerance: Medals as instruments for promoting bigotry ( Memento des Originals from December 8, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . kunstpedia, December 23, 2008.
6. ^ Billie Milman: Borderlines: genders and identities in war and peace, 1870-1930 . Routledge, 1998, pp. 229f.
7. ^ Description of the Lusitania Medallion on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London
8. ^ Nicholas John Cull et al: Propaganda and mass persuasion: a historical encyclopedia, 1500 to the present . ABC-CLIO, 2003, p. 123.
9. ↑ Entries on Karl Goetz ( Memento of the original from May 10, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the collection catalog of the National Maritime Museum 
10. ↑ shaping memory . Australian War Memorial exhibit
11. ↑ Description of the Mousetrap Medal ( Memento of the original from December 18, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library 
12. ↑ Cannon fodder for the Grim Reaper. In: FAZ . November 26, 2014, p. 14.
13. ^ Mocking medal for Kaiser Wilhelm II and the First World War, 1919 (description). In: Michael Kunzel: History medals and plaques from the collection of the German Historical Museum . DHM Magazin, 6th year, Volume 17, 1996.
14. ^ Hitler's putsch in Munich . Medal description in the catalog of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
15. ↑ II. Review of the origins and development tendencies of German medal creation from the Renaissance to the present. The 20th century. "L'Art Nouveau". In: Michael Kunzel: History medals and plaques from the collection of the German Historical Museum . DHM Magazin, 6th year, Volume 17, 1996.
16. ↑ Half a century of reliable operation of the Main Power Plant in Schweinfurt: 50 years of clean MKS electricity from the power of the Main. [e-mail], accessed on November 10, 2015 (Am Krafthaus bronze sculptures by the Munich sculptor and medalist Guido Goetz (October 18, 1912 - March 9, 1992)). 
17. ↑ Peter van Alfen: Long Live Our Glorious Motherland! Posters and Medals from the Birth of the Cold War, 1945-1949 . In: American Numismatic Society Magazine. Vol. 4, No. 2, summer 2005.