Andreas Preacher

Andreas Prediger ( Russian Андрей Андреевич Предигер , transcribed Andrei Andreevič Prediger ; born November 16, 1926 in Marienfeld , ASSR of the Volga Germans , USSR ; † July 24, 2017 in Bad Reichenhall , Germany) was a Russian-German artist who wrote the history and in his works The suffering of the German minority in the Soviet Union.

Life

Andreas Predigers experienced the terrible years in the Soviet Union at an early age. Both the famine of the 20s to 30s and the deportation of German-born Soviet citizens from the Volga Republic, which came into force in 1941, shaped his life and artistic work. Two of his sisters and one brother died in 1932/33. In 1941 there was forced relocation to East Kazakhstan to the Rosa Luxemburg ore mines.

In exile in the Asian part of the Soviet Union, the preachers had to fight hunger and discrimination. At the age of sixteen, Andreas Prediger was assigned to do forced labor in the coal mines in Prokopyevsk , West Siberia . He was a miner, a cutter, a mine master - for twelve years. In 1946 he married Pauline Graefenstein, who had also been deported. The couple had seven children. Preacher graduated from school in 1949 (10th grade, Abitur). Although he was already artistically inclined as a child, he was only able to finish the faculty for artistic graphics at the Krasnoyarsk Pedagogical Institute in 1966 . Previously, five such applications had been rejected by the Supreme Soviet because of his German ethnicity. Between 1954 and 1989 he earned his living as a drawing teacher at a middle school. In distance learning, he finished the painting and drawing departments at Moscow People's University.

Andreas Prediger exhibited his works of art from 1967 in the city of Prokopjewsk, and after 1985 also in other cities of the Soviet Union. In 1991, Prediger received international attention at the exhibition of Russian-German works of art in Moscow. A year later he presented his pictures in Düsseldorf, Berlin and Munich.

Andreas Prediger was committed to the rehabilitation of the Russian Germans. He was a member of the association Wiedergeburt , which u. a. for the restoration of the Volga German Republic, as well as a member of the International Association of German Culture in Russia. In the Federal Republic of Germany , Preacher was a member of the working group for fine arts of the Landsmannschaft der Deutschen von Russia and the artists' association Laufener Palette . Since 1993 he lived in Germany, in Bad Reichenhall.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Wladimir Kern, Ludmilla Marz, Annelore Engel-Braunschmidt : German artists from Russia: artist biographies . Ed .: Association for Germanness Abroad - VDA. Westkreuz, Berlin / Bonn 1992, ISBN 3-922131-82-4 , p. 70-77 .