August Grisebach (art historian)

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August Grisebach (born April 4, 1881 in Berlin , † March 24, 1950 in Heidelberg ) was a German art historian .

Life

Dismissal certificate from 1937

August Grisebach was a son of the architect Hans Grisebach and a grandson of the botanist August Grisebach . His son Hans Grisebach was a biochemist and university professor, his daughter Manon Andreas-Grisebach is a literary scholar and former politician with the Greens. The daughter Eveline from his first marriage (1922-2001), a doctor, was married to the zoologist Erich von Holst since 1951 .

Gravesite of August and Hanna Grisebach in the Heidelberg Bergfriedhof in the forest department, WB department

From 1901 Grisebach studied art history at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin with Adolph Goldschmidt and especially with Heinrich Wölfflin . In 1906 he was at Wölfflin with a dissertation on "The German Hall of the Renaissance" doctorate . In 1910 he received his habilitation on “ The Garden ” in Karlsruhe . During the First World War he was a typist in Brussels .

In 1919 he received his first professorship in Hanover , and from 1920 to 1930 he was full professor of art history at the University of Breslau . In 1929 and 1930 he was a researcher at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome . In 1930 he was appointed to the art history chair at Heidelberg University. After the transfer of power to the National Socialists in Germany in 1933, he was officially prosecuted; Attempts to fire him on the basis of the law to restore the civil service initially failed. In 1937 he was retired as a “ Jewish Versippter ” because of his Jewish wife Hanna . He left Heidelberg and spent the years between 1937 and 1946 in Timmendorfer Strand on the Baltic Sea and in Potsdam in "inner exile" . At a meeting of artists in the apartment of the painter Otto Nagel in Rehbrücke near Potsdam on July 10, 1945, Grisebach was elected chairman of the cultural association for the democratic renewal of Germany in the province of Brandenburg. In 1946 he returned to Heidelberg and was rehabilitated in 1947 after long bureaucratic obstacles. His retirement was retrospectively converted into a retirement with the rights and duties of an active professor . In 1947 he was accepted as a full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences .

Grisebach died in 1950 and was buried in the Heidelberg mountain cemetery. The ash grave above a well is secluded on the northern slope. A small granite boulder made of red sandstone bears the names and dates of life of Grisebach and his wife Hanna.

reception

Grisebach was not one of those “old masters of art history” who shaped their subject so sustainably that they themselves became the subject of research. He was important as a teacher and mediator; whether as an author of widely read books, brochures and newspaper articles, as a keynote speaker and lecturer on the radio or - and above all - as a university lecturer and teacher for his students. One of them, the German-American writer and publicist Hans Sahl, who received his doctorate from Grisebach in Breslau in the early twenties, wrote after the death of his teacher:

Through him I got to know that respect for the spiritual and noble in art that has not left me since then. He was the aristocrat among art historians, and anyone who came into contact with him refined himself and became a better person. He did not stand in front of the work of art; he let it speak for itself, based on his own laws he made it understandable to us. He was true and sincere and kind - and yet not soft or yielding, but strong and strict in his views, and of the purest disposition. He was one of the best that the German spirit has produced, and when I thought of Germany in all the years of horror and sought consolation, I thought of him. (Maurer 2007, p. 10f.)

Along with Kurt Gerstenberg, August Grisebachs is one of the founders of systematic German art geography . His research area was either destroyed in the Second World War or, as a result, shifted from the geographical perspective: the old German city, the German town hall, the cities of Danzig and Breslau , the art landscape of Silesia , the art of Karl Friedrich Schinkel . Grisebach's last great work was published in 1949. Even if the title “The Art of German Tribes and Landscapes” did not cause any discomfort shortly after the war, the topic was soon supplanted by the discourses of the 1950s and 1960s. The fact that Grisebach's terminology became increasingly misleading is tragic in so far as even a critical reading of his writings cannot discover anything intrusive even where it would not have been far removed from the subject and the time of origin. The fact that Grisebach worked on the art of the German tribes and landscapes before and in the years of the Second World War (i.e. in the years of his own exile) shows that there is no formal demarcation from contemporary history: When Grisebach speaks of “Volksstamm”, “Heimat” or “Geblüt “Spoke, he did so in a sense that could not have been further removed from the content that the National Socialists gave these terms. Grisebach was not concerned with Germanness as a homogeneous bloc that stood against its neighbors, but with cultural landscapes, the decisive value of which he saw in the historically grown regional characteristics. (Maurer 2007, p. 11 f.)

“But if a time begins,” says Grisebach in his foreword, “which questions the value of tradition in general, then of course the art that has grown out of trunk and landscape has also lost its roots.” (Grisebach 1949, p. 18) Time had long since begun, and Grisebach's art of German tribes and landscapes had to look like the epilogue to a thoroughly bygone era. In contrast to some of his more famous colleagues, Grisebach was never a tempi passati attorney. Even if he was not a herald of modernity, he was enough of a historian to not only allow the present to have its own forms, but also to require it to create such forms. The conviction, however, that this renewal work can only assert its claim to a successor if it is effective from within the historical continuum was a position that was perhaps a little too strenuous in the post-war period.

August Grisebach Prize

On October 15, 2007, the Institute for European Art History at Heidelberg University (Grisebach's former institute) awarded the August Grisebach Prize for an outstanding doctorate, which has been awarded annually since then. The prize, endowed with 1000 euros, is donated by the publisher Franz Philipp Rutzen.

Publications

  • The German Renaissance Town Hall. Berlin 1907 (dissertation, University of Berlin, 1906).
  • Danzig (= places of culture. Vol. 6). With drawings by Paul Renner. Leipzig 1908; Reprint: Augsburg 1999.
  • The garden: a history of its artistic design . Klinkhardt & Biermann, Leipzig 1910, doi: 10.5962 / bhl.title.18989 (habilitation thesis, TH Karlsruhe, 1910).
  • Architecture in the 19th and 20th centuries. Book 1 (= handbook of art history. Delivery 59). Berlin 1915.
  • German architecture in the XVII. Century (= Library of Art History . Vol. 14). EA Seemann, Leipzig 1921.
  • Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Leipzig 1924; New edition: Karl Friedrich Schinkel: architect, town planner, painter. Munich / Zurich 1981.
  • The old German city and its tribal peculiarities. Berlin 1930.
  • Roman portrait busts of the Counter Reformation (= Roman research of the Bibliotheca Hertziana. Vol. 13). Leipzig 1936.
  • The art of the German tribes and landscapes. Vienna 1946.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Magdalena Heider: Cultural Association for the Democratic Renewal of Germany in: Martin Broszat , Hermann Weber (ed.): SBZ manual: State administrations, parties, social organizations and their executives in the Soviet zone of occupation , Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag Munich, 1993, ISBN 978-3 -486-55262-1 , p. 717
  2. ^ Members of the HAdW since it was founded in 1909. August Grisebach. Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, accessed July 8, 2016 .
  3. ↑ L. Ruuskanen: The Heidelberg Bergfriedhof through the ages , Verlag Regionalkultur, 2008, p. 224
personal data
SURNAME Grisebach, August
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German art historian
DATE OF BIRTH April 4, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH March 24, 1950
Place of death Heidelberg