Bismarck on his deathbed

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Bismarck on his death bed on July 31, 1898 by Willy Wilcke and Max Priester

Bismarck on his deathbed is, among other things, the name of a photograph taken by the former Chancellor Otto von Bismarck immediately after his death, which triggered a press scandal in the German Empire. Independently of this, there are some contemporary paintings with the title Bismarck on his deathbed or on the deathbed .

history

Depiction of the dead by Emanuel Grosser in the style and taste of the time

On July 30, 1898 around 11 p.m., Bismarck died in his bed in Friedrichsruh . His family, neighbors, house servants and the doctor Ernst Schweninger witnessed the event. No death mask was made, nor was there any public laying out. The relatives had only commissioned the author and photographer Arthur Mennell , who was staying in the nearby forester's lodge , to take a few photographs of the prince on his deathbed, which he should only make available to the Bismarck family.

Nevertheless, the Hamburg photographers Willy Wilcke and Max Christian Priester managed to take a photo. They bribed Bismarck's forester and mayor Louis Spörcke, who kept them up to date on the condition of the dying man. A few hours after Bismarck's death, when Spörcke held the nightly wake with a groom , they illegally gained access to the death room. They reached the death camp through the windowsill and took a magnesium flash photograph of the deceased. Wilcke had adjusted the pillow beforehand so that Bismarck's head could be seen better. The clock on the bedside table was set to 20 minutes past 11 (i.e. 11:20 p.m.) when in reality it was 4 a.m.

On August 2, the two photographers looked for a buyer for the picture that they had previously retouched in order to remove the nightware and the checkered handkerchief through advertisements in the Berlin newspapers, the daily Rundschau and the Lokalanzeiger . In a room of the "Hotel de Rome" Unter den Linden they presented the picture for viewing and for sale. An interested party offered 30,000 marks (according to today's value about 210,000 euros) plus a 20% profit share.

The process

The stir about the sale and the advertisement of her colleague Mennell were the undoing of the two ' paparazzi '. On August 4th, they were arrested and the photo was confiscated. Spörcke was punished with eight months, Wilke and Priester with five months in prison. The two photographers fought legally over the picture for two years.

Retention, Use and Publication

Mennell, in turn, got caught up in contradictions in public and as a witness in the process of testifying how many photographs he had taken himself. The Berliner Tageblatt quoted him on August 4, 1898 with eight photographs, six of which were successful, in the process he then spoke of only one photograph. The statements cannot be verified at the moment, as none of these images has yet been published and the storage location is also uncertain. It is considered possible that one of these photos could be based on a painting by Franz von Lenbach, who was also staying in the forester's house on the night of death . Lenbach himself could only take a look at the corpse shortly before the coffin.

The confiscated negatives from Wilcke and Priester are said to have been kept in the Bismarck's safe for decades. The picture was first published in the Frankfurter Illustrierte in 1952. The negatives and copies were said to have been burned by a bailiff on the orders of the Prince of Bismark's lawyer. At that time it was read in Hamburg newspapers.

Legal historical significance

The right to one's own image was legally anchored in Germany in 1907 in the Art Copyright Act (KuG) and, according to Section 22 of this law, continues to exist up to ten years after death. The legal dispute over the image of Bismarck triggered the discussion about the need for a legal regulation. The photographers were namely by then applicable law only because of trespassing are doomed entity therefore were the castle owners and heirs, not Bismarck himself.

The legal historical significance is solely historiographical. So it is a myth that the picture marks the beginning of a new right and that the process sparked the discussion about the art copyright law. The story persists to this day and is told that way in most commentaries and essays, but only because the picture is so well suited to the formation of myths. In fact, the discussion about new image rights across Europe dates back to the 1830s. From the 1980s onwards there were a number of legal proposals in Germany. The Bismarck fall played no role in the parliamentary debate.

More paintings

In addition to Lenbach and Grosser, there are other paintings and drawings by Bismarck on his deathbed or deathbed, including picture postcards from the Berlin publishers Paul Albert and Max Marcus, which were still running in the year of his death in 1898 .

literature

  • Fabian Steinhauer: Your own picture. Constitutions of the image law discourses around 1900 , Berlin 2013
  • Fabian Steinhauer: Rules of the picture. Studies on the legal conflict of images , Munich 2009
  • Hans Michael Koetzle: Photo Icons - The story behind the pictures , Taschen , 2005, ISBN 3-8228-4095-5 , p. 74.
  • Lothar Machtan: Bismarck's Death and Germany's Tears: Reportage of a Tragedy , Munich 1998, ISBN 3-44215-013-2 , III. chapter
  • Ernst Engelberg : Bismarck. Original Prussians and founders of the empire. Siedler, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-88680-121-7 .
  • Edward Crankshaw: Bismarck. A biography. List, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-471-77216-2 .
  • Lothar Gall : Bismarck. The white revolutionary. Propylaeen, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1980, ISBN 3-549-07397-6 .
  • Hans Schneiekert: The protection of the photographer and the right to one's own picture . Systematic contributions to the revision of the German Photography Protection Act of January 10, 1876, Wilhelm Knapp, Halle / S. 1903 (contemporary representation of different legal positions on the draft of the Photography Protection Act of July 21, 1902), ( digitized version )
  • Small messages - "A reminiscence of the conviction of those two Hamburg photographers Wilcke and Priester". In: Dr. A. Miethe (Ed.): Photographische Chronik , 7th year Wilhelm Knapp, Halle / S. 1900, pp. 6-7.
  • Trial against the photographers Wilcke and Priester and the forester Spörcke for taking Prince Bismarck's corpse . In: JM Eder (Hrsg.): Photographische Korrespondenz , 36th year, Verlag der Photographische Korrespondenz, Vienna. Leipzig 1899, pp. 245–248, continued pp. 268–273 (detailed, contemporary description of the process, in particular the course of events).

Web links

Wikisource: Photographic Correspondence  - Sources and Full Texts
Wikisource: Photographic Chronicle  - Sources and Full Texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Volker Ullrich , Otto von Bismarck , 1998, p. 128 (there also illustration of Lenbach's Ingres drawing)
  2. ↑ Or does the clock show 5 minutes to 4 a.m.?
  3. ↑ Lothar Machtan , III. Bismarck's Paparazzi - The story of a photo that was not allowed to be shown , p. 143 ff.
  4. ↑ Quotation: “After almost an hour's deliberation, the court sentenced Wilcke to 6 months, priests to 3 months and Spörcke to 5 months in prison and to jointly bear the costs.” Photographische Korrespondenz , Volume 36, 1899, p. 273.
  5. ^ Machtan, p. 175.
  6. ↑ Machtan, p. 170 f.
  7. ↑ Art. Moving, sad, beautiful . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 , 1998, pp. 156-157 ( online ).
  8. ↑ Lothar Machtan: Photo plates in the ice cellar . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 , 1998, pp. 80-81 ( online ).
  9. ↑ Frankfurter Illustrierte, 40/1952, No. 50 ( online copy of the double page ), see on this: Fabian Steinhauer, Recht am Eigen Bild , in: Handbuch der Politik Ikonographie, Vol. 1, 2011, p. 288.
  10. ↑ Kleine Mitteilungen , in: Photographische Chronik , VII. Jg., 1900, p. 303.
  11. ↑ Florian Wagenknecht: The emergence of the right to one's own image . In: Right on the picture , July 11, 2011
  12. ↑ Daniel McLean, Bild und Recht , in: Frieze-Magazin, 3, Winter 2011/12 ( online ( memento of the original from January 1, 2014 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 note. ) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / frieze-magazin.de
  13. ↑ Herbert von Bismarck had sued Wilke and Priester for the surrender of the plates and photographs of Prince Bismarck's body made by them, before the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court. (Source: Miscellaneous in: Der Photograph , 8th year, No. 37, Hannover 1898, p. 148).
  14. ↑ Fabian Steinhauer: Picture rules . Studies on the legal conflict of images. Munich 2009.
  15. ↑ Hans Schneiekert: The protection of photographers and the right to one's own image .
  16. ↑ Historical picture postcards, University of Osnabrück, Prof. Dr. S. Gisebrecht ( online )
  17. ^ Bismarck Foundation : Postcard: He was ours!