Charles Derlien

Charles Francis Derlien (born February 26, 1891 in Toxteth Park, Lancashire (now part of Liverpool ), † November 30, 1962 in Lübeck ) was a German painter and commercial artist.

Life

Charles Derlien was the son of the Lübeck ship's captain of the same name and an Irish mother. He grew up in Liverpool for the first few years and came to Lübeck in 1901. In April 1910 he emigrated to the United States . Back in Germany, he joined the Imperial Navy as a sailor in 1913 , where he was stationed as an artilleryman in Kiautschou . As a result of the German surrender to the Imperial Japanese Army in November 1914, Derlien was taken prisoner in Japanese war camps in Fukuoka , Ōita and Narashino until after the end of the First World War . In the Ōita camp, he and Fritz Rumpf the Younger (1888–1949) wrote the Oita yellow book with rhymes and illustrations about camp life. The work was not printed until the Narashino camp. Captivity in Japan sparked Derlien's interest in ethnology, archeology, and history. He was released from captivity at the end of 1919 and returned to Germany in 1920.

During the Weimar Republic , Derlien attended courses at Willibald Leo von Lütgendorff-Leinburg's Lübeck art school and completed his graphic training with Emil Orlik in Berlin . Back in Lübeck, he found employment as a book illustrator and as a press illustrator for the Lübeck General-Anzeiger . With Alfred Mahlau , he designed the move for the 700th anniversary of the city. In the 1930s he worked in the museum workshop in the Museum am Dom . When the prehistoric collection moved there from the St. Anne's Museum in the mid-1930s , he created plans and reconstructions for the new presentation of the collection.

During the Second World War he was a soldier in the Navy , temporarily in Athens . After the war he worked as a draftsman and restorer at Lübeck City Archeology. He succeeded in salvaging numerous pieces of the collection, believed to be completely lost, from the rubble of the museum , which was destroyed in the air raid on Lübeck on March 29, 1942 , or reassembling fragments. “In a very time-consuming work that required endless patience, he succeeded in preparing and preserving the entire remaining stock - currently 1297 pieces - and in finding missing pieces, for example from numerous urns; From the thousands of stone fragments that he picked up in the rubble of the cathedral museum, he brought about a dozen stone axes and axes back together, which today can be considered examples of the fate of the collection. "

Derlien died as a result of a traffic accident.

Fonts and illustrations (selection)

• 100 folk children's songs from Lübeck. With melodies, explanations, game descriptions. Collected by Wilhelm Stahl . Illustrations: Ch. Derlien. Borchers, Lübeck 1915
• with Fritz Rumpf: Oita Yellow Book. Narashino 1919.
• with Alfred Mahlau: The historic festival procession 700th anniversary of the freedom of the Reich in Lübeck, June 1926. Lübeck 1926.
• Portrait drawings in: Julius Havemann: History of beautiful literature in Lübeck. Lübeck 1926.
• Lübeckers look at you: [40] Well-known Lübeckers drawn on stone. Lübeck 1931.
• Former Lübeck originals: Pictures from Lübeck's street life in the 19th century; Collected in the father city sheets and expanded thereafter. / With illustrations after pen drawings by Chs. Derlien. Borchers, Lübeck 1933.

literature

• Werner Neugebauer : Obituary Charles Derlien. In: Journal of Lübeck History . 43 (1963), p. 117. ( digitized version )

Individual evidence

1. ^ Digitized at tsingtau.info, with the prisoners' résumés
2. ^ Short biography of Charles Derlien. In: Tsingtau and Japan 1914-1920 - Historically Biographical Project. Retrieved June 16, 2020 .  
3. ^ Werner Neugebauer: First report of the Office for Prehistory and Early History (soil monument preservation) of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck. In: ZVLGA 43 (1963), p. 73.