Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke

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Elisabeth Gerhardt with August Macke in Bonn in 1908

Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke (born May 11, 1888 in Bonn as Elisabeth Gerhardt ; died March 17, 1978 in Berlin ) was a German writer of biographical texts and memories, the focus of which is her life with the expressionist painter August Macke . He portrayed her more than two hundred times.

Life

August Macke: Portrait of the Artist's Wife with Hat (1909)

Elisabeth Gerhardt, called Lisbeth, was born into a wealthy merchant family in Bonn. Her father, Carl Gerhardt, owned a pharmaceutical equipment factory. Her mother came from Erfurt . In 1903, Elisabeth met 16-year-old August Macke on the way to school on Meckenheimer Strasse in Bonn (today: Thomas-Mann-Strasse). Both kept their love a secret, but under the pretext of portraying Elisabeth's brother, he became a frequent guest at her parents' house. When her father became seriously ill in May 1905, Elisabeth was sent to an officer's widow in Bern , who took young girls in for training. There she received lessons in French, English and Italian, in music, housekeeping and gardening. She is said to have been a good piano player.

On October 5, 1909, she married August Macke. The marriage resulted in two sons. August Macke and Franz Marc had a close friendship between artists . Elisabeth Macke and Maria Marc also became friends. The two couples met in the circle of the artist group Blaue Reiter in Gabriele Münter's house in Murnau , visited and corresponded with each other. On August 1, 1914, August Macke was called up for military service. A little later he moved out to the French front, where he fell in battle on September 26th. Elisabeth only received the official death report from his regiment a month later. In 1915 she began to record the story of her love and marriage, episodes from family life, trips and encounters with artistic companions of her husband in order to “preserve an image of their father” for her sons.

In 1916 she married a school friend of Macke's, the publicist Lothar Erdmann , with whom she had three other children. The family moved to Berlin-Tempelhof in 1925 . Her eldest son Walter died in 1927 at the age of 17 after a scarlet fever infection. In 1939 Lothar Erdmann was arrested and murdered in Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Elisabeth relocated Macke's work from her Berlin house and thus saved it from destruction. She had copies made of Macke's letters. Almost all of the originals were lost in a bombing of the house in 1943.

In 1948 Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke returned to Bonn. She lived in August Macke's studio until 1975 and took part in the city's cultural life. With an essay by Lothar Erdmann, which first appeared in 1928 in an anthology edited by Ernst Jünger , she published her memory of August Macke as a book in 1962 .

Memorial stone for August Macke and Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke in the old cemetery in Bonn

In the 1970s, Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke wrote down her memories of encounters with important people in the art world, including Robert and Sonia Delaunay , Lyonel Feininger , Paul Hindemith , Wassily Kandinsky , Paul and Lily Klee , Franz and Maria Marc , Paul Magar , Herwarth Walden and Mary Wigman . It reports on art exhibitions and describes current cultural and social events, especially in the years 1905 to 1914. It was not until 2009 that the 110 manuscripts under the title Encounters were published in full in a book for the first time. The manuscripts, along with the diaries and correspondence of Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke and her family from 1905 to 1978, are in the archive of the August-Macke-Haus . On the occasion of the book's publication, the exhibition “My Second Self” - August and Elisabeth Macke in the Macke-Haus dealt with August Macke's artistic engagement with Elisabeth.

Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke spent the last two years of her life with her children from her marriage to Lothar Erdmann in Berlin, where she died in 1978 at the age of almost 90.

Publications

supporting documents

Exhibition catalog

  • "My second self": August and Elisabeth Macke. Volume 56 of the August Macke Haus series, Bonn 2009, ISBN 978-3-929607-58-1

Web links

Commons : Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke: Memories of August Macke. Frankfurt 1987, p. 238 ff
  2. ^ Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke: Memory of August Macke . DER SPIEGEL 43/1962
personal data
SURNAME Erdmann-Macke, Elisabeth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gerhardt, Elisabeth (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer, wife of August Macke and Lothar Erdmann
DATE OF BIRTH May 11, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Bonn
DATE OF DEATH March 17, 1978
Place of death Berlin