Emil Stumpp

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Emil Stumpp (self-portrait, 1929)

Emil Wilhelm Stumpp (born March 17, 1886 in Neckarzimmern ; † April 5, 1941 in Stuhm , West Prussia ) was a German teacher , painter and one of the most famous German press illustrators of the Weimar Republic .

life and work

Stumpps lithograph by the Danish author Martin Andersen Nexø from 1921

Stumpp's parents were the gardener Wilhelm Stumpp from Stetten and his wife Maria, née Aeckerle. He grew up with five siblings. Three years after his birth, the von Neckarzimmern family moved to Worms , where the father worked as head gardener for the industrial family Heyl . Emil attended secondary school and had formative experiences as a member of the Wandervogels . After graduating from high school in February 1904, he first studied one semester at the Karlsruhe School of Applied Arts , then did his one-year voluntary military service with the 118 Infantry Regiment in Worms from October 1 and began studying at the Philipps University of Marburg in the winter semester of 1905/06 of German, English, history and philosophy. After two semesters he switched to the Humboldt University in Berlin , where he studied for the next two semesters.

He then spent a year in Scandinavia before returning to Marburg for the last three years of study. In Uppsala he met the Swedish student Hedvig Glas, whom he married in 1910 while still a student. The couple had five children: Maria (* 1911), Hermann (* 1912), Hedwig (* 1913), Hilde (* 1918) and Gudrun (* 1920). In Marburg, Stumpp passed the examination to become a gymnastics and drawing teacher in March 1910, the state examination for the higher teaching post in German and English in November 1913, and in 1914 an additional examination for the subject of philosophical propaedeutics. When the First World War broke out , reserve lieutenant Stumpp was called up immediately. He was wounded four times during the war. At the end of the war he lived with his family in Königsberg , where he was adjutant to the station commander. In the turmoil of the November Revolution , he was temporarily imprisoned by counter-revolutionary troops for his collaboration with the Workers 'and Soldiers' Council .

From February 1919 Stumpp completed the prescribed seminar year ; From April 1, 1920, he worked at the Royal Hufengymnasium in Königsberg, and was also an artist. In 1919 he was the founder and chairman of the "Economic Association of Visual Artists Northeast Germany". Torn between teaching and being an artist, he retired from school at Easter 1924 and from then on worked as a freelance painter and draftsman in Berlin, while his family stayed in Königsberg. After the early death of his wife in 1928, the children were looked after by his sister.

Stumpp initially specialized in the production of portrait drawings , then in their lithographic reproduction for publication in the press, with which he was soon so successful that his pictures were printed in numerous newspapers and in 1926 the first book with his drawings, Heads in Swabia , appeared. One of his main clients was the Dortmund General-Anzeiger . In the following years, Stumpp portrayed a large number of important personalities from politics, business, sport, intellectual life and the art world on numerous trips as a "mad draftsman". Sometimes he attended major events such as conferences, congresses and sports competitions to find his models, sometimes they sat for him on behalf of newspapers, and sometimes he went to them specifically in order to get their approval for a portrait session. For example, after visiting the site several times, he was the only artist to get Edvard Munch 's permission for a portrait. He benefited from his quick conception and way of working; for example, in 1932, after attending the Olympic Games in Los Angeles , he portrayed the then Democratic presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt in a session of just ten minutes. It became a trademark of his portraits that he had the original drawings signed by the people portrayed.

Hitler portrait 1933

On April 20, 1933, the Dortmunder General-Anzeiger printed a portrait of Adolf Hitler on the first page on the occasion of his birthday , which Stumpp had drawn shortly before in a Hitler speech. The local SA regarded the unflattering drawing as a "malicious" caricature and took the incident as an opportunity to occupy the printing and editorial staff of the newspaper, which is known to be left-wing liberal. The result was the synchronization of the Dortmunder Zeitung, which was converted into a party organ of the NSDAP , and a publication ban for Stumpp. With that he suddenly lost his main source of income. In the following years he tried to keep himself afloat economically by selling landscape drawings and watercolors. To this end, he traveled to numerous European countries and stayed abroad a lot. He also wrote articles for the magazine Geister und Gespenster of his Königsberg friend Robert Budzinski .

After Stumpp had returned from Stockholm to Königsberg in February 1940 on the news that his daughter Hilde was fatally ill, he no longer received an exit permit. In September he rented a room in Perwelk (today: Pervalka ) on the Curonian Spit ; there he expressed himself politically frankly and was denounced by his landlords. He was arrested on October 2, 1940 in Perwelk and sentenced by the Koenigsberg Special Court on January 14, 1941 in a session of the court in Memel to one year in prison for violating the treachery law and illicit handling of prisoners of war. The conditions of detention were mainly characterized by systematic malnutrition ; During the six months in the Königsberg prison, Stumpp lost 30 kg. When he was transferred to the Stuhm prison in West Prussia at the beginning of April , he had to cover the 150 km journey in the grim cold in an unheated railroad car. Stumpp, weakened by hunger, developed pneumonia and died in prison on April 5, 1941, at the age of 55. His diary from prison has been preserved and is a copy in the Emil Stumpp archive .

estate

After Stumpp's only son Hermann fell off Leningrad at the end of 1941 , the three surviving daughters took care of the preservation of the artistic estate, which includes around 20,000 lithographs and numerous watercolors and oil paintings. In particular, Stumpp's daughter Hedwig and her husband, the composer Kurt Schwaen , stood up for the preservation and care of the estate and the memory of Emil Stumpp for life. Several times they moved within East Berlin with the entire estate. The collection was temporarily housed in the Märkisches Museum and in the armory . After the reunification , Schwaen left most of the estate to a nephew of the graphic artist, Michael Stumpp, who has owned the Stumpp archive since 1998, which has been located in Gelnhausen since 1998 . Further parts of the estate are at the Institute for Newspaper Research in Dortmund.

Whereabouts

  • Most of Emil Stumpp's estate is kept in the Emil Stumpp Archive in Gelnhausen. Numerous images have been digitized and put online there in recent years.
  • The German Historical Museum in Berlin has the most extensive Stumpp collection in museum ownership (over 900 entries in the GOS object database online).
  • In the Institute for Newspaper Research in Dortmund there are around 400 images and manuscripts, mainly from Stumpp's collaboration with the Dortmund General-Anzeiger .
  • The German Bundestag has a collection of more than 300 portraits of German politicians from the Weimar Republic von Stumpp.

literature

  • Emil Stumpp. Press drawings. Klartext, Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-481-X .
  • Emil Stumpp, chronicler of his time. Kunsthalle, Rostock 1986, DNB 210288469 .
  • Over my heads. Book publisher Der Morgen, Berlin 1983, DNB 840476345 .
  • Detlef Brennecke (ed.): Emil Stumpp - A draftsman of his time. Dietz, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-8012-0135-X .
  • Bruno König: Emil Stumpp - a chronicler of his time. In: Mosbacher Jahresheft 2008. Vol. 18, Mosbach 2008, ISBN 978-3-936866-14-8 , pp. 132-140.

References and comments

  1. ↑ Annegret Bölke-Heinrichs: The press illustrator Emil Stumpp. In: Heimat Dortmund (magazine of the historical association for Dortmund and the Grafschaft Mark), No. 1/2001 (special issue: History of the Council in Dortmund ), p. 46 f.
  2. ↑ Judith Prokasky: press illustrator Emil Stumpp (1886 to 1941). In: Andreas Nachama (Ed.): Between the lines? Newspaper press as an instrument of Nazi power. Topography of Terror Foundation, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-941772-11-3 (catalog for the special exhibition of the same name by the Topography of Terror Foundation , Berlin), p. 124.
  3. ^ Salomo Friedlaender / Mynona: Grotesken II: Gesammelte Schriften. Books on Demand, 2015 ( digitized version of the review of issue 1932/2)
  4. ↑ Harald Ritter: Kulturforum shows drawings and portraits from the Schwaen archive. In: Berliner Woche , July 17, 2014, accessed on May 14, 2020.

Web links

Commons : Emil Stumpp  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Stumpp, Emil
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stumpp, Emil Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German teacher, painter and press illustrator
DATE OF BIRTH March 17, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Neckarzimmern
DATE OF DEATH April 5, 1941
Place of death Stuhm , West Prussia