Ernst Boerschmann

Ernst Boerschmann (born February 18, 1873 in Prökuls in Memelland , today Lithuania ; † April 30, 1949 in Bad Pyrmont ; full name: Ernst Johann Robert Boerschmann ) was a German architect , construction clerk and sinologist .

Life

Boerschmann was born the son of an accountant; his brother was the physician and Social Democratic parliamentarian Friedrich Börschmann (1870-1941), his sister the reform pedagogue and school director Anna Börschmann (1871-1939).
He attended the humanistic high school in Memel . After passing the school leaving examination, he studied architecture and construction at the Technical University (Berlin-) Charlottenburg from 1891 to 1896 . After legal clerkship and state examination , he joined the Prussian building administration in 1901 as a government master builder ( assessor ). From 1902 to 1904 he was assigned to the East Asian Occupation Brigade in China as a building inspector . It was here that he became interested in classical Chinese architecture, which had hitherto been neglected .

In 1906, with financial support from the German Reich, he began his first expedition, on which he toured fourteen of the eighteen ancient Chinese provinces with the official status of scientific advisor to the German legation. On this trip he took photographs and drawings of numerous pagodas and temples . They formed the material for his later publications.

He took part only briefly in the First World War (until 1915). After the end of the war, he began lecturing on China while he was head of the military construction department in Königsberg (1918–1921). It initially only extended to East Prussia, but was soon extended to the entire empire. In Berlin, where he had been active since 1921, he had a teaching position at the Technical University of Charlottenburg from 1925; he received the title of professor here in 1927 .

From 1933 to 1937 Ernst Boerschmann was in China for the third time. He also brought numerous documents with him from this trip - photos, construction drawings and copies of stone reliefs and inscriptions. From 1940 he was a lecturer at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin , to whose Sinological seminar he wanted to connect a research institute for Chinese architecture. In 1943 his apartment was destroyed; Boerschmann was able to move the greater part of the material he had collected to Bad Pyrmont, where his wife came from, and others. a. its photo archive and its extensive library.

Boerschmann represented the Hamburg sinological chair from 1945 until it was fully occupied. After his death, some got his library of Cologne art historian Werner Speiser , director of the East Asian Museum in Cologne , about the Art History Institute of the University of Cologne in the university and public library Cologne , the scientific estate to the University Archive Cologne .

literature

• Ernst Boerschmann: Chinese architecture . 2 volumes, Berlin, 1925. Wasmuth Verlag.
• Ernst Boerschmann: Architecture and Landscape in China. A journey through twelve provinces. 2nd edition Berlin, 1926. Wasmuth Verlag.
• Wolfgang Franke:  Boerschmann, Ernst Johann Robert. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 407 ( digitized version ).
• Fritz Jäger: Ernst Boerschmann (1873-1949). In: Journal of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft , 99 (NF 24) / 1945–1949 (1950), pp. 150–156.
• Eduard Kögel: The Grand Documentation. Ernst Boerschmann and Chinese Religious Architecture (1906–1931) , De Gruyter Berlin - Boston 2015. ISBN 978-3-11-037494-0

Web links

• Literature by and about Ernst Boerschmann in the catalog of the German National Library