Franz Kaiser (architect, 1888)

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Friedrich Franz Kaiser (born February 5, 1888 in Düren , † July 23, 1971 in Hamburg ) was a German architect and painter and one of the so-called inflation saints of the 1920s.

Life

Born the son of a railway conductor, Kaiser first completed secondary school and a commercial apprenticeship. He then attended the Royal Art and Trade School in Berlin, where he then began to work as a salaried architect, among others for Bruno Paul and Peter Behrens . In the First World War he was wounded as a soldier. In 1916 he married Lea Gerta Lipsky, from whom he divorced in 1924. In the November Revolution of 1918 he participated as a communist speaker. From 1919 to 1921 he worked as a teacher in the architecture class at the art and trade school in Königsberg. Artistically he was close to the Berlin Dadaists .

As with most inflation saints, Kaiser also experienced a life turning point. Around 1921 he met the self-proclaimed “Savior of Mankind”, Ludwig Christian Haeusser , and then reflected on his previous life. Soberly, Kaiser stated a disgust for the bourgeois art business and modern civilization: Berlin seemed to him “like a sinking ' Lusitania ' ... The downfall of my dear city is terribly annoying to me. The sinking in the feces. The downfall in your own shit! Terrible to look at! Disgusting!"

Kaiser gave up his job as an architect, cursed his previous clients publicly and spent three years traveling with Haeusser and his entourage, the “fools in Christ”, as a vagabond and preacher through Germany. Like Haeusser, he repeatedly came into conflict with the law during this time and was convicted of insulting, begging, theft and “traveling in hordes”. From Haeusser, Kaiser took over the “I cult” and the egomaniacal self-stylization and combined these elements in his appearances with Dadaist role-play. He maintained his contact with the artist group around Raoul Hausmann , Wieland Herzfelde and George Grosz during his time as an itinerant preacher. In 1923 you worked on his magazine "Stark-Kaiser".

As a “Führer” and “People's Emperor”, Kaiser stood as a candidate in the Reichstag elections in 1924, as well as in the 1925 presidential election - each time without measurable success. His “election program” was more like a Dadaist happening: “Dictatorship of violence against all enemies of the truth. I'll warn once and twice and then kill. Who does not hear must feel. I have my people ... I am the judgment of God! I categorically demand the heads of the vicious !!! "

In October 1925, Kaiser, who was living on the verge of subsistence, ended his role as a public provocateur and officially apologized, but remained true to his inner beliefs. His plan to found a “practical school for life reform ” in Berlin, however, failed, as did various attempts to build a rural “settlement”. It was only in Hamburg that he found a permanent place to stay and work (until the end of his life): “When I landed in Hamburg in 1926 in rags and with nothing, I collected here in the criminal, prostitute and pimp district what the others had in terms of material and people threw away, made it a permanent exhibition and gathering with work and speeches and hectographed writings, ... at the end came the celebrities, so a kind of art and life arose that ... gradually became a kind of 'profession' ”, recalled himself Kaiser in a letter in 1961.

Together with his partner Therese Böckmann, also a former Haeusser fanatic, he founded the “Franzkaiserschule” at the end of the 1920s, where household appliances and furniture were made by young people. During the Third Reich, all of his publicly owned works - his painting “Die Afrikanerin”, for example, had been bought by the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1932 - were removed as part of the Degenerate Art campaign . Kaiser himself was forced to do armaments work. In 1941 he got his second marriage.

After 1945 Kaiser continued to work as an artist, but earned his living as a caretaker. He had remained true to his views of the traveling preacher and life reform era to the end: In the mid-1960s he argued with the then senator and later Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt about religion. And in 1965, at an exhibition of his paintings, Kaiser clashed with a priest when he asked for one of the pictures to be removed. It was labeled: "I am the Lord My God / I don't want any other gods besides me!"

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Death register StA Hamburg-Barmbek-Uhlenhorst, No. 2711/1971
  2. ↑ Marriage register StA Wilmersdorf, No. 435/1916.
  3. ↑ See Kaiser's self-written curriculum vitae (1926), cited above. in: Linse 1983, p. 205; Election leaflet Kaisers Auf! To the presidential election! (March 1925), facsimile in: Linse 1982, p. 197 f.
  4. ↑ Linse 1983, p. 251 A96.
  5. ↑ Linse 1983, p. 79.
  6. ↑ election leaflet Emperor On! To the presidential election! (March 1925), facsimile in: Linse 1982, p. 197 f .; see also Linse 1983, p. 208 f.
  7. ↑ Linse 1983, p. 212.
  8. ↑ Marriage register StA 6 Hamburg, No. 199/1941.
  9. ↑ Linse 1982, p. 196.

literature

  • Ulrich Linse: Wandering Prophet of the Twenties. In: Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Ed.): Residence: Nirgendwo . Frölich & Kaufmann, Berlin 1982, pp. 191-208 ISBN 3-88725-070-2
  • Ulrich Linse: Barefoot prophets. Savior of the twenties . Siedler-Verlag, Berlin 1983 ISBN 3-88680-088-1
  • Thomas Lippick: Emperor without a throne - life and work of the artist and inflation saint Franz Kaiser . Diploma thesis at Ottersberg University of Applied Sciences in 1989

Web links
personal data
SURNAME Kaiser, Franz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kaiser, Friedrich Franz (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German architect, painter and saint of inflation
DATE OF BIRTH February 5, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Düren
DATE OF DEATH July 23, 1971
Place of death Hamburg