Friedrichsberg heads

Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler: Self-Portrait 1929, first drawing in the Friedrichsberger Köpfe series

Friedrichsberger Köpfe is a series of sixty drawings by the painter Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler (1899–1940), which she created in 1929 during a two-month stay at the Friedrichsberg State Hospital in Hamburg due to a mental illness . The works are both art-historical and biographical as extraordinary, they document the fellow patients, the institutional life and also the artist's own healing. The drawings have a deeper meaning through the later murder of Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, as well as many inmates of Friedrichsberg through the euthanasia of the National Socialists called T4 .

Emergence

Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler had moved from Dresden to Hamburg in 1925 with her husband, the painter and singer Kurt Lohse (1892–1958) . In 1926 the relationship broke down, the artist lived in difficult financial circumstances, felt increasingly isolated personally and blocked in her work. In the winter of 1928/1929, friends noticed excessive nervousness and other symptoms of mental illness, and on February 4, 1929, she was admitted to the Friedrichsberg hospital. After an initial apathy, Lohse-Wächtler recovered after a few days and began drawing. These activities were documented in the patient's file, as the entry from February 17, 1929 says: “Pat. sat in front of the mirror and painted himself. Drew her fellow mate. and winter landscape. ”The drawings of self-portrait and winter landscape were attached to the documents and were transferred to the archive of the Eppendorf University Hospital when the files were removed . On March 30, 1929, Kurt Lohse obtained his wife's discharge; the attending physician could not make a final diagnosis, he suspected schizophrenia or transitory psychosis . In these nearly eight weeks Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler has created sixty drawings in a reception of the journal The circle in May 1929 for the first time Friedrich Berger heads were called. Only a few works in the series have survived.

Series of works

The following table lists 17 illustrations, two of which are montages of several drawings that have been preserved on photographs in the artist's estate. A total of 29 works can be traced. 21 of these pictures are considered lost, of the remaining eight two are in the holdings of the Hamburger Kunsthalle , two in the archive of the Eppendorf University Clinic and four in the Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler estate.

Illustration	title	Additional title, notes
	Self-portrait	In the Friedrichsberg State Hospital, Hamburg, February 17, 1929 ; Pencil, 37 × 24.5 cm today in the Eppendorf University Hospital, stock of the Friedrichsberg files
	Winter landscape	Institution garden with main building State Hospital Friedrichsberg, Hamburg, February 17, 1929 ; Pencil, 21 × 29.6 cm today in the Eppendorf University Hospital, stock of the Friedrichsberg files
	View of the institution garden	View from House X of the Friedrichsberg State Hospital, Hamburg ; Pastel, dimensions unknown lost
	Sketches with figure studies and building views	Assembly of five drawing sheets, top right sketch of the main building of the Friedrichsberg State Hospital, Hamburg Pencil, dimensions unknown lost
	A patient	Woman with Landscape Pastel chalks, 38.5 × 29 cm estate of Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler
	Sitting woman in blue smock	Pastel chalk, dimensions unknown lost
	Painfully dormant	Pastel, 25 × 24 cm Hamburger Kunsthalle
	An old patient	Pastel chalk over pencil, 27.2 × 20.4 cm from the estate of Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler
	An old	Pencil, dimensions unknown missing
	Patient	Pastel, dimensions unknown lost
	Incidence	Pastel, 27.5 × 17.5 cm from the estate of Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler
	Sleeping	Pastel, 28.5 × 36 cm Hamburger Kunsthalle
	Lying head of a woman	“Hallucinatory, the pastel combines impressions of illness, psychiatry, men, the city of Hamburg.” Pencil, dimensions unknown lost
	Sick sitting in bed and sister in conversation	Pencil and colored pencil, 29.6 × 20.8 cm; verso: three head studies from the estate of Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler
	Four female half-portraits and clasped hands	Pencil and colored pencil, dimensions unknown missing
	Studies of female patients eating	Pencil, dimensions unknown missing
	Nine sketches with patients on the ward	Montage of nine drawing sheets, pencil, dimensions unknown missing

A large part of the sixty drawings were portraits and three-quarter views of patients, often done in dull pastel chalk . While in the first pictures, as an example, an old woman, hectic lines and balls of lines emulate the mood, the others with "scarcity and sculptural cohesion" indicate a calming in the formal language, for example very clearly in the patient , in its formal Compactness especially the rigid gaze out of the picture dominates the impression.

The depictions of everyday life in the institution are quick pencil sketches of “genre-like hospital impressions” with contoured lines, they show pensive patients who are frozen in motion, but also gesticulating and acting patients. In the picture four female half-portraits and folded hands , the confusion in dealing with each other is shown, the hands placed in the foreground reinforce this effect. Sick and sister sitting in bed in conversation gives the impression of friendly treatment in psychiatry. Further drawings captured the view from the window of other buildings in the asylum complex and dealt with being locked up.

reception

Self-portrait with cigarette , pastel over pencil, 1929, created after his stay in Friedrichsberg

After her release from Friedrichsberg, Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler had a short-term successful phase. As early as May and June 1929 she was able to take part in the series of works in the Maria Kunde art salon in Hamburg-St. Georg and received a positive response in the press. The Hamburger Anzeiger wrote : "Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler rises above today's Plätscher level - she is definitely a discovery." In the culture magazine Der Kreis , the art historian Anna Banaschewski dedicated a four-page monograph to the artist with the images of the pastels Woman in Blue Gown and a patient . In it, she describes the Friedrichsberg heads as "outcry from oppressed creatures" that are thematically close to the sensational. “But because they are so artistically disciplined, so genuinely and organically grown, so completely inspired, any objection of this kind is invalid.” Towards the end of the exhibition, the Hamburger Kunsthalle acquired two of the drawings - Painful Resting and Sleeping . In 1937 they were overlooked in the depots when they were confiscated by the National Socialist Art Commission in the course of the “ Degenerate Art ” campaign, so that they were retained.

Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler was admitted to the state sanatorium and nursing home in Arnsdorf near Dresden in 1932 due to renewed psychological problems . Until 1935 she drew and painted everyday life and the patients of the hospital here too. In May 1935 they incapacitated, in December 1935 she underwent as part of the Nazi eugenics of forced sterilization . On July 31, 1940, she was murdered in the Nazi killing center in Pirna-Sonnenstein .

The hundred or so works created between 1932 and 1935 ended up in the estate administered by her brother and were rediscovered in 1995. In 2000, the Saxon Memorials Foundation to commemorate the victims of political tyranny published a catalog for both groups of works and thus published many of the drawings for the first time. The foundation called the series Gallery of the Doomed and related it to National Socialist euthanasia , as "they make the dividing line between accompanying, caring for and caring for patients and [...] the murder of the sick immediately aware".

literature

• Maike Bruhns: Art in Crisis. Hamburg: Dölling and Galitz Verlag 2001. Vol. 1: Hamburg art in the Third Reich . Pp. 225 and 291; Vol. 2: Artist Lexicon . P. 267 ff.
• Saxon Memorials Foundation to commemorate the victims of political tyranny (ed.): "... the often rising feeling of being abandoned". Works by the painter Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler in the psychiatric hospitals in Hamburg-Friedrichsberg (1929) and Arnsdorf (1932–1940). With a contribution by Hildegard Reinhardt and a foreword by Norbert Haase. Dresden: Verlag der Kunst 2000, ISBN 90-5705-152-4
• Georg Reinhardt (Ed.): Sunk in the maelstrom of life ... Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler. 1899-1940. Life and work. With contributions by Georg Reinhardt, Boris Böhm, Hildegard Reinhardt and Maike Bruhns. Cologne: Wienand 1996. Monograph, ISBN 3-87909-471-3

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler medical file, Eppendorf University Hospital, holdings of the Friedrichsberg files that have been outsourced, medical file no. 64741/1929; quoted from: Stiftung Sächsische Gedenkstätten in memory of the victims of political tyranny (Ed.): "... the often rising feeling of being abandoned". Works by the painter Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler in the psychiatric hospitals in Hamburg-Friedrichsberg (1929) and Arnsdorf (1932–1940). , P. 11
2. ^ ^{A b} Anna Banaschewski: Friedrichsberger heads. Drawings by Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler , in: Der Kreis. Magazine for artistic culture , 6th year, issue 5, Hamburg May 1929; completely printed in: Georg Reinhardt (ed.): Sunk in the maelstrom of life ... Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler. 1899-1940. Life and work. , Cologne 1996, pp. 275-277.
3. ↑ Maike Bruhns: Art in the Crisis , Volume 1: Hamburg Art in the Third Reich , p. 290
4. ^ Stiftung Sächsische Gedenkstätten in memory of the victims of political tyranny (ed.): "... the often rising feeling of being abandoned". Works by the painter Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler in the psychiatric hospitals in Hamburg-Friedrichsberg (1929) and Arnsdorf (1932–1940). , P. 11 and 13
5. ↑ Hamburger Anzeiger of May 27, 1929; quoted from: Stiftung Sächsische Gedenkstätten in memory of the victims of political tyranny (Ed.): "... the often rising feeling of being abandoned". Works by the painter Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler in the psychiatric hospitals in Hamburg-Friedrichsberg (1929) and Arnsdorf (1932–1940) , p. 16
6. ↑ Norbert Haase, preface to the publication "... the often rising feeling of being abandoned". Works by the painter Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler in the psychiatric hospitals in Hamburg-Friedrichsberg (1929) and Arnsdorf (1932–1940) , p. 16