Fritz Kahn (Author)

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Fritz Kahn

Fritz Kahn (born September 29, 1888 in Halle (Saale) ; † January 14, 1968 in Locarno , Switzerland ) was a German doctor and author of popular science books .

Life

Fritz Kahn was born as the son of Arthur Kahn , doctor and writer, and Hedwig Kahn, nee. Schmuhl, born. Shortly after the birth , his father emigrated to the USA and settled in Hoboken (NJ) . When Arthur Kahn had established himself as a doctor, he brought his wife and children to join him around 1893, and Fritz Kahn started school in Hoboken. The family later moved to Manhattan . In 1895 Hedwig Kahn returned to Germany with her three sons. After long stays in Hamburg and Halle, the family moved to Bonn with their father, who had returned from the USA . The family finally found a home in Berlin in 1905 , where Kahn attended Sophien-Gymnasium until he graduated from high school. As a high school graduate, he taught in student worker courses.

In 1907, Kahn began studying human medicine at the Friedrich Wilhelms University with a focus on microbiology . At the same time, he studied various natural sciences and humanities, worked at a meteorological institute and began to write newspaper articles . In 1912/1913 Fritz Kahn completed his studies with the state examination and was awarded a Dr. med. PhD. Specializing in gynecology and obstetrics , he worked as a surgeon and obstetrician in a clinic from 1914 to 1922 .

As a medical doctor, Fritz Kahn did military service from 1914 to 1918, including in Alsace , the Vosges and northern Italy . Because of malnutrition and overwork, he was given leave in 1918 and looked after by an Italian farming family. After the war he traveled to Algeria to relax .

Fritz Kahn, meanwhile working as a doctor in Berlin again, married Irma Glogau in 1920. Around 1921 he traveled to Palestine , where he bought land on Mount Carmel and in Jerusalem . In 1922, Kahn opened his own gynecological practice. In the following years he was increasingly in the public eye as a successful author. His books achieved six-figure editions and have been translated into several languages. Among other things, he was committed to the Jewish elderly aid and founded a humanist lodge . In 1926 Kahn was asked to advise the major exhibition in Düsseldorf 1926 for health care, social welfare and physical exercises GeSoLei (section “The Hygiene of the Jews”) and worked on the Berlin exhibition “Diet”. Around 1930 he undertook geological research trips to Palestine and the Arctic Circle . After months of pneumonia , he traveled to desert studies in the Sahara in 1932 .

Due to the new anti-Semitic propaganda, Kahn was forced to close his practice in 1933. His books were publicly burned. He emigrated with his family to Palestine and settled first in Haifa and shortly afterwards in Jerusalem. He wrote newspaper articles on current topics and in 1934 he showed the exhibition “The Hygiene of School Children” in Jerusalem. After the divorce from Irma Glogau, Fritz Kahn married the singer and music teacher Erna Schnabel (1907–1997) in 1937 and moved to Paris .

Shortly after the “ Reichskristallnacht ” in 1938, Kahn's books were placed on the “ List of harmful and undesirable literature ”. The book “Our Sex Life” was also banned by the police, and all copies that could be found were destroyed.

After the outbreak of war, Kahn fled from Paris to Bordeaux . As a hostile foreigner, he was interned in a French camp in 1940 . His wife, Erna, obtained his release and they fled to Spain and Portugal . At the beginning of 1941 Fritz and Erna Kahn were able to emigrate to the USA with the help of Albert Einstein . They settled in Manhattan.

Between 1948 and 1950, Kahn stayed in Europe several times, including Ascona . After remigration to Europe seemed not yet possible, Kahn moved his center of life back to New York around 1950 . He had a house on Long Island and a studio in Manhattan.

After his wife Erna separated from him, Kahn lived with his Danish-American colleague Ellen Fussing. With her he finally returned to Europe and until 1960 lived mostly in Switzerland, including in Lugano . During a vacation in Agadir in 1960, Kahn survived a severe earthquake unharmed . He was flown to Denmark with Ellen Fussing and settled in North Zealand and opened a studio in Copenhagen in 1962 .

For health reasons, Kahn traveled to Ascona in the fall of 1967. He died on January 14, 1968 in a clinic in Locarno.

meaning

Magazine advertisement for Kahn's book series Das Leben des Menschen , around 1931

With extraordinary metaphors in words and images, Kahn was able to present complex principles in nature and technology in a generally understandable way. The Berliner described man as “the most powerful machine in the world” and reflected the technical and cultural development of the Weimar Republic . He had a large part of the illustrations made by draftsmen according to his specifications, and he ran his own studios in Berlin, New York and Copenhagen. With his book series "Das Leben des Menschen" Kahn became an international bestselling author. The series is considered a masterpiece of popular science communication. After his emigration his work was largely forgotten in Germany. He continued to publish successfully in exile and was listed in the US Who's Who in the mid-1950s .

Several artists, including the Bauhaus graphic artist Herbert Bayer and Eduardo Paolozzi , have been inspired to interpret Fritz Kahn's human-machine analogies. In the creative scene, these motifs have recently been used several times as a source of inspiration for their own artistic implementations, for example for a trailer for the Sundance Film Festival 2007 or to advertise the music program “Vamos Falar de Música” on MTV Brasil. In 2009, an animation by the designer Henning Lederer attracted internet-wide attention, in which he set Kahn's famous motif "Man as an industrial palace" in motion as part of a student thesis. With the publication of the monograph "Fritz Kahn - Man Machine / Machine Mensch" by the siblings Uta and Thilo von Debschitz in 2009, Kahn's pictorial work, a pioneering achievement of modern information design, was again accessible to a broad public and is the subject of various research projects in the fields of science, Art and cultural history. For example, the Federal Cultural Foundation sponsored an exhibition project on the popular infographics of the 1920s with a focus on the work of Fritz Kahn and Otto Neurath. The Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and the cultural broadcaster Arte supported a game adaptation of Fritz Kahn's educational poster “Man as an industrial palace”, which was a Franco-German co-production, with the “Homo Machina” project .

The world's first exhibition on Fritz Kahn was shown under the title "Fritz Kahn - Machine Man" in 2010 in the Berlin Medical History Museum of the Charité . In 2017, the exhibition “Image factories: Infographics 1920–1945” in the German Museum of Books and Writing in Leipzig juxtaposed the visual concepts of the infographic pioneers Fritz Kahn and Otto Neurath .

Quotes

Fritz Kahn 1927 on the fight against the night and the radio:

“But every kerosene lamp that is hung up somewhere in a remote homestead in a previously dark room or finds its place of honor in a Negro kraal as a European innovation is an outpost fire of life in the night and - against the night; Every cinema portal that shines in a previously unknown abundance of light to the amazement of thrifty shopkeepers somewhere in a small town is an illuminated gate of victory for waking enjoyment over sleep that is becoming atavistic; through every radio set somewhere outside with its antenna network picks up the aether waves from the transmitters, the acoustic flood of urban culture surges into the hitherto patriarchal evening silence of the rural family and keeps the old people, who previously ended the busy day with an after-prayer at 9 o'clock, until the end awake at the concert and the boys even - unheard of a generation ago - on the weekday (!) until past midnight with fox and tango. And even the seal hunter in the Arctic Ocean no longer sleeps before midnight - he listens to the opera that Oslo sends him ... "

In 1943 - towards the end of World War II - the New York Times reviewed Kahn's book Man in Structure and Function (German: Das Leben des Menschen ):

“The last sections deal with the nervous system, the skin and the sensory organs eyes, ears, nose, and sexuality. With the latter in particular, it's refreshing to see that Dr. Kahn's exegesis differs from the physiological textbooks [America], where 'the abdomen south of the navel is represented as a smooth, rather unexciting surface.' The text is accurate, detailed, adequate, if an effort is made. [...] The illustrations [...] have the qualities of the wonderful exhibition objects in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. I pray every night that the British Air Force will spare the museum. As far as I am concerned, they should get Cologne Cathedral, Potsdam, the Brandenburg Gate and the Rhine Palaces as long as they leave the German Museum intact. "

Fonts

Human life in the Arthur and Fritz Kahn Collection
  • The mistake of the pregnant woman in popular belief and poetry . Sauerländer, Frankfurt am Main 1912. Dissertation, Berlin 1913
  • The Milky Way , Cosmos, Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung, Stuttgart 1914
  • The cell , cosmos, Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung, Stuttgart 1919
  • The Jews as Race and Culture , Welt-Verlag, Berlin 1920
  • Das Leben des Menschen I , Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung, Stuttgart 1922
  • The life of man II , Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung, Stuttgart 1924
  • The Life of Man III , Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung, Stuttgart 1926
  • Das Leben des Menschen IV , Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung, Stuttgart 1929
  • Das Leben des Menschen V , Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung, Stuttgart 1931
  • Our sex life - a guide and advisor for everyone , Albert Müller, Rüschlikon-Zurich 1937
  • Man healthy and sick I – II , Albert Müller, Zurich-Leipzig 1939
  • Man, structure and functions of our body , Albert Müller, Rüschlikon-Zurich 1940
  • First Aid - Popular , Friedrich Krause, New York 1942
  • Man in Structure and Function I – II , Alfred Knopf, New York 1943
  • The atom - finally understandable , Albert Müller, Zurich 1949
  • The Book of Nature I – II , Albert Müller, Rüschlikon-Zurich 1952
  • Design of the Universe: The Heavens and the Earth , Crown Publishers, New York 1954
  • The world clock - from the history of the globe , Lux reading sheet no.209, Murnau 1955
  • Bird folk - from the original bird to the eagle , Lux reading sheet no.219, Murnau 1956
  • Must love be blind - school of love and marital happiness , Albert Müller, Rüschlikon-Zurich 1957
  • Star puzzle - from the work of the astronomer , Lux reading sheet No. 237, Murnau 1957
  • The nine planets - children of the sun , Lux reading sheet No. 247, Murnau 1957
  • Forces of nature - winds, clouds, deserts , Lux reading sheet no.262, Murnau 1958
  • The Human Body , Random House, New York 1965
  • Knaur's book on the human body (German adaptation by Otfrid Butenandt, preface by Peter Bamm ), Droemer / Knaur, Munich 1967/1969/1973

literature

  • Uta von Debschitz, Thilo von Debschitz: Fritz Kahn - Man Machine / Machine Mensch. Springer, Vienna 2009, ISBN 978-3-211-99181-7 .
  • Uta von Debschitz, Thilo von Debschitz: Fritz Kahn. Taschen, Cologne 2013, ISBN 978-3-8365-4840-3 .
  • Uta von Debschitz, Thilo von Debschitz: Fritz Kahn - Infographics Pioneer . Taschen, Cologne 2017, ISBN 978-3-8365-0493-5 .
  • Salomon Wininger : Great Jewish National Biography . Kraus Reprint, Nendeln 1979, ISBN 3-262-01204-1 (Reprint of the Czernowitz edition 1925), Volume 3, p. 367
  • Leo Baeck Institute New York: Arthur and Fritz Kahn Collection
  • Central Library Zurich: Fritz Kahn estate

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Erna Schnabel, sister-in-law of Eugen Hoeflich
  2. ↑ Patrick Rössler: On the edition history of Fritz Kahn's ›Das Leben des Menschen‹ . In: From the second-hand bookshop . NF 16, no. 1 , 2018, p. 18-36 .
  3. ↑ Estudio Fine Tuning: Trailer for MTV show "Vamos Falar de Música" Video on YouTube, accessed on November 9, 2011
  4. ↑ Henning Lederer: Man as an industrial palace video on Vimeo, accessed on November 9, 2011
  5. ^ Federal Cultural Foundation - People - Pictures - Universal. (No longer available online.) In: www.kulturstiftung-des-bundes.de. Archived from the original on December 2, 2015 ; accessed on October 9, 2016 .
  6. ↑ Funding "Innovative Audiovisual Contents": Countdown for the first Medienboard-funded 360 ° expedition into space and for 7 other projects . ( medienboard.de [accessed on October 9, 2016]).
  7. ^ Fritz Kahn - Machine Man ( Memento from February 9, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) - Body images of modernity
  8. ^ Marc Reichwein: German Museum of Books and Writing, Leipzig: Do you speak infographics? In: THE WORLD . September 20, 2017 ( welt.de [accessed October 10, 2017]).
  9. ↑ Fritz Kahn: You sleep too much. Paths to quality sleep , in Uhu , Ullstein Berlin July 1927, p. 94
  10. ↑ Logan Clendening: Guide and Chart for the Human Interior. New York Times of April 4, 1943, translated from the American
personal data
SURNAME Kahn, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor and author of popular science books
DATE OF BIRTH September 29, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Hall
DATE OF DEATH January 14, 1968
Place of death Locarno , Switzerland