Fritz Mühlenweg

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Fritz Mühlenweg (born December 11, 1898 in Konstanz , † September 13, 1961 in Allensbach ) was a German painter and writer .

Life

After an apprenticeship as a druggist in Bielefeld , Fritz Mühlenweg took over his father's drugstore in Konstanz on Lake Constance .

In 1917 he was drafted into the First World War as a soldier and was taken prisoner by the French , from which he was able to escape. In January 1927 he moved to Berlin , where he was employed as a commercial clerk at the newly founded airline Deutsche Luft-Hansa and joined Sven Hedin's East Asia expedition as an auditor.

In 1935, after marrying the trained Austrian painter Elisabeth Kopriwa , Mühlenweg settled as a freelance painter in Allensbach on Lake Constance . The marriage had seven children.

During the Second World War , Mühlenweg was obliged to work as an auxiliary customs officer on the Swiss border and in Bordeaux from 1939 .

He advised and supported the Gray Riders in the preparations and implementation of the steppe camp on Hohenkrähen near Singen . Over 2000 boys spent almost a year preparing for this first tent camp with a game idea.

Fritz Mühlenweg died on September 13, 1961 at the age of 62 in Allensbach as a result of a third stroke . His wife, who had severe kidney disease, died a day and a half later. Both are buried in the Allensbach cemetery.

Asia expeditions

As accountants Fritz Mühlenweg was in the preparations for the by Sven Hedin led major international Chinese-Swedish expedition involved which the meteorological, topographical and prehistoric conditions in Mongolia , the desert Gobi , the Taklamakan and Chinese Turkestan examined. From 1927 to 1928 he took part in the first part of the expedition on behalf of Deutsche Luft-Hansa, which was to explore the climatic conditions for the establishment of an airline Berlin- Beijing and to create landing sites with weather stations and aviation fuel supplies. From 1929 to 1930 Mühlenweg returned to Mongolia for a short time; a third journey took him from March 1931 to spring 1932 as the caravan leader of the German meteorologist Waldemar Haude again in the Gobi desert. Mühlenweg later processed the impressions of this expedition in his novels In a Secret Mission through the Gobi Desert (1950) and Valley of No Return (1952)

freelance artist

painter

After returning from the last expedition Mühlenweg took in the fall of 1932 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna a study of painting in the master class of Ferdinand Andri at which he, however, soon dropped out.

Mühlenweg began to paint at a time when the art of European modernism was ostracized in Germany and ultimately persecuted as " degenerate ". The painterly development of Mühlenweg led from landscapes of the old masters to pictures of magical realism , but he was not very successful as a painter. From 1936 had Mühlenweg direct contact with Otto Dix , who in 1936 after Hemmenhofen on Lake Constance in the interior of emigration had gone. The two couples developed a lifelong friendship. Otto Dix and Fritz Mühlenweg painted together several times. In Konstanz, the couple founded together with Sepp Biehler , Alexander Rihm and Werner Rohland the group 38 , the first exhibition in 1938. In 1940 two more exhibitions followed in Mannheim and Freiburg im Breisgau . Fritz Mühlenweg later participated in the annual exhibitions in Singen and in those of the Oberschwaben-Bodensee secession .

From December 1998 to February 1999 a comprehensive retrospective of Fritz Mühlenweg's painting was shown in Konstanz .

author

In 1946 the first book of the band Millennial Bamboo with transcriptions of Chinese poems was published . His greatest success then followed in 1950, the novel In a Secret Mission through the Gobi Desert , placed by the publisher as a book for young people , translated into eight languages ​​and now understood as an all-age classic (roughly a book for all ages ). Mühlenweg processed his travels through Mongolia in it .

His second novel, based even more closely on the experiences of the expeditions with Sven Hedin, was published in 1952 under the title Tal ohne Wiederkehr (today: Strangers on the Path of Thoughtfulness ). As a result, Mühlenweg switched to writing and translating children's books , some of which were illustrated by his wife Elisabeth Mühlenweg (née Kopriwa). In 1956, he received the first German Youth Book Prize for The Happy Lion .

Quote

“Anyone who goes to Central Asia has to abandon the usual standards. He should enter the land as on the first day of creation, as if he had no experience, did not know people, and not even nature. Relearning how to think does not only require adaptability. The readiness of the heart is necessary for this. "

- Fritz Mühlenweg : Three times Mongolia; Dragonfly 2006

Works

author

  • On a secret mission through the Gobi desert , Freiburg i.Br. 1950 / reissued Lengwil 1993
    • two-volume edition: Part 1. Big Tiger and Compass Mountain , 1950; Part 2. Zero five in Urumchi , 1950
    • (today one-volume edition under Großer-Tiger and Christian )
  • The valley of no return or The Journey from Magog to Gog , Freiburg 1952
    • reprinted under Strangers on the Path of Thoughtfulness , Lengwil 1992
  • Nuni , Freiburg 1953
  • The little book from Lake Constance , Constance 1954 (together with Lotte Eckener)
  • Punch with the wind clock , Freiburg 1956
  • In those days. The story of the boy who brought the two fish and five loaves of bread to Freiburg i.Br. 1957
  • The family outing , Freiburg i.Br. 1960
  • The Castle of the Dragon King , Freiburg i.Br. 1961
  • Real and false magic , Freiburg i.Br. 1963
  • Small Mongolian secrets , Bottighofen on Lake Constance 1992
  • Painting , Lengwil 1999
  • Mongolian secrets , Lengwil 2002
  • Three times Mongolia: Dampignak and other stories; Travel diaries and letters from the Sven Hedin expedition through Inner Mongolia , eds. Ekkehard Faude and Regina Mühlenweg, Lengwil 2006 ( posthumous )
  • With Elisabeth Mühlenweg : The family excursion / Zugaatai ​​aylal - A story , new edition, Lengwil 2011

Editing

Translations

  • Dino Buzzati : The Bear Kingdom , Freiburg i.Br. 1962
  • Louise Fatio: The Happy Lion , Freiburg i.Br. 1955
  • Louise Fatio: The Happy Lion in Africa , Freiburg i.Br. 1956
  • Louise Fatio: The happy lion child , Freiburg i.Br. 1960
  • Louise Fatio: A doll for Marie , Freiburg i.Br. 1959
  • Louise Fatio: Two happy lions , Freiburg 1957
  • Janice: The duck Angelina , Freiburg i.Br. 1961
  • Nicholas Kalashnikoff: Turgen, the hunter , Freiburg i.Br. 1957
  • Nancy Lord: Me and my dog , Freiburg i.Br. [u. a.] 1959
  • Millennial bamboo , Hamburg 1946 / new edition, Lengwil 1994

Discount, reception

Fritz Mühlenweg's estate is kept in the Franz Michael Felder archive of the Vorarlberg State Library in Bregenz on Lake Constance .

On June 22, 2012, the MÜHLENWEGMUSEUM Allensbach was opened in Allensbach, the family's former residence, in the station building, Konstanzer Straße 12 . It is located in five rooms measuring 80 square meters.

Fritz Mühlenweg's pictures are traded at auctions.

Awards

literature

Catalogs

  • The land of the blue sky - Fritz Mühlenweg in Mongolia. Libelle Verlag, Lengwil am Bodensee 2005, ISBN 978-3-905707-02-1 .

Varia

  • Ekkehard Faude: Fritz Mühlenweg - from Lake Constance to Mongolia. Libelle Verlag, Lengwil am Bodensee 2005, ISBN 978-3-909081-01-1 .
  • Gabriele Goldfuß: Fritz Mühlenweg: Thousand-year-old bamboo: New poems from the Schi-King. In: Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung , Vol. 21. Bochum, 1998, 188–191.
  • Ekkehard Faude: 'Hammaguä! One shouldn't run after what has been written. ' Sometimes maybe; you may then discover an author. Improved afterword to Fritz Mühlenweg: On a secret mission through the Gobi desert (Libelle, 2007)
  • Ekkehard Faude: On the path of thoughtfulness. Fritz Mühlenweg between remembered Mongolia, poetry and paperwork. Epilogue to Fritz Mühlenweg: Strangers on the Path of Thoughtfulness (Libelle, 2013)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Batkhishig Tserennyam: The Aeroarctic and Sven Hedin's flight expedition to Northern China , in: Polarforschung, Vol. 88 (2018), No. 1, pp. 23-30 (here: p. 29Fn1). Available here.
  2. ↑ http://www.perlentaucher.de/autor/louise-fatio.html
  3. ↑ vlb.vorarlberg.at
  4. ↑ MÜHLENWEGMUSEUM Allensbach
  5. ↑ Aurelia Scherrer: The door to another world. In: Südkurier , May 22, 2020.
  6. ↑ Fritz Mühlenweg at artgebung
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personal data
SURNAME Mühlenweg, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 11, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Constancy
DATE OF DEATH September 13, 1961
Place of death Allensbach