Fritz Wingen

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Fritz Wingen (born May 14, 1889 in Holpe ; † probably January 23, 1944 in Majdanek concentration camp ) was a German expressionist church painter .

Life

Fritz Wingen, whose parents Josef and Bertha moved to Kempen with their children in 1908 , initially decided to become a teacher, but then completed a degree at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and became a painter and wood carver.

St. Gertrud, detail
Fritz Wingen: Paradise scene, 1917

In 1923 he created wall paintings in the Morsbach parish church of St. Gertrud, which was badly damaged by a lightning strike in 1922. The naked Old Testament figures, however, made some parishioners uncomfortable. This initially led to an attack on the paintings, which were smeared with black shoe polish. Later the interior of the church was whitewashed. Only in the covings of the side altars are traces of Wingen's paintings left.

On December 29, 1939, Wingen, who was visiting his daughter Eva Kurz in Lambach , was reported by Margarethe von Pausinger and Theresia Reinthaller for expressions critical of the regime. He was sentenced to ten months in prison. In 1942 Wingen came to court again after tearing off a Hitler poster and painting a church on the back. He was condemned as an enemy of the state and first came to Plötzensee , then to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and finally to the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin , where he was probably gassed on January 23, 1944 or died of a typhus infection deliberately brought about by the concentration camp doctors .

exhibition

A commemorative exhibition with 100 works by Wingen took place in 2005 in Kempen.

Others

A street in Kempen was named after Fritz Wingen. His entry in the martyrology of the Catholic Church as a martyr of the tyranny of the National Socialists was discarded after it became known that he had illegitimate children. Wingen's daughter Eva Caro, b. Kurz and others tried to persuade the Lambach local council to revoke her father's informer posthumously as an honorary citizen and to rename a street that was named after Pausinger. This was initially rejected; In addition, the Upper Austrian Provincial Archives pointed out that Wingen had a criminal record for moral offenses. After massive protests and further investigations, Margarethe-von-Pausinger-Strasse was renamed Siedlungsstrasse in 2005, but no decision was made to withdraw its honorary citizenship. In 2006, the mayor of Lambach published a declaration of honor in which he apologized and pointed out that homosexual acts between adults accused of Fritz Wingen in the 1930s are not punishable under current law.

literature

  • Margret Cordt, Annette Schwarzer, Peter Goßens: Fritz Wingen. A life between Kempen and Berlin 1889–1944 (= life and work of Lower Rhine artists , vol. 5). Boss Druck und Medien, Krefeld / Kleve 2005, ISBN 3-933969-47-6 .

Web links

Commons : Fritz Wingen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Leo Furtlehner: Brown spots in Upper Austria. In: Context XXI, archive link ( Memento from November 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Robert Eiter : The conflict about the honorary citizenship of the Nazi informer Margarethe Pausinger. In: Context XXI, archive link ( Memento from 23 August 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ^ Friedrich Ilk: Declaration of Honor . In: News of the market town of Lambach . tape 61 , no. 1 , January 2006, p. 3 ( online on the municipality's website (PDF; 1.73 MB)).
personal data
SURNAME Wingen, Fritz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wingen, Gottfried
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and wood carver of Expressionism
DATE OF BIRTH May 14, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Holpe
DATE OF DEATH uncertain: January 23, 1944
Place of death Majdanek concentration camp