Günter Feist

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Günter Feist during an event in the Berlin gallery Parterre, 2011

Günter Feist (born February 10, 1929 in Frankfurt (Oder) ; † November 11, 2014 in Berlin ) was a German art historian , national prize winner and politically persecuted in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Life

Feist, the son of a cleaner and a driver, grew up in Frankfurt (Oder) and Brandenburg (Havel) . After elementary school , he attended a commercial school , where he graduated in 1944. Until the end of the Second World War he was an unskilled worker in the Arado aircraft factory in Brandenburg .

After the end of the war, Feist became a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and was involved as its representative in the Antifa youth committee in Brandenburg. By the Soviet occupation zone of Germany carried out forced merger of the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Feist was in 1946 its member. In the same year he completed a new teacher course, later the first teacher examination and worked as a teacher until 1948.

From 1948 to 1950 Feist attended a workers and farmers faculty (ABF), passed the Abitur and became a lecturer in German at the ABF Berlin. From 1951 to 1956 he studied history, then art history at the Humboldt University (HU) Berlin .

In 1957/58 he began an apprenticeship at the Institute for Social Sciences (IfG) of the SED, but broke it off and in 1959 became a research assistant at the Art History Institute of the HU Berlin and senior editor and co-editor of the Lexikon der Kunst for the Seemann-Verlag in Leipzig .

After the construction of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961, Feist came increasingly into conflict with the party and state leadership of the GDR. In 1964 he published the essay We must make it harder for us in the magazine Bildende Kunst , in which he strongly criticized the Association of Visual Artists of the GDR (VBK) and the Politburo of the Central Committee of the SED . His criticism was mainly directed against the harassment and persecution of various artists. He literally spoke of the “pejorative assessment of works of art using the term decadence”. In February 1966 he lost all posts, resigned from the SED and worked as a freelancer from then on.

From 1968 to 1971 Feist had an honorary job as a lecturer for art history at the DEFA company academy in Potsdam-Babelsberg , from 1971 to 1981 he and his wife looked after Lothar Bolz's graphic collection . From 1975 he received orders from the Center for Art Exhibitions in the GDR , among other things for the development of the retrospective for the exhibition Companions - Contemporaries and the associated catalog. After the exhibition was banned and demolished in October 1979, Feist decided to emigrate to the Federal Republic of Germany and made a corresponding application in 1983 . Thereupon he was effectively subject to a professional ban.

Until he left for West Berlin in 1987, Feist kept afloat with various activities, including as a heater and cleaner. From 1989 to 1993 Feist worked for the Museum Education Service in Berlin. In 1992 he was co-founder of the Art Documentation Association SBZ / GDR and in 1993 a working group of the same name.

Honors

Fonts (selection)

  • Ursula and Günter Feist: Art and Artists. From three decades of a German art magazine. Berlin 1971, Dresden 1979.
  • Ursula and Günter Feist: Russian graphics of the 19th and 20th centuries - a selection from a Berlin private collection. Nuremberg 1977.
  • Günter Feist: Art Documentation SBZ / GDR. Cologne 1996.

literature

Web links

Commons : Günter Feist  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Günter Feist: We have to make it harder for us. In: Bildende Kunst (GDR magazine), number 4, 1964, reprint 1991.
  2. ↑ Hartmut Pätzke: On the death of Günter Feist. In: Das Blättchen - biweekly for politics, art and science. 17th volume, number 24, Berlin November 24, 2014. ( online )
  3. ↑ National Prize Winner 1980 In: Neues Deutschland , Archives of the Berlin State Library , October 8, 1980, p. 4
personal data
SURNAME Feist, Günter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German art historian, politically persecuted in the GDR
DATE OF BIRTH February 10, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt (Oder)
DATE OF DEATH November 11, 2014
Place of death Berlin