Gertrud Otto

Gertrud Otto (born June 7, 1895 in Memmingen ; † October 12, 1970 there ) was a German art historian who researched the plastic arts of the 15th and 16th centuries. Local focal points were both the Memmingen and Ulm schools .

Life

Gertrud Otto came as the daughter of the newspaper publisher of the Memminger Zeitung and book printer owner Gustav Otto and his wife Berta, nee. Derpsch, to the world. After elementary school , she attended the secondary school for girls in Memmingen. At the age of 15 in 1910 she left Memmingen and went to Munich . Only there was it possible for girls to take their Abitur at that time. In July 1916 she passed the Abitur at the Ludwigsgymnasium . She was one of the first women to take the Abitur in the Kingdom of Bavaria .

academic career

Her further career aspiration was to take up a degree in art history, which of course was not immediately possible because of the war. As part of the War Aid Organization, she worked for two years in the editorial office of the Memminger Zeitung and completed a year-long home economics training in Memmingen.

In September 1919 she began studying art history , classical archeology , education and psychology at the University of Munich . Three years later - in 1922 - she moved to the University of Tübingen . There she submitted her dissertation The Ulm Sculpture in the Late Gothic and passed her doctoral examination on December 13, 1923 . She was then an assistant of Georg way at the Art History Institute of the University of Tuebingen. She stayed there for 17 years.

Nazi era and World War II

After the National Socialists came to power , a difficult time began for Gertrud Otto because she did not sympathize with the Nazi ideology . In order not to lose her job, she became a member of the Nazi women's association in 1935 , but refused to become a member of the NSDAP . On March 31, 1936, she was advised to voluntarily resign from university.

On March 31, 1941 Otto left the Art History Institute in Tübingen and moved to Otto Kletzl at the newly founded University of Posen , which urgently needed academic staff, including women. On November 26, 1943 , Gertrud Otto completed her habilitation there with the work of the Ulm sculptor Gregor Erhart . When the Red Army advanced to Posen, Gertrud Otto was evacuated on January 20, 1945; she saw the end of the war in Memmingen.

post war period

From May 1945 to August 1947 she tried in vain to regain a professional footing. In 1947 she applied for a job at the Städtische Realschule, today's Vöhlin-Gymnasium . There she was allowed to teach German and history by the hour. In 1952 she was proposed for the office of deputy school director. It came to light that she had not passed a teaching degree. Only with the intervention of the then mayor Heinrich Berndl could it be prevented that she was denied the ability to teach. He managed to keep them in employment, albeit under considerably worse conditions: the service contract could be terminated every year, the number of hours was reduced. The remuneration was correspondingly modest.

In addition to teaching, Gertrud Otto devoted herself to art historical research and published. In 1953 she was the first woman in Memmingen to visit the Buxheim choir stalls in the chapel of St. Savior's Hospital in London . Two years later she toured the ancient sites of Greece. In 1960 Gertrud Otto retired from school.

As a pensioner, she wanted to go to America to research Bernhard Strigel's works there . She even took English lessons from a colleague. A serious illness with subsequent constant care prevented this. In 1970 she suffered a heart attack at the age of 75 and died on October 12, 1970 in Memmingen, where she is buried.

The city of Memmingen honored them by naming a street in the south of the city.

Focus of the art-historical work

The focus of her art-historical work was on researching the late Gothic sculpture of the Swabian region. This was also due to the fact that at Georg Weise's chair at the beginning of the 1920s, the entire remaining inventory of plastic works from the 15th and early 16th centuries had been viewed and recorded. She recognized the Ulm Minster and the Münsterbauhütte there as a center of the sculptural work of that period. The Ulm Minster received its sculptural decoration during the construction phase at that time; thus the order situation for artists there was very favorable. Her concern was to find out what prompted the artists of that time to abandon the late Gothic plastic forms and find the form of the Renaissance . She documented this development with the artist Bernhard Strigel. Strigel developed from a simple medieval sign maker to the court painter of Emperor Maximilian I. As part of this research, she traveled to the Netherlands to the places that Bernhard Strigel visited on his wanderings in the 1480s and trips in 1507 and 1508. Bernhard Strigel later came to the Viennese court of Emperor Maximilian I, who had gathered the most famous artists of his time there. Here the artist was able to study the spatial conception of the Italian Renaissance. He got to know the sophisticated colorism and figures whose body proportions determined the garment and posture that no longer corresponded to the late Gothic pattern. Your monograph on Bernhard Strigel from 1964 is still the state of research today.

Fonts (selection)

• The Ulm sculpture of the early 15th century . Tübingen 1924.
• The Ulm sculpture of the late Gothic . Reutlingen 1927.
• The export of the Syrlin workshop to Graubünden . In: Anzeiger für Schweizerische Altertumskunde 37, 1935, pp. 283–291.
• with Georg Weise: The religious expressions of the baroque and their preparation by the Italian art of the Renaissance . Stuttgart 1938.
• Hans Multscher . Castle 1939.
• Gregor Erhart . Berlin 1943.
• Blaubeuren Monastery . Berlin 1947.
• The exposed frescoes in the Zangmeister chapel of St. Martin's Church In: Memminger Geschichtsblätter. 1963, pp. 17-21.
• Bernhard Strigel . Berlin 1964.
• The Memmingen sculptor Hans Thoman . In: Memminger Geschichtsblätter. 1965, pp. 5-14.
• Ivo and Bernhard Strigel, Hans Thoman. Additions to questions of Memmingen art history . In: Memminger Geschichtsblätter. 1967, pp. 23-28.

literature

• Robert Stepp: Gertrud Otto and her work . Memmingen 1995.
• Irmgard Brommersbach, Rita Huber-Sperl, Rosemarie Simmerding, Jutta Stefl-Didden, Peter Wischmann: Dr. habil., born in 1895. In memory of the art historian Gertrud Otto (1895–1970). In: Memminger Geschichtsblätter. 1993/96, ISSN  0539-2896 , pp. 125-143.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gertrud Otto in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography of the women's history workshop in Memmingen
• Writings in the OPAC of the Regesta Imperii

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Archive of the University of Tübingen Sign. 155/4406 Personal files G. Otto.