Hans-Hasso von Veltheim

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Live mask by Hans-Hasso von Veltheim (1927) in the church of Ostrau

Hans-Hasso Martin Ludolf von Veltheim-Ostrau (born October 15, 1885 in Cologne , † August 13, 1956 in Utersum ) was a German landlord , world traveler, private scholar , writer , collector of books and anthroposophist .

family

Hans-Hasso von Veltheim came from the old noble family of those von Veltheim . He was the son of the Prussian lieutenant colonel and landowner Franz von Veltheim (1856–1927), landlord of Ostrau Castle and Grossweißandt Castle, as well as ducal chamberlain , and his first wife Klara Herbertz (1860–1925), a daughter of the Cologne Privy Councilor Dr. Martin Herbertz, who was one of Bismarck's confidants . The marriage ended in divorce in 1892, and both parents remarried. In addition to a brother, he had several half-siblings from both parents, including Marion von Leipzig (1898–1984), who married the conductor Hans Knappertsbusch in 1926 .

He himself married Hildegard Duisberg (1892–1964) in Leverkusen on October 7, 1916 , the daughter of the industrialist Carl Duisberg , CEO of Bayer-Werke and a collector of modern painting. The marriage was divorced on January 28, 1924 in Berlin. His daughter died as a result of the birth of his grandson.

Life

Veltheim was a landlord on Ostrau and Großweissandt, a private scholar and knight of honor of the Order of St. John . It was in 1906 at the military academy Metz , the officer exam, in January 1907, the inclusion in the he was the officer corps of the garrison of Fürstenwalde / Spree denied. From February 1907 he studied in Munich. He completed his studies in archeology, history and philosophy at the University of Bern with a doctorate in 1912 ; his dissertation dealt with small Burgundian churches up to the year 1200 . He then worked as a publishing director and antique dealer, from March 1919 he was employed in the management of the Dreiländerverlag by Walter Schmidkunz and Alfons von Czibulka in Munich. In 1916 he became a personal student of Rudolf Steiner and worked particularly for his social threefolding and biodynamic agriculture . Alfred Schuler died in his arms in Munich in 1923. Through Annie Besant he came close to theosophy , especially the world savior Jiddu Krishnamurti, who was temporarily postulated by her . Later encounters with him and other Indian gurus like Ramana Maharshi shaped his spiritual development.

When a general strike was called on March 3, 1919, he joined the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division .

Ostrau Castle

The Castle Ostrava , until the expropriation in 1945 in his possession, he inherited from his father in 1927. It was from him extensively renovated in the late 1920s and early 1930s and used in the following years as a cultural center; a synod of the Christian community took place around 1935 . He invited numerous German and foreign guests to his castle, including philosophers, poets, scientists, psychologists, musicians, visual artists and researchers in many fields. Thassilo von Scheffer , Ernst Penzoldt and Grigol Robakidse wrote books here. Outside of Ostraus and on his travels he performed with personalities such as Gandhi , Briand , Stresemann , Rathenau , Eden , with scientists such as Hans Prinzhorn and Hermann Kasack , with artists such as Gerhart Hauptmann , Rilke , George , Hermann Graf Keyserling , Richard Strauss , Arno Breker , Oswald Spengler in contact. Ostrava became a place of west-east encounter, numerous Indians, Afghans and other representatives of the spiritual Orient came and went here. At first his interests revolved around China, which he was never supposed to enter and whose art and philosophy were conveyed to him by the sinologist Richard Wilhelm , but gradually India came to the fore, especially through theosophical and spiritual contacts; the Indologist Helmuth von Glasenapp introduced him to Indian art and philosophy. Probably to protect his cosmopolitan meeting place, he joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party on July 19, 1937 and received membership number 4341560. In 1944 he mentally supported the resistance fighter Elisabeth von Thadden before her execution by means of letters that he included in her Had the prison cell smuggled in.

Marsden Hartley: Lighthouse

After the Second World War, the American occupying power immediately took Veltheim's advice for the administration of the region. Although warned in good time before the surrender of Central Germany to the Soviets, he refused the offer to transport the Ostrava cultural assets and stayed. First of all, the Soviets put honor guards on him, like the Americans before, as a result of sovereign private diplomacy, as Veltheim had also used against National Socialism. The authorities of the Soviet occupation zone initially wanted to use Veltheim as trustee and administrator of the palace and park; they even offered him a professorship at the University of Halle; his refusal to accept it made his stay impossible. "He had to watch how the mob, made drunk by the Russians, stormed into the Ostrauer Park, cut down venerable trees, broke open the coffins of the hereditary burial and hung the skeletons of the ancestors on the branches". Veltheim was expropriated and fled across the zone border to avoid internment. The library and cultural assets were partially confiscated or looted by the Soviet occupiers. Marsden Hartley's painting Lighthouse from Veltheim's collection hung in the Moritzburg (Halle) from 1954 .

The painting was returned to his heirs in 2008. The library with 9719 volumes, 145 manuscripts and 42 maps was incorporated into the holdings of the University Library in Halle , if not already available . In the course of the restitution , 3,000 volumes from the holdings of the von Veltheims in the holdings of the ULB Halle were identified and placed there separately in consultation with the heirs.

Hans-Hasso von Veltheim was cared for in the west by his divorced wife and friends, and Asian governments also helped him. He suffered from asthma and angina pectoris, but he resumed his worldwide correspondence and now wrote several books on the metaphysics of India, also on the basis of his travel diaries which had already been privately printed in 1939 and excerpts in 1943 by Suhrkamp, ​​which were published between 1951 and 1958 . His talent for dealing with difficult questions in a common language that was easy to understand brought them widespread success. Most recently he lived in the Utersum sanatorium on the island of Föhr , still visited by followers; he died here in 1956.

Due to his flight from the Soviet occupation zone , his urn could only be buried in 1990 in the grave-altar chapel of the castle church in Ostrau, which he built for this purpose.

Travel in the 1930s

In 1931 extensive foreign exchange restrictions were enacted in the German Reich . These were supplemented by the law against the betrayal of the German economy of June 12, 1933, by an obligation to report foreign assets. On April 1, 1933, a visa was introduced for German citizens at the borders of the German Reich. These measures channeled the freedom of travel during the Third Reich to travel with the organization Kraft durch Freude .

Nevertheless, Hans Hasso von Veltheim managed to undertake several long-distance trips in the following years. At Ostrau Castle he hosted tour groups from Asia who supported him with foreign currency during his travels. For example: from April 8th to 13th, 1931 Jiddu Krishnamurti , from April 12th to 13th, 1931 August 1936 on the occasion of the Summer Olympics in Berlin, Sardar Shah Mahmud Khan , Allah Nawaz Khan Ghulam Faruq and Omer Khan, deputy Afghan envoy to the League of Nations with him; about Pentecost 1935 Ambalal Sarabhai, Jamshed Burjorji Vesugar , Dhirendra Nath Majumdar , Bijoy Prasad Singh Roy , Ram Nath Chopra , Dipak Dutta Choudhury.

On September 2, 1933, he led a delegation of the German World Economic Society at the Europa from Bremerhaven to Chicago for the World's Fair , then he traveled via Niagara Falls (New York) , Detroit , Pittsburgh, the Allegheny Mountains , Washington, Philadelphia and New York. From April 12 to May 10, 1934, at the invitation of the Christian community , he traveled to Palestine , Jaffa , Jerusalem , Hebron , Bethlehem , Jericho, Tiberias, Damascus, Baalbek and the Dead Sea.

In July 1935 he traveled with the North German Loyd via Venice and the Black Sea to the Caucasus, on the way back he stopped in Rome. On March 10, 1936, he gave a lecture on esoteric India at the World Congress of Faiths by Francis Younghusband in London .

From November 11, 1935 to April 19, 1936 traveled from Veltheim to India . On March 9, 1936, he was on board the Strathmore from Bombay to London . On March 25, 1936, Subhash Chandra Bose wrote a letter to Franz Thierfelder .

In July 1937 he attended a session of the World Congress of Faith in Oxford . He then went to the Netherlands, Brussels and Butterley , where he attended an anthropological summer school.

In November / December 1937 he traveled from Genoa with the Scharnhorst via Colombo to Bombay . On January 3, 1938, he took part in the anniversary meeting of the Indian Science Congress Association in Calcutta , where he met Ernst Eduard vom Rath at the Consulate General. From Calcutta he set out on January 10, 1938 for Rangoon, from there to Mandalay, Pagan and Pegu. Von Veltheim traveled to British India , Afghanistan, Nepal, Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies , Java , Singapore and on Bali he visited Walter Spies . On April 20, 1938, the day before his death, he visited Muhammad Iqbal in Lahore . On November 9, 1938, von Veltheim stayed with a high-ranking official in British India who, at the request of the Indian government, asked him to leave immediately. Veltheim had initially planned to travel back via India , China, Japan, Canada and the USA. On January 2, 1939, he started the return journey on the Conte Biancamano . On January 11, 1939, he was in Port Said and met with his cousin Bernd Rütger von Goßler, who was serving as consul general in Cairo. He traveled through Egypt via Cairo , al-Fayyum , Luxor , Aswan , Abu Simbel to Khartoum . In Tripoli he was received by Italo Balbo on March 8, 1939 . He spent May 1939 in Rome and traveled to Paris on May 31, 1939 . On June 29, 1939, he traveled to The Hague and on July 12, 1939, visited Wilhelm II in Haus Doorn .

characterization

His friend, the esoteric psychotherapist Herbert Fritsche , characterized him in 1955 as follows:

“… He's into you and you with life and death. He practiced that long and hard. But both partners never know whether and when he wants to start a conversation with them as a sage or as Eulenspiegel, as a knight without fear and blame or as a fascinating mocker. That is his sovereignty today as it was in the past: the opposites outside in the world and inside in his own being cannot harm him. He makes use of them, his ability to love embraces them all. His entire life was under the grace of transforming the incompatible into contradictions and being able to shape them creatively. The gigantic grand seigneur, whom the theosophist Annie Besant called “my crusader”, my crusader, was valued as a friend and patron in very different circles. As an officer and representative of his class he showed form and demeanor, as an art dealer and born adventurer he was absolutely bohemian, as an occultist devoted to silence and wisdom. One is not surprised to see the person who has always been in love with the human-all-too-human being conspired to the cult of bizarre ignorance.

Here (in Ostrava) he kept a place of hospitality and promotion wide open to an international elite and at the same time an esoteric bohemian , which is indispensable in the intellectual life of the recent past. Occultists and dancers, art historians and politicians, theologians and anarchists have been guests in Ostrava incessantly, often for weeks, often for months. "

- Herbert Fritsche

His friend, the landowner and art historian Udo von Alvensleben , wrote in 1959:

“... In the Ostrau festival rooms there was now an almost monastic atmosphere. Work was done during the day. In the evenings, spiritual orgies took place in incense-scented rooms, in winter by crackling chimneys, when the mind was clear, despite Dionysian exuberance ... The master of the house knew how to direct the show in a planned and simple manner. He never forgot the social obligations imposed by such property. The advertising of many tendencies was disturbing at times, but Veltheim's intensive approach to each of its guests was compelling ...

A man of the world seeks the transcendent was what von Veltheim said when he completed his previous journeys with the Indian pilgrimages, shortly before the Second World War, when no German had such opportunities. Since private people were not allowed to take their own money with them at the time, he traveled at the expense of the hosts in complete freedom, received everywhere with unusual honors. The government of Afghanistan and several Indian courts welcomed him as a state guest, the dictator of (at that time virtually inaccessible) Nepal, the Indian viceroy, the British governor of Bengal presented him (who felt like an ambassador extraordinaire ) with awards ... they discovered Characteristics in him that they usually look for in vain in whites: unusual empathy, a certain training of the mind, a sense of the occult, familiarity with meditation, the ability to recognize the aura of people and places and to meet it with awe. The downside: a lack of criticism, obvious weaknesses, were not hidden from the Indians either ... In their eyes, no one had absorbed as much enlightened Asia as he did.

That he lived in exile as a sannyasin , as a dispossessed pilgrim to the Absolute, seemed like an Asian finale. However, he remained a European in the fact that stormy participation in the confusion of the problems of our world hour continued to smell in his heart while the spirit carried out the final clarification. "

- Udo von Alvensleben

Fonts

  • Burgundian small churches up to the year 1200. Georg Müller and Eugen Rentsch, Munich 1913 (= dissertation)
  • Diaries from Asia. 1937-1939. Bali. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 1943
  • Diaries from Asia. First part: Bombay, Calcutta, Kashmir, Afghanistan, the Himalayas, Nepal, Benares. 1935-1939. Greven, Cologne 1951; 2nd ext. A. Claassen, Hamburg 1956
  • The breath of India. Diaries from Asia. New series: Ceylon and South India. Claassen, Hamburg 1954
  • What we look, we will be. Aphorisms. Atharva, Frankfurt am Main 1956
  • Gods and people between India and China. Diaries from Asia. Third part: Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaya, Java and Bali. Claassen, Hamburg 1958
  • The spirit of Asia. The lasting from 3 books . In summary u. ed. by Gisela Bonn. Claassen, Düsseldorf 1976, ISBN 3-546-49343-5

literature

  • Genealogical manual of the nobility . Noble houses A Volume I (= Volume 5 of the complete series), Starke, Glücksburg 1953, ISSN  0435-2408 , p. 398.
  • Rolf Italiaander (ed.): Hans-Hasso von Veltheim-Ostrau. Private scholar and citizen of the world . Droste, Düsseldorf 1987, ISBN 3-7700-0739-5
  • Karl Klaus Walther: Hans Hasso von Veltheim. A biography . Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle (Saale) 2004, ISBN 3-89812-211-5
  • John Palatini, Georg Rosentreter (ed.): Old nobility, new spirit. Studies on the biography and work of Hans-Hasso von Veltheim (Ostrauer Schriften, 1) . Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle (Saale) 2012 (2nd edition 2017), ISBN 978-3-89812-838-4 .
  • John Palatini, Georg Rosentreter (ed.): The legacy of the Veltheims. Ostrau Castle, Park and Church (Ostrauer Schriften, 2) . Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle (Saale) 2014 (2nd edition 2017), ISBN 978-3954629701
  • John Palatini: Ostrauer Moderne. The grave chapel of Hans-Hasso von Veltheim (Ostrauer Schriften, 3) . Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle (Saale) 2018, ISBN 978-3963110368
  • Udo von Alvensleben (art historian) , Hans Hasso von Veltheim-Ostrau , essay, published in: Visits before the downfall, aristocratic seats between Altmark and Masuria , compiled from diary entries and edited by Harald von Koenigswald, Frankfurt / M.-Berlin 1968, p. 143-149

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Walther 2005, p. 17
  2. ↑ Walther 2004, p. 78
  3. ↑ Udo von Alvensleben, Hans Hasso von Veltheim-Ostrau , article, published in: Visits before the downfall, noble seats between Altmark and Masuria , compiled from diary entries and edited by Harald von Koenigswald, Frankfurt / M.-Berlin 1968, page 144
  4. ↑ Udo von Alvensleben, Hans Hasso von Veltheim-Ostrau , essay, published in: Visits before the downfall, noble seats between Altmark and Masuria , compiled from diary entries and edited by Harald von Koenigswald, Frankfurt / M.-Berlin 1968, page 148
  5. ↑ Udo von Alvensleben, Hans Hasso von Veltheim-Ostrau , essay, published in: Visits before the downfall, aristocratic seats between Altmark and Masuria , compiled from diary entries and edited by Harald von Koenigswald, Frankfurt / M.-Berlin 1968, page 146f.
  6. ↑ Udo von Alvensleben, Hans Hasso von Veltheim-Ostrau , essay, published in: Visits before the downfall, aristocratic seats between Altmark and Masuria , compiled from diary entries and edited by Harald von Koenigswald, Frankfurt / M.-Berlin 1968, page 147.
  7. ↑ After restitution to the heirs, it was auctioned at Christie's in 2008 for US $ 6.3 million ( auction catalog ).
  8. ^ Karl Klaus Walther: The collector Hans Hasso von Veltheim . In: From the second-hand bookshop . NF 14, no. 3 , 2016, ISSN  0343-186X , ZDB -ID 517761-3 , p. 144-149 .
  9. ^ Andreas Fincke: The grave-altar chapel in the castle church in Ostrau. An anthroposophical gem , in: Materialdienst. Journal for Religious and Weltanschauung questions 71, 2008, pp. 252-257 ISSN  0721-2402 .
  10. ↑ Ed. Alexander Werth, A Beacon Across Asia: A Biography of Subhas Chandra Bose
  11. ↑ Quoted from Udo von Alvensleben, Hans Hasso von Veltheim-Ostrau , essay, published in: Visits before the downfall, noble seats between Altmark and Masuria , compiled from diary entries and edited by Harald von Koenigswald, Frankfurt / M.-Berlin 1968, p. 143
  12. ↑ Udo von Alvensleben, Hans Hasso von Veltheim-Ostrau , essay, published in: Visits before the downfall, aristocratic seats between Altmark and Masuria , compiled from diary entries and edited by Harald von Koenigswald, Frankfurt / M.-Berlin 1968, p. 145
personal data
SURNAME Veltheim, Hans-Hasso von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Veltheim-Ostrau, Hans-Hasso Martin Ludolf Freiherr von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German anthroposophist, private scholar and world traveler
DATE OF BIRTH October 15, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne
DATE OF DEATH August 13, 1956
Place of death Utersum