Helene Marcarover

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Helene Marcarover: Self-Portrait, 1952 (Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek )

Helene Marcarover , actually Elena Dmitrowna Markarian (born July 22, 1900 or 1904 in Ciechocinek ( Poland ), † 1992 in Königheim ), was a German painter , draftsman and poet .

Life

Little information can be determined with certainty about Helene Marcarover's biography up to 1944. The artist repeatedly changed her details in the course of her later life, probably out of fear of persecution, starting with her name and date of birth to her various places of residence, activities and employers. There are few sources other than her own records.

Marcarover was therefore the daughter of a civil servant of Armenian origin and a Baltic German mother. Due to the father's changing places of work, the family had to move frequently; Marcarover lived as a child temporarily in St. Petersburg and Moscow before moving to Cuciurul-Mic ( Romania ) around 1925 , where distant relatives lived. By this time her parents and siblings had died, partly in World War I , partly from illness, and she had survived some serious illnesses herself (including scarlet fever and tuberculosis ).

Marcarover worked there in various positions, including as a housemaid and nanny and as an office worker in the nearby Chernivtsi . There she began to draw again, in addition to the struggle for a sufficient living, and to pursue her artistic inclination. In Chernivtsi she met the much older art historian and lawyer Wladimir Sergej von Zalozieckyj (1884–1965), who was probably her great love.

When Romania fell to the Soviet Union in 1944 , Marcarover was forced to flee. In 1947 she came to Waldenhausen ( Wertheim ) via the Carpathians , Upper Silesia and Thuringia . During the years of her flight she was temporarily used by the German Wehrmacht as an interpreter . In 1949 she suffered a serious back injury in an accident and a heart attack in 1950. As a result, she spent many months in various hospitals and was in poor health.

In 1952 she moved to Tauberbischofsheim , where she devoted herself entirely to painting, occasionally writing poetry and becoming a writer. While she was well known in her place of residence, had several exhibitions of her works and was also repeatedly present with poems and pictures in the local newspaper, she did not achieve a major breakthrough as an artist. She died in the spring of 1992 in a retirement home in Königheim.

Her estate has been in the Badische Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe since 2012 .

literature

  • Axtmann, Alexandra / Stello, Annika (eds.): Language pictures - picture language. The artists Helene Marcarover and Georg Alexander Mathéy . Karlsruhe 2017.
  • Marcarover, Elena: People who haven't been there. Stories. Edited by Andreas Golm and Christoph Mackert. Frankfurt 1992.
  • Marcarover, Helene: Fragments. Poems and pictures. Edited by Christoph Mackert and Gunther Schmidt. Lauda-Koenigshofen [1984].

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ S. Mackert / Golm 1992, p. 80.
  2. ↑ See Axtmann / Stello 2017, p. 15.
  3. ^ S. Mackert / Golm 1992, p. 80.
  4. ↑ This is what the documents in the Marcarover estate come from: Karlsruhe, SU, K 3238.
personal data
SURNAME Marcarover, Helene
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Markarian, Elena Dmitrovna (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter, draftsman and poet
DATE OF BIRTH July 22, 1900 or July 22, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Ciechocinek
DATE OF DEATH 1992
Place of death Koenigheim