Josef Thorak

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Josef Thorak, painted by Fritz Erler (1939)
Franz Ullstein's hereditary burial, Heerstraße cemetery , Berlin around 1928
Work (1928) ...
... and Heim face each other on Knobelsdorffstrasse in Berlin-Westend
Paracelsus statue by Josef Thorak in the spa gardens of Salzburg

Josef Thorak (also Joseph Thorak) (born February 7, 1889 in Vienna , † February 25, 1952 in Hartmannsberg Castle on Chiemsee, Bavaria) was an Austrian sculptor and medalist . By Arno Breker , that of Albert Speer was included in the artistic design of buildings of the planned world capital "Germania", Thorak was considered populärster sculptor in the " Third Reich " and was like Breker, Georg Kolbe , Fritz Klimsch , Richard Scheibe and Adolf Wamper to the mostly busy sculptors of the Nazi regime.

Live and act

Josef Thorak first learned the pottery trade like his father , but turned to sculpture at an early age . From 1910 to 1914 he studied at the Vienna Art Academy with Anton Hanak , Josef Müllner and Josef Breitner and finished his studies in Berlin , where he became a master student of Ludwig Manzel .

In the 1920s he made a name for himself primarily with sculptures in wax . 1925–1926 he had a studio and summer house built in Bad Saarow , Moorstrasse 1, according to plans by the (Jewish) architect Harry Rosenthal . In 1928 Thorak was awarded the State Prize of the Prussian Academy of the Arts . He designed the "Palmensaal" of the major Berlin restaurant Haus Vaterland , which opened in 1928 after major renovations. In the same year, Thorak, as a member of the German Association of Artists, exhibited the sculpture Mädchen in the Künstlerhaus Sophienstrasse at the DKB annual exhibition in Hanover .

Thorak's penchant for monumental sculpture earned him a number of state commissions from the 1930s, especially in Turkey. So in 1934 he created the Turkish National Liberation Monument, which was built in Eskişehir . Here he worked with Clemens Holzmeister and got to know Gudrun Baudisch , whom he later promoted in Berlin. From 1932, his neighbor in Bad Saarow , the boxer Max Schmeling , was his model for seven years, which he immortalized in the bronze sculpture pugilist for the Reichssportfeld in Berlin in 1936. After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists in 1933, he let his Jewish wife Hilda, b. Lubowski, part. She and their son Peter emigrated and were considered missing after the end of the war.

In 1934, after the death of the Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, he was one of the signatories of the call by cultural workers to “ refer to the people ” on the unification of the Reich President and Reich Chancellery in the person of Hitler. Thorak's artistic handwriting corresponded to the official Nazi ideas about art, so that during the “Third Reich” he advanced to one of the most employed and most sponsored artists. In 1935, Alfred Rosenberg's office showed a large exhibition of Thorak's work in Berlin.

In 1937 he designed two groups of figures in front of the German Pavilion at the Paris World Exhibition , which Adolf Hitler honored as a “masterpiece”. He appointed Thorak to head a master class at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich . His studio was in the Munich Art Pavilion . Further orders followed. So he designed a winged victory for the March Field on the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg and the striding horses , two life-size horse sculptures for the garden front of the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin.

From 1938 to 1941, Hitler had his favorite sculptor built a huge studio in Baldham, Upper Bavaria (today the Vaterstetten municipality ) based on Albert Speer's plans , in which sculptures up to 17 meters high could be made from one piece. The short documentary Joseph Thorak - Werkstatt und Werk , produced by Leni Riefenstahl , was made there in 1943 under the direction of Hans Cürlis and Arnold Fanck .

Another project, the huge monument to work that was to be erected on the Reichsautobahn , remained unfinished.

In 1941 Thorak applied for membership in the NSDAP.

“When Thorak applied for membership in the NSDAP on April 23, 1941, it was postponed because Hitler wanted to accept Thorak personally into the party. The final recording took place on January 30, 1943 and was dated back to January 30, 1933. "

- Karin Förster : State commissions to sculptors for the Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg . In: Magdalena Bushart, Bernd Nicolai and Wolfgang Schuster (eds.) Disempowerment of art. Architecture, sculpture and their institutionalization 1920 to 1960. Frölich & Kaufmann, Berlin 1985, ISBN = 3-88725-183-0, pp. 156–182.

The membership card was issued on December 28, 1942 and his membership number was 1446035.

Even in the final phase of the Second World War , Thorak remained exempt from active military service, as he was not only named on the list of the gifted gods created by Hitler in 1944 , but also on the special list of the twelve most important "irreplaceable" visual artists. He was involved as a fence in Kajetan Mühlmann's art theft and bought six sculptures from him for Schloss Prielau .

Crypt 25 ( Petersfriedhof Salzburg), in which Josef Thorak and his mother are buried

Thorak survived the denazification unmolested: The Munich Chamber of Justice acquitted him in May 1948 as “not affected”. Two appeals, filed in 1949 and 1951, ended with the same verdict.

In 1950 Thorak went back to the public with a solo exhibition in Salzburg, where he had spent his early years and later celebrated successes. Until his sudden death in 1952, he repeatedly received public contracts. After his death, Thorak was buried in the family cemetery next to his mother in the Petersfriedhof Salzburg .

Erna Thorak died in Bavaria in June 2004 at the age of 90. She was the artist's last wife. As the sole heir, she had initiated a contemporary Thorak archive with expert guidance in good time.

A street in the Aigen district of Salzburg is named after Thorak. The Josef Thorak Archive preserves the memory of the German-Austrian sculptor.

Bronze statue of a striding horse in Ising am Chiemsee

Thorak's Striding Horses have been considered lost since the end of the war and were only found in 1989 on the sports field of the Soviet barracks in Eberswalde . However, they disappeared from there shortly after their discovery and did not appear until May 20, 2015, together with reliefs for the world capital Germania by Arno Breker and some sculptures, including the two larger than life bronze sculptures Galathea and Olympia by Fritz Klimsch , in the course of a nationwide raid in Bad Dürkheim on. With a third horse owned by the artist, the Thorak family paid their son's boarding school fees at the Ising am Chiemsee school home in 1961 . Thus, this horse is the property of the school owner Zweckverband Bayerische Landschulheime . This third version is the sculpture that was shown in the central hall at the Great German Art Exhibition in Munich in 1939 - that is, the same year that Thorak gave the other two horse figures to Hitler.

In 2015 , a marble bust of Adolf Hitler designed by Thorak in 1942 was found in Danzig , part of the German Reich from 1939 to 1945 . It will be exhibited in the planned World War II Museum in Gdansk.

Exhibitions

reception

  • 2016: The artist Bernhard Gwiggner responded with an art campaign in the Salzburg spa gardens with a counter-sculpture. Essentially because the figure Paracelsus is displayed without comment and was a gift from Thorak to the Gau Salzburg for the donation of the Aryanized Prielau Castle in Zell am See .
  • The digital art project Memory Gaps ::: gaps in memory by Konstanze Sailer proposed on February 1, 2016 that the street named after Josef Thorak in the Salzburg district of Aigen should be renamed after Helene Taussig , a victim of the Nazi dictatorship.

literature

Web links

Commons : Josef Thorak  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Baptismal register of the parish Alser Vorstadt for the Most Holy Trinity, fol. 138/1889
  2. ^ Josef Thorak Archive, EKS, Salzburg obituary from February 26, 1952
  3. ↑ s. Thorak, Josef. In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. Fourth volume (Q-U). EA Seemann, Leipzig 1999 (study edition), ISBN 3-363-00730-2 , p. 442.
  4. ↑ Bad Saarow - two artists' houses on Moorstrasse ( Memento of the original from June 29, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bldam-brandenburg.de
  5. ↑ Josef Thorak: Girls . Illustration in the monthly issue : German Art and Decoration , 62/1928, p. 120 (accessed April 24, 2016)
  6. ↑ a b c Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 613.
  7. ↑ On witnesses and discipline
  8. ↑ Article in Süddeutsche , accessed on May 31, 2020
  9. ↑ Bundesarchiv Sign. R 9361-VIII card index / 23050203 .
  10. ^ Jean Vlug: Vlug Report 25 December 1945. pp. 77, 104. [1]
  11. ↑ https://www.meaus.com/0213-josef-thorak-archiv.htm , accessed on October 25, 2019
  12. ↑ Konstantin von Hammerstein: "Brown Masters". In: Der Spiegel . 22/2015 (May 23, 2015)
  13. ↑ Other Nazi art emerged - two Bad Dürkheimers under suspicion.
  14. ↑ The Rhine Palatinate from May 21 and 22, 2015
  15. ↑ Third horse turned up in the Ising school home. Süddeutsche Zeitung of August 7, 2015
  16. ↑ Thorak's bust of Hitler found in Danzig. In: orf.at . November 5, 2015, accessed November 5, 2015 .
  17. ↑ https://www.meaus.com/0213-josef-thorak-archiv.htm
  18. ↑ Art campaign causes a stir. ORF, Zeit im Bild , May 3, 2016
  19. ↑ Memory Gaps ::: memory gaps
personal data
SURNAME Thorak, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian sculptor
DATE OF BIRTH February 7, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Salzburg
DATE OF DEATH February 26, 1952
Place of death Hartmannsberg Castle