Josef Winckler

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Josef Winckler, approx. 1925 - with the kind permission of the Nyland Foundation, Cologne

Alfred Joseph Werner Winckler (born July 7, 1881 in Bentlage near Rheine , † January 29, 1966 in Bensberg ) was a Westphalian writer .

His best-known work The Great Bomberg from 1923 was a best seller. It was in 1957 with Hans Albers in the leading role filmed .

Life

Winckler was the second child of the salt works inspector Dr. jur. Alfred Winckler and his wife Maria, née Nieland, were born. His father lost his position as inspector - soon after the birth of his fourth child - and then accepted a voluntary position as the syndic of the Hessian farmers' association in Marburg . His mother Maria Winckler moved with her four children to neighboring Hopsten (1889), where her family owned an old Töddenhaus , Haus Nieland. Apart from the sporadic visits of the father, Josef and his siblings were raised by his mother and grandparents Nieland.

School and study

After completing primary school at the Rector's School in Hopsten, 13-year-old Josef Winckler and his family moved to Kempen in 1894 . His father had found a job there with the Rhenish Farmers' Association. In Kempen he attended the Thomas grammar school there , and from 1899 to 1902 the grammar school in Krefeld . Since the lack of a high school diploma did not allow a philological subject, Winckler enrolled in the field of dentistry at the University of Bonn in the summer semester of 1902 , for which the sub-primary maturity (grade 11) was sufficient as an entry requirement. He completed his dental, but also comprehensive philological studies in 1906 with a license to practice medicine .

While still a student he published in 1904 with two friends from Bonn, Wilhelm Vershofen (1878–1960) and Jakob Kneip (1881–1958), a first volume of poetry, entitled Wir Drei! appeared in Bonn and was well received by the public.

After working as an assistant in Hildesheim and Berlin , Winckler settled in Moers on the Lower Rhine in 1907 as a miner's dentist and opened dental practices in Moers and Homberg , which he ran together with various assistants and colleagues.

Workers at House Nyland

Front view of Haus Nieland in Hopsten

With Kneip and Vershofen, who was meanwhile married to Winckler's sister Gustava, Winckler founded the Rhenish group of authors in 1912, Werkarbeiter auf Haus Nyland , which borrowed its name from Winckler's parent company in Hopsten . This union was a loose association of writers who dealt literarily with the industrial and working world and often met in the Nieland house. The intention of the “work people” did not correspond to what we understand today as workers' literature : In contrast to the Dortmund group 61 around Fritz Hüser and Max von der Grün or the work group literature from the world of work , the work people lacked those socially critical aspects such as the connections between Uncovering labor reality and worker reality or capital and domination. Pathos and transfiguration characterized the language of the workmen, whose writings were almost exclusively aimed at a middle-class reading public. Writers such as Gerrit Engelke (1890–1918), Carl Maria Weber (1890–1953), Karl Bröger (1896–1944), Heinrich Lersch (1889–1936), Max Barthel (1893–1975) or Otto Wohlgemuth (1884–1965) belonged to Winckler, Vershofen and Kneip, or were friends of the Bund. The sponsoring and honorary members included the AEG chairman and later Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau (1867–1922) and the poet Richard Dehmel (1863–1920).

Winckler had a particularly close relationship with the writer and poet Richard Dehmel, who was associated with the Impressionists . Dehmel, the older, established artist, took Winckler under his wing and paved his way into the literary world. This support went so far that Dehmel did not read his own works at a reading in Berlin in 1914, but recited Winckler's sonnets . Later, as a recognized author, Winckler thanked Dehmel's protection by promoting young talents throughout his life, such as the Rhenish painter Franz M. Jansen (1885–1958) or the Dortmund writer Josef Reding (* 1929). In their as yet unpublished correspondence, comprising hundreds of letters, postcards and billets, Dehmel and Winckler discussed both personal problems and literary concerns. Winckler found Dehmel's critical comments on his texts helpful. He adopted Dehmel's handwritten changes in the manuscript of his poem Dichtersaga when he published it in Quadriga magazine in 1914 .

Between 1912 and 1914 Winckler and Vershofen published the magazine Quadriga , which served the Werkfolk Association as a forum for literary debate, but was discontinued at the beginning of the First World War. Now the Bund and Winckler, like many of their intellectual contemporaries, took part in the propagandistic support of the war, from which they hoped to be “cleansed” - as in their “War Gifts” The Burning People (1916), to which Winckler wrote the verse Die mythical time wrote, and shoulder to shoulder (1916). Winckler himself published "war-affirming poetry" (Hanns Martin Elster) in the books Mitten im WW (1915) and Ozean - Des Deutschen Volkes Meeresgesang (1917), as well as poems in daily newspapers and anthologies. He took part in a competition run by the Frankfurter Zeitung to subscribe to the ninth war loan in 1918 and won the second prize in the “Literary Contributions” category of 500 Reichsmarks with his poem Der Ruf des Rheins . The tragic loss of his only brother Alfred, who was killed on the Western Front near Cambrai in December 1916 and with whom Winckler lost his family contact, was tragic for Winckler .

After the end of the war, the dissolution of the old system of values ​​and the realization of his own failure, Winckler initially withdrew from literary production in order to reflect. He did not publish any more books until 1922. Although the Bund revived with its new magazine Nyland at the renowned, national-conservative publisher Eugen Diederichs , and Winckler was again active as a publisher, but he was far less committed to the workmen than in the pre-war period. He published in Nyland exclusively contributions that were made before 1918.

In 1919 he married Adele Gidion (1895–1951), who came from a Cologne merchant family. At this time he was already working on his nihilistic, strongly expressionistically colored books The Maze of God (poetry, 1922) and The Chiliastic Pilgrimage (1923). In addition, he wrote stories, for example those in the trilogy of time (1924), which reflect basic human experiences such as loneliness, abuse or indifference.

The great Bomberg

Although Winckler maintained his dental practices in Homberg and Moers nominally until 1925, he was represented more and more frequently in the early 1920s. He had decided to become a writer and was now working systematically on building his literary career. He achieved his breakthrough in 1923 with the "big hit" Der große Bomberg - a Westphalian picaresque novel with which he "freed himself from the personal crisis of the post-war period - as he repeatedly emphasized in later years -" through laughter ", and the one complete one Turning away from his first creative period meant. While Winckler had previously dealt almost exclusively with topics from the Rhenish industrial world, he now took up topics related to home.

Winckler conducted extensive research and source studies for his Bomberg . Although the novel had a historical model in the figure of Baron Gisbert von Romberg , he literaryised this legendary figure in the Münsterland by adding new myths that only coincide with small parts of the historical tradition. The Bomberg mainly owed to Winckler literary afterlife. With him Winckler created something like a Westphalian "national saint". The long seller The great Bomberg , of which more than 750,000 copies have been published to date, established its reputation as a “local poet”, which Winckler did not always appreciate. Winckler's later designation as “Westphalia of real shot and grain” ignores the fact that many Westphalians felt contemptuous and exposed by Bomberg and Pumpernickel . After the publication of Pumpernickel , Winckler should not have been seen in Hopsten at first.

The Bomberg was filmed twice (1932 with Hans Adalbert von Schlettow and in 1957 with Hans Albers in the title role). Other "Bombergiana" (Winckler) were the names of an intercity train of the Deutsche Bundesbahn or numerous restaurants and pubs.

Freelance writer

The financial success of the book enabled Winckler since 1923/24 to finally lead the life of a freelance writer, just as he had imagined - following his great role model Richard Dehmel: a luxurious life with great personal freedom. At times he owned several residences in Cologne , Bonn and, in the 1930s, Honnef (in a garden house of the Hagerhof ); Readings took him all over Germany; he allowed himself several months of travel through Europe; He went to a spa at least once a year. Winckler earned his doctorate in 1923 more out of personal vanity than out of professional necessity. dent. His doctoral thesis on art theory studies of the graphic, pictorial and plastic representation of dentistry, which was rated “very good”, looks like the preliminary work for the historical novel Doctor Eisenbart , published in 1928 , whose main character (based on the model of Johann Andreas Eisenbarth ) he designed in his interdisciplinary Gives a lot of space for the dissertation.

In addition to his prose works, Winckler published after Wir Drei! further volumes of poetry, with which he reflected on his actual literary preference, because Winckler's first lyrical attempts in sonnet form can be traced back to the Pennäler days. With the Iron Sonnets (1912–14) he integrated the subject of the world of work into bourgeois literature. In his favorite lyric form, the sonnet, he emphatically and pathetically exaggerated the industrial and working world. His industrial lyric corresponded to "the educational policy ideas of the (non-communist) labor movement and the trade unions, but far more than the ' cultural Bolshevism ' of that left bohemian who ... had devoted itself to the proletarian cult". In 1929 he tried to revive the time-bound expression of the Iron Sonnets in a revised form - as the Iron World. In the volume of poetry, The Call of the Rhine , published in 1923, he emphasized his ties to the Rhineland, which had become his second home.

He personally considered the mother book (1939), especially its first part, to be his most mature and successful poetry, the lack of recognition of which he suffered until his death and which he repeatedly tried to call into literary consciousness. His efforts to have these poems set to music by the composers Franz Jos Frey and Heinz Pauels in 1953/1954, and not least the inclusion of the mother book version from 1939 in the four-volume Westphalia edition (1960–1963), indicate the importance of this poem had for him.

Winckler's oeuvre also includes an environmental novel ( Der Großschieber , 1933), a musician novel ( Adelaide - Beethoven's Farewell to the Rhine , 1936), a book on China ( The Sacred Dogs of China , from the estate of 1968) and a medical novel ( The operation , from the 1974 papers).

In addition, Winckler often appeared as an associate editor. In addition to the above-mentioned work people magazines, he published the Jena quarterly for culture and freedom with Wilhelm Vershofen in Thuringia as early as 1909–1912 and, together with Josef Ponten (1883–1940), was responsible for Das Rheinbuch - Festgabe Rhenish poets , in 1925 was responsible for the selection of the texts. The Rheinbuch is still a treasure trove for research into Rhenish modernism. Because Winckler used it to promote young talents, so that not only established but also unknown Rhenish authors were included in it. But the attempt failed with Detmar Heinrich Sarnetzki to establish the Athenaeum - Yearbook of Rhenish Poetry (1948), to connect it to Das Rheinbuch , and thus to revive the tradition of meetings of the Bund Rheinischer Dichter eV from the 1920s and 1930s. Only this one issue appeared.

Winckler's literary productivity is also borne out by the as yet unpublished manuscripts that are stored and processed in the Nyland Archive in Cologne, such as the novel Midas or the Golden Ears , the novella Jan von Weerth or The Vacuum , in which he found himself with the years 1933– 1945 argued.

In the "Third Reich"

Winckler survived the years between 1933 and 1945 by adapting to the given cultural norm. However, the usual political commitments to the system are missing. In contrast to his father, who was imprisoned for his progressive-conservative convictions during the Kulturkampf, Josef Winckler was a rather apolitical, if not apolitical person. Only a few statements on current political events are known from the published and unpublished writings: probably in 1923 he campaigned for the release of 150 prisoners from the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in a newspaper article , and in 1932 he signed an appeal for the re-election of Hindenburg as Reich President. After the National Socialist “ seizure of power ”, Winckler provided the book Der Großschieber , published in April 1933, with the dedication “After fourteen years of wilderness in the hour of departure” and made changes in the final chapter that took account of the changed political situation. However, Winckler did not change the themes of his works during the Nazi regime. Winckler did not allow himself to be carried away to eulogies about the "Führer" or to sign "German Confessions", nor did he appear as a speaker at official events.

Josef Winckler was married to a Jewish woman. So he had to be documented by his work conduct to protect his wife from the racial persecution until - in 1943 - with special permission of the Reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler , in which Switzerland was allowed to leave.

post war period

In 1945 his wife Adele returned from exile in Switzerland.

When Thomas Mann had his "argument about Germany" with Frank Thieß and Walter von Molo and in the mid-1950s Kurt Ziesel presented his book The Lost Conscience , in which he attacked Winckler, among others, Winckler felt compelled to respond, which he received in 1961 on the occasion of an event of the Society of Bibliophiles in Cologne. In the 1950s and 1960s, Winckler was considered to be of integrity: “For many, Winckler was something of a - admittedly failed - mediator between two generations of poets: those who took a seat in the front row in the Third Reich <...>, but then in vain had sought a new connection, and the one who made a new starting point after the war ”(Walter Gödden). It was Winckler's task to defend this position and his personal integrity. Ziesel's claim that he "separated from his wife in the Third Reich and <let her move abroad, where she perished" was particularly perfidious.

Winckler loved the conversation and the argument. In addition to his literary works, for which he has received numerous awards, he was a member of numerous literary and cultural associations (including PEN , German Academy for Language and Poetry , Society of Bibliophiles) and was actively involved in the cultural activities of the early Federal Republic.

The house where Josef Winckler was born: administrator's house of the saline Gottesgabe in Rheine with the memorial plaque attached in 1956.

The way in which Winckler appeared not only on the occasion of the Westphalian Days, showed his influence by Westphalia and his preference for the country and its people. Ever since the success of his Bomberg, Winckler felt himself to be the most important representative of Westphalian literature since Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and loved to present himself in a Westphalian folk way. From the celebratory meal after the Westphalian Literature Prize was awarded in Meschede in 1953 , it is said that Winckler poked around listlessly in his meal and said that he would have “preferred hearty Westphalian bacon with broad beans”.

Winckler can be seen as a representative of Nadler's definition of tribal literature. Josef Nadler believed that the spiritual and physical climate of a landscape shaped people. In this sense Winckler saw himself as a writer rooted in Westphalia. It should be taken into account that in the 1920s there was generally an increased return to home and the surrounding environment, as the founding of local museums and local associations shows. The fact that almost half of his work deals with regional-Rhenish or higher-level topics was hardly noticed in Westphalia. Winckler himself did not allow himself to be restricted to Westphalian despite all his commitment to Westphalianism. Thanks to the experience of his Rhenish years, it seemed easier for him "in the freer urbanity of a river landscape, in ... greater open-mindedness among a moving crowd, ... to perceive the contours of the Low German plain and its enigmatic inhabitants".

In the early 1950s he was involved in the revitalization of the authors' association DIE KOGGE in Minden, in which he campaigned for Low German literature. His involvement led him to the West German Authors 'Association and to the Westphalian writers' meeting (including in Marl ).

Most recently Winckler lived in Frankenforst , a district of the then still independent town of Bensberg . There he died at the age of eighty-four on January 29, 1966 in the Vinzenz-Pallotti-Hospital. He found his final resting place in Bergisch Gladbach on the Laurentius cemetery next to his wife Adele.

Honors

  • In 1953 he was awarded the Annette von Droste Hülshoff Prize for his complete narrative work .
  • He was honorary chairman of the association of north German poets Die Kogge .
  • The Bielefeld sculptor Karl Altenbernd created a bronze bust of Josef Winckler for the Münster city library in 1955.
  • The city of Rheine honored Josef Winckler with a plaque on the house where he was born in Bentlage, the naming of a path, a school, the establishment of a memorial room (which has since been closed) and the gold medal of the city of Rheine. Today the school houses the adult education center and the municipal music school under the name Josef Winckler Zentrum .
  • In 2005, a Josef Winckler Museum was opened on the site of the former Gottesgabe salt works .
  • The annual Josef Winckler Prize honors the best graduates of the secondary schools in Rheine.

Works

Selection from over 40 independent publications:

  • Iron sonnets . Leipzig (1914 in the magazine Quadriga 1914 and in the Insel-Bücherei 134 / 1A without mentioning the author)
  • The great Bomberg - A Westphalian picaresque novel . Stuttgart 1923
  • The world man . Cologne 1923
  • Pumpernickel. People and stories around House Nyland . Stuttgart 1925
  • De olle Fritz. Lost rascals and legends full of fantastic adventure and purring myths. Collected and ed. as a Low German devotional book. Bremen 1926
  • Under the spell of the second face - fates and figures around house Nyland . Berlin 1930
  • The daring surgeon is world-famous by Johannes Andreas Doctor Eisenbart, the tooth breaker, bailiff, oculist, Steinschneider's virtues and vices on trips and fairs, some of the most tried and tested doctors in distress and death sampled many oracles, miracles, spectacles, in particular philosophical, political, moral, mythical tractata and very much Significant reports of countless terrifying and funny incidents are faithfully presented and presented by the righteous, rite licensed colleague Josef Winckler, a former dentist in Mörs am Rhein, maker of extremely artistic dentures, entirely natural, made of rubber, gold, aluminum. Dr. med dent of the University of Cologne, polyhistor and great poet, resident and well-founded, legally born, validly baptized by the future bishop Dr. Brinkmann at Rheine in Westphalia . Stuttgart 1928
  • The wine saints. A happy legend . With drawings by Felix Timmermans. Cologne 1934
  • The mother book . Stuttgart 1939
  • ´´The Creation Celebration 1949
  • Bishop Emmanuel von Ketteler . Cologne 1947
  • Festival of festivals. Christmas parties at House Nyland . Stuttgart 1948
  • Adelaide. Beethoven's farewell to the Rhine, DVA 1951
  • The Westphalian mirror . Dortmund 1952
  • That's how Westphalia laughs. Also a philosophy . Honnef am Rhein 1955
  • Why did I keep silent for ten years? Speech on my 80th birthday in the Bibliophile Society Cologne . Cologne 1961
  • The sacred dogs of China. Stories. Edited and with an afterword by Hanns Martin Elster on behalf of the Nyland Foundation. Stuttgart 1968
  • The operation. From the papers of someone unnamed . Edited and with an afterword by Hanns Martin Elster on behalf of the Nyland Foundation. Emsdetten 1974
  • Josef Winckler reading book. Compiled and provided with an afterword by Ralf Drost. Cologne 2005 [= Nylands Small Westphalian Library 4]
  • An edition of the Gesammelte Werke, managed by the Nyland Foundation , has been published since 1984 and is planned to be 8 volumes. Volumes 1 to 6 are available.

media

  • THE GREAT BOMBERG and other stories . Record Qu 1038
  • Sound testimonials to Westphalian literature (vol. 8): "I freed myself through laughter" . Josef Winckler 1881–1966 . Münster 2007 (audio CD)

literature

  • Wolfgang Delseit: Josef Winckler (1881–1966). A Rhenish-Westphalian writer. Bio-bibliographical summary. In the S. and Franz Rudolf Menne (ed.): Josef Winckler 1881–1966. Life and work. Exhibition workbook. Ed. I. A. the Nyland Foundation. Cologne 1991, pp. 4–12
  • Ders .: Felix Timmermans and Josef Winckler - two “wine saints”. In: Yearbook of the Felix Timmermans Society 2/1991, Kevelaer 1991, pp. 58–63
  • Ders .: Between adaptation and ostracism: As a writer in the “Third Reich”. In the S. and Franz Rudolf Menne (ed.): Josef Winckler 1881–1966. Life and work. Exhibition workbook. Ed. I. A. the Nyland Foundation. Cologne 1991, pp. 68-96
  • Ders .: The "great" Romberg - overthrow of a myth? In: Rainer Krewerth (Ed.): Yearbook Westphalia '93. Münster 1992, pp. 7-22
  • On the other hand: Josef Winckler (1881–1966). In: Rheinische Lebensbilder. Vol. 13. Ed. Franz-Josef Heyen. Cologne 1993, pp. 297-312
  • Ders .: Richard Dehmel as a sponsor of Josef Winckler. The writer as a promoter of young talent. In: Dieter Breuer (ed.): The modern age in the Rhineland. Its promotion and implementation in literature, theater, music, architecture, applied and visual arts 1900–1933. Lectures by the interdisciplinary working group for research into modernity in the Rhineland. Cologne 1994, pp. 59-73
  • Ders .: The Nyland Archives. A research report. In: Walter Gödden (ed.): Literature in Westphalia. Contributions to research. Vol. 2. Paderborn 1994, pp. 135-153
  • Ders .: "The portfolio will be fine." As a member of the workmen at House Nyland. In: Peter Kerschgens and Wolfgang Delseit (eds.): Ernst Isselmann (1885–1916). Rees 1994, pp. 29-42
  • Ders .: “So get down to work.” Technology, literature and art: the industry folder (1913). In: Association August Macke Haus e. V. (Ed.): Franz M. Jansen. Early Cycles 1912–1914. Bonn 1994, pp. 140-156
  • On the other hand: Josef Winckler (1881–1966). In: Bernd Kortländer (Ed.): Literature from next door 1900–1945. 60 portraits of authors from what is now North Rhine-Westphalia. Bielefeld 1995, pp. 397-404
  • On the other hand: "Now I can no longer get lost in the literature of Westphalia." Home as Josef Winckler's literary concept. In: Walter Gödden (Ed.): Literature in Westphalia. Contributions to research. Vol. 3. Paderborn 1995, pp. 119-151
  • Ders .: Avant-garde of industrial poetry: The workers at House Nyland. In: Konrad Ehlich, Wilhelm Ehler and Rainer Noltenius (eds.): Language and literature on the Ruhr. Essen 1995 and 1997, pp. 149-165
  • On the other hand: Josef Winckler (1881–1966). In: Walter Gödden and Iris Nölle-Hornkamp: Westphalian author lexicon. Vol. 3: 1850-1900. Paderborn 1997, pp. 838-864
  • Ders .: Disorientation of the modern age? Turning to "new objectivity". Rhenish writers and National Socialism. In: Dieter Breuer and Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann (eds.): Modernism and National Socialism in the Rhineland. Lectures by the interdisciplinary working group for research into modernity in the Rhineland. Paderborn 1997, pp. 149-161
  • Ders .: House Nieland in Hopsten. Töddenstube and Literatenwinkel. In: Walter Gödden (Ed.): Literature in Westphalia. Contributions to research. Vol. 4. Paderborn 1998, pp. 313-323.
  • Ders., Christiane Kerrutt: The "Josef Winckler House" in Rheine. In: Literature in Westphalia. Contributions to research. Vol. 8 (2006), pp. 391-402
  • Ders .: Josef Winckler, in: Friedrich Gerhard Hohmann (Hrsg.): Westfälische Lebensbilder Vol. 19 (Publications of the Historical Commission for Westphalia, New Volume 16) Münster 2015, ISBN 978-3-402-15117-4 , p. 169 -187.
  • Josef Reding: He not only wrote the 'Tollen Bomberg' , in: Rheinisch-Bergischer Calendar 1978, pp. 140–151
  • Dieter Sudhoff : The literary modernity and Westphalia. Visiting a neglected cultural landscape. Bielefeld 2002 [= Publications of the Literature Commission for Westphalia 3], pp. 207-253

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ For example, a repeated attribution by Westphalian newspapers, e. B. by the Münstersche Zeitung of July 10, 1961.
  2. ^ Karl Günter Werber : Honnefer walks . 2nd revised edition. Verlag Buchhandlung Werber, Bad Honnef 2002, ISBN 3-8311-2913-4 , p. 108 .
  3. ^ Heinz Ludwig Arnold (ed.): Handbook of German workers' literature . Edition Text and Criticism, München 1977. ISBN 3-921402-34-4 . P. 132.
  4. The celebration of creation. Poems . Schwertfeger-Verlag, Karlsruhe 1949.
  5. Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann: The Association of Rhenish Poets 1926-1933 . Schöningh, Paderborn 2003. ISBN 3-506-71551-8 . On the Bund Rheinischer Dichter eV cf. also the articles on Alfons Paquet , Alois Vogedes and Hanna Meuter
  6. ^ In the holdings of the Nyland Archives, Cologne
  7. Josef Winckler (1881-1966): I. curriculum vitae ( memento of the original from January 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.wodel.de
  8. Winckler published his speech under the title Why did I stay silent for ten years? Speech on my 80th birthday in the Bibliophile Society Cologne . Cologne 1961.
  9. Kurt Ziesel: The lost conscience . Lehmann, Munich 1958. p. 143.
  10. Literary history of the German tribes and landscapes , 4 volumes. Verlag Josef Habbel , Regensburg 1912–1928.
  11. So laughs Westphalia. Publishing house Dr. Hans Peters, Honnef am Rhein 1955.
  12. Bergischer calendar for the year 1956, p. 110
  13. Winckler Werkausgabe, accessed on October 14, 2012 ( Memento of the original from March 8, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was 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.nyland.de