Käthe Jatho-Zimmermann

Käthe Jatho-Zimmermann (born Käthe Zimmermann, pseudonym : Karl Zimmermann; born June 21, 1891 in Bergisch Gladbach , † 1989 in Cologne ) was a German writer. Together with Franz Wilhelm Seiwert and Carl Oskar Jatho , she founded the Kalltalgemeinschaft , a progressive artists' colony in the Eifel, between 1919 and 1921 .

Life

Käthe Zimmermann grew up in Cologne and graduated from a teacher training college in 1910 with a teaching qualification for middle and higher schools. This was followed by stays abroad in Belgium (1910/11) and England (1911/12), during which she taught at boarding schools. Back in Cologne, she studied at the commercial college, which she completed with two diploma theses in French and social sciences. The work, entitled Belgian Workers' Housing , was published in the Archives of Social Science and Social Policy in 1916 .

From 1915 Käthe Zimmermann published under the pseudonym Karl Zimmermann . In 1916 she married Carl Oskar Jatho ; the connection resulted in the son Kurt in 1917. In their shared apartment in Cologne, the couple organized lecture and discussion evenings as well as exhibitions, which the young artist Franz Wilhelm Seiwert also attended early on. A close friendship developed between the married couple Jatho and Seiwert. As a Seiwert researcher, Uli Bohnen assumes that the Jatho apartment was a meeting place for large parts of Cologne's intellectuals and opponents of the war during this period.In 1916, she organized a private exhibition in the apartment with works by Franz Marc , Wassili Kandinsky , Lionel Feininger , Erich Heckel , Ernst Ludwig Kirchner  and others. According to her husband's post-war memories, Käthe Jatho's lecture on “Expressionism was still very young at that time” met with great interest and “passionate concern” in the scene.

In 1919, Jathos and Seiwert moved with Käthe Jatho as the only woman and their two-year-old son to Simonskall near Hürtgenwald in the Eifel in order to realize the dream of a proletarian writer and artist colony and with joint artistic production. During this time, Käthe Jatho was the author of several editions of the Kalltalpresse and co-editor of the group's publications. She dedicated the poem Community to Angelika Hoerle .

The settlement experiment was ended in 1921, and the family moved back to Cologne, where Käthe Jatho had been employed as a business school teacher at the Cologne vocational school since 1922.

In 1944 the Jathos house was destroyed by air raids. After the end of the war, Käthe Jatho interrupted her teaching activity for two years to work as an editor of a city newsletter before she applied again for admission to the school service.

A few essays have survived from the post-war period, including a. under the title “Guardian Spirit of a Cologne Child” in the first Merian booklet on the city of Cologne from 1948, in which she dealt with the Romanesque churches of the city from the perspective of her childhood in Cologne. The text was reprinted in 2001 in an anthology on Romanesque in Cologne.

Käthe Jatho-Zimmermann died in Cologne in 1989 at the age of 98.

Fonts

• The problem of Belgium, or: it lay the Geuse! Eugen Diederichs Verlag, Jena 1915
• Der Hauptmann Deutschle: A book for grandchildren First publication of the Kalltal community. Kalltal-Presse, under the pseudonym Karl Zimmermann, Max Rascher Verlag, Zurich 1919
• The community of the lonely. A homage to Christianity in its geniuses Plato / Franziskus / Richard Wagner / Friedrich Nietzsche. Third publication from the Kalltal Association. Kalltal-Presse, under the pseudonym Karl Zimmermann, Eugen Diederichs Verlag, Jena 1919
• Ascension of Venus. Collection of poems Eighth publication of the Kall valley community. Kalltal-Presse, under the pseudonym Karl Zimmermann, Eugen Diederichs Verlag, Jena 1920

Translations

• E. Moberly Bell: Octavia Hill . A picture of life. Schwann, Düsseldorf 1948 (translation into German by Käthe Jatho)

literature

• Reinhard Schilf (ed.), Uli Bohnen: The Kalltal Press 1919–1921: An artist community in Hürtgenwald-Simonskall , Hürtgenwald History Association 1994, ISBN 978-3925955266
• Reinhard Schilf: Experiment Kalltalgemeinschaft. The Cologne Progressives in Simonskall 1919–1921 Verlag Ralf Liebe (Landpresse), Weilerswist 2008, ISBN 978-3-935221-97-9

Web links

• junkerhaus-simonskall.de: Short biography of Käthe Jatho-Zimmermann

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Personnel file in the historical archive of the city of Cologne: "A 935 - Jatho, Käthe, born on June 21st, 1891, administrative employee"
2. ^ ^{A b} Historical Archive of the City of Cologne, Acc. 2 (Lord Mayor), A 233, curriculum vitae
3. ↑ Catalog entry on econbiz.de
4. ↑ ^{a b} Reinhard Schilf: Experiment Kalltalgemeinschaft. The Cologne Progressives in Simonskall 1919–1921 , pp. 9–11.
5. ↑ Greven Verlag: Käthe Zimmermann-Jatho ( Memento of the original from May 21, 2012 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.