Karl-Georg Hemmerich

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Karl-Georg Hemmerich (born May 29, 1892 in Munich- Schwabing; † November 14, 1979 in Gland VD ) was a painter , writer and composer . Due to his political attitude and the resulting biography, he belongs to the generation of "forgotten artists".

Life

Karl-Georg Hemmerich was the only child of his parents. The father came from a Huguenot family in Toulouse and worked at the Bavarian royal court. The mother was Rosa Hemmerich, b. Gregory. After the November Revolution in 1918 the family moved to Altomünster .

Hemmerich initially began training in a Munich bank, which he soon broke off to study at the art academies in Munich and Paris. The estate includes drawings that are signed and dated “Paris 1913”. It can be assumed that he stayed in Paris for his studies from 1912 to 1913 and returned to Germany with the outbreak of the First World War at the latest . After his return he was drafted as a soldier. Due to an injury, he was no longer used at the front.

In 1919 he married Ursula Ruth Kwilecki, who studied medicine in Munich. Her mother was Jewish.

Hemmerich earned his living as a portraitist and composer in the 1920s. Some of his early compositions were premiered in Munich. He also had initial successes as a painter. In the economically difficult years he gave composition lessons and led a choir. In 1925 the daughter Ursula was born. As early as 1928 he emigrated to Switzerland due to the emerging political developments. Although the efforts to obtain Swiss citizenship were unsuccessful, thanks to the help of good friends, he was able to stay in Switzerland with his family until the end of the war. During the war he worked as a painter, writer and composer.

Confrontation with National Socialism

Hemmerich dealt intensively with the ideology of National Socialism . In 1935 his book "Das ist der Mensch" was published. Soon after the publication, the entire edition was confiscated and destroyed by the Gestapo . Only one copy remained, which he had buried with other incriminating documents at the outbreak of the Second World War, fearing that Hitler might also attack and occupy Switzerland.

In his foreword to the new edition after the World War, Hemmerich explains:

Now, after the German defeat, this attempt by a German to defend general human dignity would like to find its place in the present. Events have moved, but have not given the author's thoughts any other direction and, since the German problem has not yet been solved by the defeat, an attempt to extract the essentials from the variety of events would justify itself. May he show the world that the German problem before the catastrophe was brought up by a European of German origin. So the undertone of despair is only understandable today, as the world stands in horror at mass graves ...
After all, the first victims of the German system were “only” Jews, but later intellectuals of all kinds. The disenfranchisement of Jews as citizens and people did not revolt democratic Europe and that is its complicity. But I was certain that the disenfranchisement of the Jews would follow that of all other Europeans as soon as the national borders were crossed ...

In a manuscript by Hemmerich that he sent Ernst Schürch , the editor-in-chief of the Swiss newspaper Der Bund , on November 17, 1938 , he explains:

It's been a long time since you nearly printed an article of mine that was still relevant today. I dare to report again with a contribution that is intended as an editorial. Of course, you don't usually read such thoughts in the newspaper, but where else should you read them? ... In the “coming conflict between democracy and the 'others', the former has so far no weapon other than tradition, which does not create a militant presence ; and what would tradition be against the irresistible dynamic of nihilism? ”That is the name of the thing and its harbinger is called anti-Semitism, its sacrifice is called democracy. It would be the task of every daily newspaper to present these facts without political aspects, in order to finally make it clear to the “little man”, using the example of the baiting of Jews, that only humanity can defend democracy, not the other way around. I have been repeating myself, for better or worse, for ten years…. But Germany will take up the fight of annihilation! For years, even in Switzerland, the devil was painted red on the wall; but it appeared brown. I live and fight for Switzerland, although I am not Swiss; I owe her a lot and I want to thank her through the truth.

During the Third Reich, Hemmerich broke off almost all connections to Germany. He found out that old friends also followed the Nazi ideology. In 1933 he wrote (in extracts) to a friend before his emigration:

German anti-Semitism is one of the main points of the national program and with it alone, in my eyes, this movement is directed; not only that one takes away the material existence of the Jews: one does something much worse, perhaps the most shameful thing one can do as a human being: one makes a community of people contemptible because they exist. The reverence for life, as the basis of moral thought, is cruelly violated here. I have to suffer as if I were a Jew, for I have met the noblest people of this unfortunate race and have received support and encouragement in every way from them.

post war period

In 1948 he made the attempt to exhibit some of his large-format paintings with religious themes in Freiburg, which was an extremely difficult undertaking under the conditions at the time, in terms of transport technology. His religious pictures, which are difficult to access and which are neither bound to a clear expressionism, surrealism nor fantastic realism, were rejected. He wrote in a letter to his friend Baron von Gebsattel:

The hostility with which my religious pictures were taken there (and later also in Munich) was annoying, but not discouraging. My opponents have also recognized that I wanted something new; their reproach is obviously directed against the means that are not those of the time, which only recognizes the two-dimensional image. But where an action is represented, as in my pictures, there must also be the space in which it takes place. Nothing should happen today! Fear of action and the inevitable responsibility has produced the demon, the dictator, that is, the being who is supposed to take action from us.

In the triumphant advance of non-representational or abstract painting that began in the 1950s, his representational works no longer had a chance. He himself recognized and documented this very clearly in his letters.

During the Second World War Hemmerich had lost most of his fortune. Since he could no longer support his family with his artistic work, the circumstances forced him into another profession. His “linguistic genius” and his excellent knowledge of art history enabled him to work as a translator for art books at the Swiss Skira publishing house. He translated German-language editions from French, English and Italian. Marc Chagall signed a copy of the translated volume from the series “Le goût de notre temps” by Lionello Venturi with an ink drawing and signature.

Hemmerich worked for the Skira publishing house until 1968, i.e. until he was 78. He died in Gland on November 14, 1979 at the age of 87. His grave is in the small cemetery in Vich near Gland. He had his grave cross without a name made according to his own design while he was still alive. It shows an alpha and an omega in the middle, giving posterity a final indication of his personality, which is rooted in the Christian faith.

The work

The earliest surviving works date from before the First World War, he probably destroyed early works himself, others may have been lost during various relocations. From 1920 his wife began to take pictures of his work or to have it documented by other photographers. The focus of his work was therefore biblical topics. Drawings, sketches, state prints and woodcuts stored in folders have been preserved. After her father's death, Ursula Hemmerich began to sift through the artistic estate and to store it appropriately. In 1985 she had the large-format sketches in red chalk and pencil on parchment paper restored and framed under acrylic glass in an acid-proof manner.

Hemmerich mastered all common painting techniques: oil, watercolor and ink painting, pencil, charcoal and red chalk drawings heightened with white, etchings , line etching , drypoint , vernis mou and aquatint as well as woodcuts . Numerous hardwood printing blocks have been preserved. Hemmerich seems to have preferred the manual trigger. The prints therefore do not show a pinch or plate edge.

Hemmerich must have been particularly concerned with Japanese and Chinese art for a few years of his life and applied his knowledge of woodcuts.

The graphic work

His main graphic works are the etching cycles The Great Passion as well as illustrations for ET A Hoffmann's tales Kreisleriana , Princess Brambilla and his fantasy pieces in Callot's manner . The young Hemmerich was obviously particularly drawn to the work of ETA Hoffmann. While reading “Princess Brambilla”, Hemmerich may have inspired Callot's fantastically caricatured copperplate engravings for “Comedia dell'arte — Scenes” of the Roman Carnival.

Oil painting

After the war, Hemmerich wrote to the Catholic clergyman Dr. Tetzlaff:

The starting point for your presentation should be the fact that in my work the human being once again becomes the object of the picture, which he has not been for a long time. For modern art, man was never more than an object among other objects, a pretext for an experimental art. In other words: modern art no longer has any other object than the object; the transcendental nature of the human being is denied and so not only the historical catastrophes arise, but also the images with the torn human bodies ...
As the creator of a religious work, I am far more a servant of it than an autocratic artist who makes his own law. I follow the law that outside of me is above me, so I am much less of a "person" than it appears. In my loneliness, however, I have experienced the crisis of today's man more deeply than other, “modern” artists and believe that I have overcome it in my pictures, in which there is no longer a crisis: hence the “classic solution”. The modern, the "classic solution". The modern artist represents the crisis, ie the world without man, a demonic yes, "devilish world" in which things ape human form; I, however, overcome the crisis by portraying the Lord and people like him. To achieve this, it took silence and patience and, since the pictures are big, time too. The long work on the individual pictures is also meditation: gradually the “last” form, the symbol, appears.

Baron von Gebsattel wrote the following text (in excerpts) in Munich in 1920 on the "Kreisleriana portfolio" and on the "Fantasiestücke" by KG Hemmerich:

Our artist, who has to be called ETA Hoffmann congenial, draws on the timeless Kreisler experience, attracted by the figure of Kreisler, who is related to him, and uses etchings to create the strongest expression. These sheets are not about illustrations of Hoffmann, the content of which is usually not based on Hoffmann at all, but rather creations that arose from the fact that the Kreisler experience became powerful in its author. As with Hoffman an original experience found poetic expression in the figure of Kreisler, so an equally elementary experience found its pictorial expression in our artist. It is a very special world of spiritual facts and formal possibilities, which the artist presents to us with the persuasiveness of a truly expressive seer. The inner, the invisible is undertaken to show: Experiences, states come to a pictorial representation, which, before they were outlined and recorded, were in any case not visible. In this way, paths are broken in which Expressionism is searching for new territory today, but which have hardly led to useful success since Goya. Indeed, the artist seems to have a certain kinship with Goya. He, too, has exactly what Goya's vision is. One would like to call these sheets dreams, pieces of fantasy, visions, which however have nothing to do with the arbitrary play of pure imagination, but the results of an increased waking consciousness illuminate the depths of reality, of life, of experience, which must inevitably remain closed to the most practiced powers of observation .
These firstfruits, with which the barely twenty-year-old began to become aware of his real powers, already show the surprising expressiveness of the born master. The result was eleven etchings, which are among the strangest things that German graphics have produced ...

The composer

Hemmerich's compositional work is extensive. A possibly incomplete catalog of works concludes with opus 31. His musical work was controversial in his time, as was his large-format oil paintings. After all, before he emigrated in 1928, he had some world premieres in Munich, most of which he conducted himself. He himself played several instruments, cello, piano, clarinet and organ. In Switzerland he had a house organ built according to his wishes and ideas.

In 1950 some compositions from his work were performed in Badenweiler. He wrote about this in a letter dated April 15, 1950: "The only bright spot of my stay, apart from our meeting again, was an excellent performance of my music, which you unfortunately do not know, in Badenweiler."

Literary work

  • 1930: Poems , printed in 500 numbered copies by Jakob Hegner, Hellerau.
  • 1932: Reality and Tradition , printed in 300 numbered copies by Bernhard Krohn Verlag, Berlin.
  • 1936: This is the person at Bernhard Krohn Verlag.

literature

  • Elke Riemer: ETA Hoffmann and his illustrators . Hildesheim 1976.
  • Wolfram Lambrecht: Karl Georg Hemmerich, 1892 to 1979. Painter - writer - composer. A life against the zeitgeist . Steinebach / Wied 2006.
  • Wolfram Lambrecht, Thomas Noll: The graphic cycles from Karl Georg Hemmerich to ETA Hoffmann and to the Passion . Steinebach / Wied 2008.

Web links