Karl-Heinz Clasen

Karl-Heinz Clasen (born July 9, 1893 in Remscheid , † April 16, 1979 in Mettmann ) was a German art historian .

Live and act

Karl-Heinz Clasen came from a family of manufacturers. In 1913 he passed his Abitur in Düsseldorf and began studying art history and architecture at the Munich , Berlin and Kiel in a rare year . The course, which lasted until 1921, was interrupted from 1914 to 1918 when he took part in the First World War. Clasen received his doctorate from the University of Kiel in 1921 with his dissertation on Defense and Church Construction in the Middle Ages , followed by his habilitation in 1923 at the University of Königsberg with the thesis The Grand Master's Palace of Marienburg . In the same year he became a private lecturer in Königsberg, from 1930 to 1938 he was an extraordinary associate professor there, and in 1939 an associate professor.

In 1940 Clasen was appointed full professor at the University of Rostock , but was released shortly afterwards to lead the establishment of a chair for art history at the University of Posen . Nevertheless, from 1940 to 1945 he headed the art history institute in Rostock. In 1940 he was also part of the general trustee for securing German cultural property in the former Polish territories , under whose guise the SS carried out art theft in the occupied Polish territories . In 1942/43 he took the chair at the University of Greifswald and was in charge of the monuments in Mecklenburg from 1942 to 1945 . Towards the end of the Second World War , Clasen was drafted into the Volkssturm in 1945 .

In 1945 Clasen was dismissed from university as a member of the NSDAP . From 1946 he held paid teaching positions again, in 1949 he became a deputy professor for art studies and in 1950 professor with a full teaching position for medieval and modern art history in Greifswald. In 1949 he was also initially acting and later full director of the Caspar David Friedrich Institute at Greifswald University. As a visiting professor he also taught at the Humboldt University in Berlin . In 1951 he was one of the co-founders of the German Building Academy in Berlin , of which he was also a member. Clasen was also a member of the GDR Castle Commission . In 1968 he was awarded the Silver Patriotic Order of Merit .

In 1974 he moved to West Germany.

Fonts

• The Deutschordensburg Lochstedt , Graefe und Unzer Verlag, Königsberg 1927.
• Marienburg and Marienwerder , DKV, Berlin 1931.
• Medieval architecture: 2. The Gothic architecture , Athenaion, Potsdam 1931.
• Maulbronn Monastery , photos by Helga Schmidt-Glassner , Langewiesche, Königstein im Taunus 1950.
• "The Beautiful Madonnas". Your master u. his successors , Langewiesche, Königstein im Taunus 1951.
• The architecture on the Baltic coast between the Elbe and Oder , Sachsenverlag, Dresden 1955 LN 429-345 / 33/54
• Late Gothic German vaults , Henschel, Berlin 1958 (writings of the Institute for Theory and History of Architecture).
• The master of the beautiful Madonnas. Origin, development and scope , de Gruyter, Berlin-New York 1974 ISBN 3-11-003944-3 .

literature

• Hans Müller, Gudrun Hahn (Hrsg.): Aspects of the art history of the Middle Ages and modern times. Karl Heinz Clasen on his 75th birthday. Böhlau, Weimar 1971.
• Lothar Mertens : Lexicon of the GDR historians. Biographies and bibliographies on the historians from the German Democratic Republic. Saur, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-598-11673-X , p. 163.

Web links

• Literature by and about Karl-Heinz Clasen in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature about Karl-Heinz Clasen in the state bibliography MV
• Entry on Karl Heinz Clasen in the Catalogus Professorum Rostochiensium

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Neues Deutschland , June 21, 1968, p. 2