Karl Ballmer

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Karl Ballmer (born February 23, 1891 in Aarau , † September 7, 1958 in Lamone near Lugano ) was a Swiss painter and philosophizing writer .

Life

Karl Ballmer was born in Aarau as the second of four children to a bank employee. After the early death of the father in 1902, the mother († 1938) had to support the family on her own. The fight against poverty accompanied him from then on throughout his life.

Ballmer described his school days at the district school and then at the Aarau canton school as "rather bleak". At the age of 16 he demonstrated his talent for drawing by caricaturing his singing teacher. When the rector gave him a slap in the face as punishment, Ballmer dictated to his mother that he was leaving the grammar school and began an apprenticeship as a drawing designer with an architect.

Ballmer continued his artistic training, most recently at the Munich Art Academy . From 1913 to 1914 he worked as a graphic artist in Bern and Zurich . After the outbreak of war he was in active service : first at the border, then in the press service of the army staff in Bern. In 1916 he wrote newspaper articles independently and sent them to press agencies. In November he worked as an editor for the “New Helvetian Society ” and hoped to gain a foothold in journalism .

At the end of 1916 he was exempted from military service with the help of Charlot Strasser . He moved from Bern to Zurich, where in 1917 he met the anthroposophist Roman Boos - and through him anthroposophy - and his future wife Katharina van Cleef (1890–1970). In retrospect, he saw it as the salvation from his life crisis, which had apparently brought him to the point of suicide : «My existence since I returned from Munich to Aarau in the spring of 1911 had been one of the most serious crises until autumn 1918. Not so much that I lacked the resources to study calmly was the underlying cause of a terrible despair. Rather, it was the desperation of gaining a supporting meaning from human existence as I felt it at the time ... From 1914 to 1918 my existence was the most serious ongoing crisis of self-destruction, with fatal interventions and assassinations on physical and physical existence. "

In autumn 1918 he met Rudolf Steiner . Ballmer later said that he literally owed his life to Steiner and devoted his entire life to trying to make the educated world aware of "the Rudolf Steiner event" - as he called anthroposophy. However , Ballmer was apparently put off by the anthroposophists in Dornach, where Steiner had asked him to collaborate on the artistic design of the first Goetheanum . He left Dornach at the end of 1920 in order to come to an independent judgment on anthroposophy, lived in various German cities and continued his autodidactic training.

Hamburg, where he settled with Katharina van Cleef in 1922, had become Ballmer's adopted home, which he later mourned after he had to leave her in 1938. In addition to intensive private philosophical studies, he painted. The contemporary artist avant-garde, which had just formed in Hamburg as the " Hamburg Secession ", became aware of him during this time. In particular, the director of the Museum of Arts and Crafts, Max Sauerlandt , was an important sponsor from 1930. The recognition that Ballmer enjoyed here is shown in the fact that his pictures were shown in exhibitions together with works by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky and were also valued in a similar way in terms of the price estimates. In 1932 Ballmer joined the "Secession". In an intensive exchange with other artists such as Rolf Nesch , Richard Haizmann and Willem Grimm , Ballmer contributed to further developing the work of the “Hamburg Secession” on a high artistic level.

Ballmer's literary attempts to establish an intellectual understanding between anthroposophy and contemporary philosophy, on the other hand, found little response on either side. His interpretation of anthroposophy as an autonomist work of art by Steiner made him an enfant terrible among his followers ; he saw himself as an “outsider” and “heretic” within the anthroposophical movement. When he increasingly criticized anthroposophical publications in the 1950s, which in his opinion betrayed the core of Steiner's cause in their pseudo-scientific nature and damaged its reputation, he was downright ostracized and hushed up.

When, after the National Socialist seizure of power, the political pressure to bring the "Secession" into line became too strong, Ballmer announced his resignation. The artist group itself dissolved a little later, on May 16, 1933, by its own resolution and converted the association's assets into champagne, which they drank on the same evening. By dissolving themselves, the artists reacted to repression against Jewish and politically indomitable non-Jewish members, in particular to the demand to expel all Jewish members. They have thus avoided this humiliation and the foreseeable forced dissolution.

In 1937 state authorities confiscated Ballmer's works in the “ Degenerate Art ” campaign and banned him from practicing his profession . In the same year Ballmer married his longtime partner Katharina van Cleef and moved with her into a newly built studio house in Glinde near Hamburg. Among the guests at the topping-out ceremony was the young Samuel Beckett , who had visited Ballmer in his studio and, decades later, praised him as a “great unknown painter”. But the couple - van Cleef came from a Jewish family - were not safe from racist hostility even in rural Glinde. It therefore left Glinde in September 1938 and moved to Switzerland. After a few months in Basel, Ballmer and his wife settled in Ticino , initially in Melide , and from November 1941 in Lamone near Lugano.

Ballmer lived here in relative isolation until his death. He did not find a connection to the Swiss art scene - he did not seek it aggressively either - but continued to paint. In 1947, the re-established "Hamburg Secession" invited him to become a member and take part in an exhibition. However, there was no longer any lasting cooperation.

Ballmer studied all the new publications available to him on philosophy, theology and anthroposophy, took part in the cultural life of German-speaking countries via press services and radio and repeatedly reported to public figures through newspaper articles and letters.

His passion - as it speaks from the thousands of letters and manuscript sheets that are in the Aargau State Archives - was the formulation of a universal worldview, which he developed in a highly idiosyncratic way from anthroposophy. Whatever individual philosophical, theological, or even physical question he tied to, he was always concerned with the whole thing, with the (but antitheist) question of God, with Steiner's concern of "building people from their foundations". His answers and questions - he advocated the thesis that questions could only be developed from answers found - cannot adhere to any disciplinary boundaries. Ballmer's dense, woodcut-like language is difficult to understand and does not want to be measured by academic criteria. The "reality of contradiction", suppressed or marginalized in traditional occidental science, is for him an almost truth criterion.

Ballmer's “postmodern” seeming theses are almost reminiscent of later radical constructivism , but at the same time have a clearly sensualistic element, which certainly goes back to Steiner's anti-Kantianism and ultimately to Goethe. In the last years of his life he even referred to his philosophy in its entirety as a "simple doctrine of the being of sensory perception" or, following on from Herman Schmalenbach , as a "doctrine of making the logos perceptible".

Work and reception

Ballmer's painterly work regained prominence shortly before and after his death, especially in Switzerland. The major retrospective for the 100th birthday comprised most of the accessible work and is documented in an illustrated book. Extensive biographical information is also included here.

In the course of the historical rediscovery of the “ Hamburg Secession ” and the young and unestablished artistic endeavors (as the “loser in art history”) destroyed by the National Socialists, Ballmer has been rediscovered as a painter in Germany since the 1990s.

The literary legacy leads more of a Sleeping Beauty existence. With the help of his friend Hans Gessner, Ballmer founded the “Verlag Fornasella” in 1953, which has since moved to Germany and continues to publish Ballmer's writings. Since 1994 the Franco-German publisher "Edition LGC" has been issuing publications from the extensive estate.

Works

Posthumously published:

literature

Exhibitions

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ From a letter from 1927 quoted in: Karl Ballmer , Aarau 1990, p. 154 (left column)
  2. ↑ Ibid. (right column): The same letter is quoted further: «Whether I was with Dr. Steiner became known personally - in the last hour for me - was a matter of life or death for me. "
  3. ↑ James Knowlson: Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. Bloomsbury, London 1996, ISBN 978-1-4088-5766-3 , p. 236 ( limited preview in Google book search)
  4. ↑ Chris J. Ackerley, Stanley E. Gontarski: The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader's Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought. Grove Press, New York 2004, ISBN 978-0-8021-4049-4 , p. 86 ( limited preview in Google Book search)
  5. ^ Exhibition website , accessed on September 21, 2016.
  6. ↑ Alexander Sury: Adored by Beckett and misunderstood by the Swiss. In: Tages-Anzeiger , September 21, 2016.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Ballmer, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss painter and philosophical writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 23, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Aarau
DATE OF DEATH September 7, 1958
Place of death Lugano