Karl Schlabow

Karl Schlabow (born April 27, 1891 Neumünster ; † September 30, 1984 ibid) was a German textile archaeologist , new founder and director of the Neumünster Textile Museum .

Life

First, Karl Schlabow studied art painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich . He later went to Peru for two years . Funded by the cloth manufacturer Ludwig Simons, he was appointed head of the city museum in Neumünster on his return in 1926 and expanded it into an industrial museum. On the advice of Prof. Otto Lehmann from the Altonaer Museum , Schlabow dealt intensively with historical textile crafts and textile studies. Gustav Schwantes from the Kiel Museum of Prehistoric Antiquities commissioned Schlabow in 1928 to scientifically process the archaeological textile finds in the museum's holdings and to prepare them for a museum presentation. These extremely sensitive finds from Bronze Age and Iron Age moors and barrows , several thousand years old, were not very clear due to their relatively poor preservation and were unsuitable for a presentation in museums. Schlabow examined these textiles, preserved them and prepared them for a museum presentation. In Copenhagen in 1933 Schlabow examined the bronze and iron age textile finds kept in the Danish National Museum. In order to be able to present these historical costumes to the museum visitors more clearly, Schlabow, together with his long-time employee Willi Schramm and other assistants, rewoven these textiles as precisely as possible. With these reconstructed costumes he organized a traveling exhibition that was shown for more than three years with great success in Bremen, Hamburg and Berlin and finally became a central part of the permanent exhibition in the Textile Museum in Neumünster. Schlabow worked closely with the director of the Kiel Museum of Patriotic Antiquities, Herbert Jankuhn , and was a member of the SS himself. After his release from the internment camp in 1947, he rebuilt the museum, which was badly damaged by bombs in World War II, and renewed the destroyed collection. In 1948 Schlabow moved to Schleswig, where he was involved in setting up the State Archaeological Museum in Schleswig and in the conservation and processing of the finds from the Thorsberger Moor and the Nydam Moor . At the same time, he worked on the reconstruction of the textile museum in Neumünster. He had almost all Iron Age textile finds known at the time reconstructed, made practical attempts at wearing it and published his results in numerous specialist journals. Even after his retirement he devoted himself intensively to the Bronze Age and Iron Age textile archeology and in 1976 presented the results of more than 40 years of research in the publication Textile Finds of the Iron Age in Northern Germany .

Services

Karl Schlabow reconstructed Bronze Age costumes from Danish burial mounds such as those of the girl from Egtved , the wife from Skrydstrup and the burials from Borum Eshøj as well as Iron Age costumes from German and Danish moors such as the magnificent coats from Thorsberg . He processed the so-called construction sacrifice from the Wurt Tofting , the wife of Peiting and parts of the finds from the bog sacrificial sites of Nydam and Thorsberg. Karl Schlabow, as one of the founders of the research branch of textile archeology, performed pioneering work through his numerous research, conservation and reconstruction work on archaeological textile finds. It is thanks to him, together with the Danish archaeologist Margarete Hald , that the northern European textile archeology achieved appropriate importance in the public and especially in the scientific community. For many decades, Karl Schlabow's publications were considered standard works on textile archeology and costume studies in Europe.

Honors

On April 27, 1951, on his 60th birthday, Karl Schlabow was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Philosophical Faculty of the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel . For his services to the city and the museum, the city of Neumünster awarded him the Caspar von Saldern Medal of Merit on June 1, 1977 . Karl Schlabow died in 1984 and was buried in the Neumünster cemetery.

criticism

However, his scientific and reconstructive work on bog corpses is increasingly being criticized by archaeological experts and he has been accused of numerous errors or manipulations. According to Michael Fee , Schlabow was "... maybe ... really only imaginative and at the same time scientifically overwhelmed". He designed the excavation finds and exhibits rather from the point of view of an artist, whose work, however, was not critically questioned by his superordinate authorities and the professional world. For example, Schlabow added a lower jaw that did not belong to the corpse to the skull of the man von Osterby , probably for aesthetic reasons. Likewise, the allegedly obscene gesture of the fig hand of the child by Windeby or subsequent changes to the female figure of the pair of gods by Braak can be traced back to Schlabow's work.

Research areas

• Historical textile techniques and weaving tools
• Bronze and Iron Age textile archeology
• Processing and conservation of bog finds

Works

Selection:

• We weave on the old Germanic weight loom . Industry Museum, Neumünster 1936
• Germanic cloth makers of the Bronze Age . Archaeological Institute of the German Empire (publisher), Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1937
• Iron Age costumes from bog finds in Schleswig-Holstein . Guide through the collection / Schleswig-Holstein Museum of Prehistoric Antiquities in Schleswig, No. 5, Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1950
• The magnificent coat No. 2 from the Vehnemoor in Oldenburg . In: Treatises and Reports / State Museum of Natural History and Prehistory No. 2 . Dieckmann, Oldenburg 1953 pp. 160-201
• The art of board weaving . Publications of the Förderverein Textilmuseum Neumünster eV Issue 1, Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1957 ISBN 3529017019
• Iron Age costumes . State Archaeological Museum of Christian Albrechts University: Guide through the collection. Booklet 5. Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1961 (2nd completely revised edition of traditional costumes from the Iron Age from bog finds in Schleswig-Holstein. ) ISBN 3529016055
• The bog body find from Peiting (Schongau district in Upper Bavaria) . Publications of the Förderverein Textilmuseum Neumünster eV, issue 2, Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1961
• Bronze Age fabric and garment . Publications of the Förderverein Textilmuseum Neumünster eV, volume 3, Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1962 ISBN 3529017035
• The magnificent Thorsberg coat . Publications of the Förderverein Textilmuseum Neumünster eV issue 5, Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1962 ISBN 3529017051
• Woven linen in prehistoric times . Lower Saxony State Museum Hanover, series Treasures of Prehistory . Special print from Die Kunde . Lower Saxony State Association for Prehistory, NF 23, Hanover 1972
• Textile finds from the Iron Age in Northern Germany . Göttingen Writings on Pre- and Early History Vol. 15, Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1976 ISBN 3529015156
• Restoration and preservation of archaeological textiles . In: Collected preprints: 1964 Delft Conference on the Conservation of Textiles . (Delft?) 1965. Pages 37–42.

literature

• Klaus Tidow: Dr. hc Karl Schlabow 90 years . In: The home. Journal for natural and regional studies of Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg . tape 1 , no. 88 , 1981, ISSN  0017-9701 , pp. 112-114 .
• Henning Haßmann , D. Jantzen: The German prehistory - an outstanding national science. The Kiel Museum of Prehistoric Antiquities in the Third Reich . In: Offa. Reports and Communications on prehistory, early history, etc. Medieval archeology . tape 51 , 1994, ISSN  0078-3714 , pp. 9-35 .
• Sylvette Lemagnen: The Bayeux Tapestry under German occupation. New light on the mission led by Herbert Jankuhn during the Second World War . In: Pierre Bouet, Brian Levy, François Neveux (Eds.): The Bayeux Tapestry: Embroidering the Facts of History . Office universitaire d'études normandes, Presses universitaires des Cean, Cean Cedex 2004, p. 49-64 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Karl Schlabow in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lemagnen 2004, p. 55.
2. ^ Klaus Tidow: From the "Städtisches Museum" to the Textile and Industry Museum in Neumünster . In: Silke Göttsch, Kai Detlev Sievers (Hrsg.): Kieler Blätter zur Volkskunde . No. XIX . Mühlau, 1987, ISSN  0341-8030 , p. 151-169 .
3. ↑ Homepage of the city of Neumünster .
4. ↑ Picture of his tombstone in the Neumünster cemetery
5. ↑ Thomas Brock: Windeby - Secret of the bog bodies revealed . spiegel.de February 17, 2007
6. ↑ Thomas Brock: Rehabilitation of a bog body . In: Adventure archeology: cultures, people, monuments . No. 1 , 2007, ISSN  1612-9954 , p. 58–63, here pp. 61–62 .