Karl Weschke

Karl Weschke (born June 7, 1925 in Taubenpreskel , today a district of Gera , † February 20, 2005 in Hayle , Cornwall ) was a German-British painter.

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Weschke was born in the village of Alt-Taubenpreskel, which was incorporated into Gera in 1950. His mother, who worked as a waitress in a bar and had a total of three children from three different fathers, gave him to an orphanage at the age of two and did not bring him back to her home until he was seven. He spent a large part of his childhood as a street boy in Gera. There he made his first sketches, and the painter's brother Otto Dix spoke to him once when he had looked over his shoulders.

Shaped by his difficult childhood, he sought support with the Hitler Youth and in 1942 volunteered for military service with the Air Force . In 1945 he was taken prisoner by the British.

In captivity he rediscovered drawing and painting for himself, which he had already cultivated as a child and adolescent. The British recognized and nurtured his talent and allowed him to take art history classes at Cambridge University .

After his release in 1948, he visited Gera again, where he finally broke with Germany and then lived briefly in Scotland , Spain and Sweden before finally settling in England in 1955. Since 1960 he has lived as a freelance artist in St. Just in Penwith ( Cornwall ) on the extreme south-western tip of Great Britain. Nevertheless, around 20 years would pass before the public became aware of him.

Weschke's early work was characterized by dark colors, but his later works still show a gloomy mood. A trip to Egypt in 1990 had a particularly lasting influence on him , which led his biographer Jeremy Lewison to say: "His roots are not so much in Germany as in ancient Egypt" . The trip to Egypt led to a significantly different, lighter color palette.

Weschke himself described his art as follows: "A picture is not an opinion, but a fact" and "A real painter is a child who has not stopped drawing" .

In 1994 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Plymouth and in 2003 the Federal Cross of Merit with ribbon. On May 27, 2004 he became an honorary citizen of Gera. He died on February 20, 2005 in his adopted home in England. His ashes were scattered in the meadows of Cape Cornwall near the former home . On June 7, 2007, his 82nd birthday, a memorial plaque was unveiled on the house in the East Quarter of Gera where he spent his childhood.

Secondary literature

• Fuhse, Mario: Life in between. On the work of Karl Weschke. In: Culture and Ghosts, Volume 2, "Under four eyes", 2006. S. 304ff.
• Jeremy Lewinson, Karl Weschke. Portrait of a painter, 1998

Web links

• Literature by and about Karl Weschke in the catalog of the German National Library
• The German-British painter Karl Weschke , NDR-Kulturjournal, March 8, 2004