Karolina Lanckorońska

Bust in the Polska Akademia Umiejętności in Kraków

Karolina with father and three-year-old sister Adelajda (approx. 1906)

Father and mother. Painting by Jacek Malczewski (1905)

Mother. Painting by Heinrich von Angeli (before 1925)

The parental home in Vienna was built in 1894: the palace and museum of Count Lanckoronski (holds great art treasures) (1896)

Karolina Maria Lanckorońska (born August 11, 1898 in Buchberg am Kamp , Austria-Hungary ; died August 25, 2002 in Rome ) was a Polish-Austrian art historian.

Life

Karolina Maria Franciszka Adelajda Ksawera Małgorzata Edina Countess Lanckorońska was the second child of the Polish magnates in imperial Austria-Hungary Karl Graf von Brzezie-Lanckoronski and the Prussian Countess Margarethe von Lichnowsky . She had a younger sister Adelheid (1903-1980), her brother Anton (1883-1965) came from her father's first marriage. Her mother's brother, Karl Max Fürst von Lichnowsky, was the German ambassador in London between 1912 and 1914 .

Lanckorońska grew up in the Palais Lanckoroński in Vienna and attended the Schottengymnasium . When the Polish Republic was founded, she became a Polish citizen in 1918. She became a nationally conscious Pole from Sienkiewicz , who in her autobiography, written forty years later and published eighty years later, did not compromise on her distance from the Ukrainian, Russian and German neighboring states and peoples. In the countess's view, Polish history was shaped by centuries of conflicts with neighboring states and peoples. The post-war Poland in the 1920s was in continuous conflict with the Weimar Republic , and held a brief war against the newly formed Soviet Union . The development of a Polish identity, which threatened to fail because of internal social contradictions, was shifted to external conflicts. With the Hitler-Stalin Pact , Poland was divided again in 1939, Eastern Poland became Ukrainian again and remained so after 1945.

She studied art history in Vienna from 1917 to 1921 and received her doctorate in 1926 on Michelangelo Buonarroti . At the Johann Kasimir University ( Uniwersytet Jana Kazimierza ) in Lemberg ( Lwów ), which belongs to Poland , she completed her habilitation in 1935 with Dekoracja malarska kościoła Il Gesu w Rzymie and was Poland's first habilitation art historian. She got a position as assistant professor at the University of Lviv. Her academic interest in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art correlated with a close religious bond with the Roman Catholic Church. The Lanckoroński family had their ancestral home on a latifundy in Galicia, which their brother Anton had been managing since the end of the war in 1918.

After the attack on Poland, the Germans in Vienna confiscated the palace and the collection it contained on October 17, 1939. Since Anton Lanckoroński was a Polish citizen, the Germans relied on the Polish Property Ordinance issued for this purpose .

Persecutions

After the Soviet occupation of Lviv by the Red Army on September 19, 1939, Lanckorońska was only able to stay at the now Ukrainian university for a short time. In order to avoid being deported by the NKVD , she crossed the border with forged papers near Przemyśl to the General Government on May 3rd . She had already joined the Polish underground army "Związek Walki Zbrojnej" (ZWZ) in Lviv in January and now met the representative of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa - AK) Tadeusz Komorowski in Krakow . At first she worked in the Red Cross organization at the Polish prisoner-of-war organization in Krakow. With a power of attorney from the Government of the General Government, she was appointed representative of the Main Welfare Council (RGO) for better care for prison inmates. In this function, she arrived at the beginning of 1942 in Stanisławów, now conquered by the Germans . The Gestapo chief there, Hans Krüger , had her locked up - and during an interrogation boasted that he was responsible for the murder of her 23 Lviv university colleagues in the summer of 1941. Through intervention from circles of the Italian royal family and the Mussolini government, Lanckorońska escaped the threat of murder by the SS and was sent to prison in Lviv. Moved to Berlin for further interrogation at the end of 1942, she believed she could testify as a witness against Krüger in internal SS disciplinary proceedings; instead she was sent to the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp as a prominent prisoner for the next two years . Again through diplomatic intervention, this time by Carl Jacob Burckhardt , President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), she was released from concentration camp imprisonment in April 1945 on a Red Cross transport to Switzerland .

Nazi trials

Since, to the best of her knowledge, SS-Untersturmführer Walter Kutschmann, who had escaped to Argentina, was not responsible for the murder of the Lviv professors , she tried to be heard in the trial against Hans Krüger in 1968 and traveled to Germany. Krüger was sentenced to life imprisonment for other murders, while JG Burg made an inglorious appearance at the trial . According to the decision of the Hamburg Public Prosecutor's Office in 1965, the murders of the professors could no longer be resolved in the opinion of the German public prosecutor's office: the Chief Public Prosecutor von Below declared that he had “stopped the proceedings” because the “German professors responsible for the shooting of the Lviv professors It is certain that the perpetrators are not alive ”.

Polish emigration

She was a national Polish emigrant for forty-five years and lived first in Friborg in Switzerland and then in Rome. The communist seizure of power in Poland prevented her from returning as an aristocrat and former large landowner. As a Polish exile, she remarked: “How happy was the Poland of the 19th century, in whose name no one had the right to say untruth and whose exiles were a symbol of the struggle for human freedom for the entire civilized world! ”She was able to work scientifically and publish. In 1967 she founded the Lanckoronski Foundation , based in Freiburg im Üechtland. She was co-founder of the Polish Historical Institute in Rome and its director from 1976 to 1993. After her brother's death Anton in 1965, it has acquired the art collection of her father: From this part in 1950 was in a fire accident in Hohenems Palace of friends of the Waldburg-Zeil family , other parts were sold by their brother and others could only be reintegrated into the collection after laborious restitution processes with the Austrian state. After the political change in Poland, Karolina Lanckorońska bequeathed the art collection to the picture gallery in the Warsaw Royal Castle and the large Polish libraries. 82 works from the Lanckorońska collection went to the art collection in the Wawel in Krakow , including Bartolo di Fredi , Saint Augustine, Simone Martini , Engel, Sano di Pietro , Madonna and by Dosso Dossi , Jupiter, Mercury and Virtus. After the war, Anton Lanckorońska gave the latter picture to the Museum of Art History and was restituted in 2000.

As a national Pole, she felt "the deepest gratitude to the Creator for my belonging to a people who defended all the great goods of humanity in this desperate struggle [...]".

Honors

She has received numerous awards for her work from the Italian state , the organizations of the Poles in exile and, after the fall of the Wall in Poland, from the Polish state . The University of Wroclaw awarded her a doctorate hc

Works

• Courage is innate. Memories of the war 1939-1945. Translated from the Polish by Karin Wolff . Böhlau publishing house. Vienna 2003. ISBN 3-205-77086-2 , first pl 2001.
• the English edition has a foreword by Norman Davies , an introduction by Lech Kalinowski and Elžbieta Orman.
• Studies on the Roman-Slavonic rite in Poland. Roma, Pont. Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1961. Orientalia Christiana analecta, 161.
• Documenta ex Archivo Regiomontano ad Poloniam spectantia. , Romae, Institutum Historicum Polonicum, 1973– <1991>, Elementa ad fontium editiones, v. 30, etc. (Latin)
• Decoracja kościoła "Il Gesù" na tle rozwoju baroku w Rzymie. (The decoration of the “Il Gesù” church in view of the development of the baroque in Rome), Lwów, Nakł. Towarzystwa Naukowego we Lwowie, 1935. (pl)

References

literature

Reviews:

• Lora Wildenthal at The Sarmatian Review (en)

Web links

Commons : Karolina Lanckorońska  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Commons : Lanckoroński Collection in the Wawel  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Karolina Lanckorońska in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Karolina Lanckorońska in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Caroline Countess von Brzezie-Lanckoronski on thepeerage.com , accessed on September 18, 2016.
2. ↑ Ordinance on the Treatment of Property of Members of the Former Polish State (PolVermVO) of September 17, 1940 (RGBl. I, p. 1270); Peter Harclerode: Lost Masters: World War II and the Looting of Europe's Treasureholds . Welcome Rain Publishers, New York 2002, ISBN 978-1-56649-253-9 .
3. ^ RGO, Central Welfare Council (Polish "Rada Główna Opiekuńcza" ), a Polish charitable organization during the First and Second World Wars.
4. ^ Walter Kutschmann , born on May 24, 1914 in Dresden DER SPIEGEL 28/1975
5. ↑ yadvashem (PDF; 130 kB) Dieter Pohl on Krüger (English); German in: Gerhard Paul (historian) & Klaus-Michael Mallmann Ed .: Careers of violence. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft und Primus, Darmstadt, most recently 2011, pp. 134–145.
6. ↑ LG Münster 680506, BGH 720713. Subject matter of the proceedings: mass, group and individual shootings of thousands of Jews as well as Polish and Ukrainian prisoners and resistance fighters in Stanislau and other places in the area of ​​the Sipo branch in Stanislau as part of several actions (including during the ' Intelligence Action 'in August 1941), as well as by Jewish men, women and children who fled to Hungary but were sent back to Galicia by the authorities there. Mass deportations of Jews from Stanislau and the surrounding area to the Polish extermination camps. Also: jur justiz und ns-verbrechen / nazi crimes on trial ( memento of the original from January 14, 2015 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ↑ Hamburg court order (file number 141 Js 12/65) quoted in: Submission to Federal President Rau May 20, 2002 ( Memento of the original of March 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . See also Zygmunt Albert's Polish book “Kazn Profesorow Lwowskich”, 2002 
8. ↑ Karolina Lanckorońska: Courage is innate, p. 271.
9. ↑ Entry of the Lanckoronski Foundation in the commercial register of the Canton of Friborg ( Memento of the original dated May 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
10. ↑ See also en: Lanckoroński Foundation in the English language Wikipedia.
11. ^ Burghart Häfele: The Lanckoronski art collection in the Hohenems Palace. In: emser almanach no. 14. 7th year. Bucher-Druck Hohenems 2006, 54-70. (= Series of publications by the Hohenems cultural group, articles on Hohenems topics). ISBN 3-902525-46-0 . ( Full text on haben.at. Retrieved October 15, 2011.)
12. ↑ Agnieszka Janczyk, Kazimierz Kuczman, Joanna Winiewicz-Wolska: Wawel Collection ( Memento of the original from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
13. ↑ Written answer to a parliamentary question ( memento of the original dated August 3, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , 5184 / AB (XX. GP) (according to § 91 (4) GOG). 
14. ↑ Karolina Lanckorońska: Courage is Innate, p. 180.