Max Raebel

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Max Raebel (born January 8, 1874 in Bielefeld , † August 19, 1946 in Eisenach ) was a German composer , painter , Scandinavian expert and polar explorer .

Life

As the child of a cellist and a music teacher, Max Raebel had a musical talent, he already appeared as a piano player in front of an audience at the age of nine and received training at the Weimar Music School . As a pianist, he spent several years in Sweden and Norway , where he since 1889 as Kapellmeister in Trondheim worked and in the style of folk music in the Nordic countries composed . He met Edvard Grieg in 1896 and became friends with him. Unfortunately, a hotel fire destroyed many of his music.

As a teenager, Raebel, who had lived in Eisenach since 1879, was an avid extreme athlete , he was of robust constitution and sought confirmation in long-distance tours. In 1891 he completed a march from Weimar to Münster in 2½ days - 327 km. In the winter of 1893 he was the first skier to climb from Eisenach to the Großer Inselsberg . In 1900 he dared single-handedly a ski tour of 420 km in seven days in Norway. In 1913 he conquered the Rennsteig - 168.3 km - in full length in 42 hours, 21 minutes - the record was only set in 1993. As a pioneer of Nordic sports, he introduced ski sailing in the Rhön and was a co-founder of the Eisenach ski club. The Ruhla ski hut that he suggested was built and inaugurated on Rennsteig in 1932.

His physical robustness and thirst for adventure lured Raebel to numerous excursions into the Norwegian wilderness and later also into the arctic island world. His personal contacts with Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen encouraged him to work temporarily in the Norwegian service as a polar explorer . In 1908 he went to Svalbard in unexplored parts of the island archipelago and carried out geological, cartographic, glaciological and botanical studies. His precise knowledge of the weather conditions in this area gave him the acquaintance and friendship of Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin in 1910 , who was planning an airship expedition in the Spitsbergen region.

On his travels, which also took him to Iceland , Lapland , the North Cape and the remote Faroe Islands , he collected a lot of material and knowledge in order to enable travel reports and slide shows in his home country. Raebel spoke many Scandinavian languages, dealt with the history of the Nordic peoples and sent travel reports and reports to German newspapers. In 1920 he was in Iceland and attended the Althing Millennium . It was a peculiarity of Raebel to write the mail addressed to special friends back home in runic script .

Raebel's musical talent enabled him to develop a technique for depicting the light phenomena of the aurora borealis. In Norway and Germany he was also known as the Northern Lights painter .

In Norway, Raebel earned his living as a traveling musician, speaker and reporter. At the end of the 1920s he returned to Eisenach and hoped to be able to work as a travel writer here too, but the adventurer could not cope with small town life and the economic changes of the time and became impoverished. In 1931 an appeal appeared in the Eisenach press to enable him to make a living in his homeland with donations - before he had refused the offer of Norwegian citizenship . Highly honored by the king and the government in Norway , he now had to lead a very modest life in Eisenach. Occasional broadcasts on the radio and press articles about his travels only helped him to a limited extent. Heinrich Alexander Winkler, a writer and friend from his youth, supported him as much as he could and gave him new courage to face life. During the war his health deteriorated noticeably, he died in 1946 impoverished and destitute in an Eisenach hospital.

Fonts

  • Max Raebel: My trip to Iceland in 1928 . In: Eisenacher Tagespost from July 25, 1928
  • Max Raebel: Raebel's Rhön Leader . Eisenach 1928

literature

  • Reinhold Brunner: Taschenlexikon - Eisenach personalities . Rhinoverlag Weimar 2004. ISBN 3-932081-45-5
  • Heinrich Weigel: Max Raebel, the universal talent . In: Heimatblätter - monthly supplement of the Eisenacher Presse , volume 48 - October 1994 pp. 5–10
  • Heinrich Alexander Winkler: Max Raebel . In: Men of the Thuringian Gate . Flarchheim 1931, p. 58ff

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Facsimile of a letter to Grieg (1894)
  2. ↑ Heinrich Weigel Max Raebel, the universal talent in Heimatblätter - monthly supplement of the Eisenacher Presse, volume 48 - October 1994 pp. 5–10

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Raebel, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer, painter, Scandinavian and polar explorer
DATE OF BIRTH January 8, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Bielefeld
DATE OF DEATH August 19, 1946
Place of death Eisenach