Max Schulze-Sölde

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Max Schulze-Sölde at the age of 72 (October 1959)

Max Schulze-Sölde (born January 25, 1887 in Dortmund , † July 1, 1967 in Theiningsen near Soest ) was a German painter and, as "Johannes der Jugend", a well-known inflation saint of the 1920s and 1930s.

Life

Born the son of a prosecutor general, he first studied law himself. In 1910 he broke off his legal traineeship and attended the painting class at the Düsseldorf Art Academy until 1912 . When war broke out in 1914, he was on study trips to France and was interned as a member of an enemy power.

Delivered to Germany in 1918 , Schulze-Sölde , who had returned to Hagen , quickly became radicalized . Under the influence of Emil Löhnberg , a friend of the painter Heinrich Vogeler , he developed a kind of "religious socialism" with the murdered Karl Liebknecht as the "crucified Christ" in the center. In addition, he frequented the “Hagen Boheme” circle, where he met the collector and patron Karl Ernst Osthaus , who made a painting studio available to him. In this circle he also met Hugo Hertwig , a pupil of Ernst Fuhrmann , from whom he adopted some socialist and anti-civilizational beliefs, such as a deep-seated hostility to technology and luxury as well as the glorification of rural life.

Under Hertwig's leadership, Schulze-Sölde took part in a “communist” settlement project on the Lindenhof near Kleve in 1920 , which he left after a few months in frustration: “What did I have to do with these people? What did I know about them and their souls? Nothing but that, like me, they believed they were done with the 'old world'. ”Nevertheless, until 1933 he tried again and again to put his settlement plans into practice - albeit in vain. Schulze-Sölde then worked as a miner in the Ruhr area, where he came into contact with the anarcho-syndicalist movement . When he organized a solidarity strike in 1921 in support of the communist central German uprising , he was dismissed.

Disappointed, he turned away from communism and sought contact with the Christian revolutionary movement of the reform doctor Karl Strünckmann , in which he took on the role of youth leader. From then on, as “Johannes der Jugend”, Schulze-Sölde increased the number of inflation saints and tried until the early 1930s to collect the proletarian youth under his leadership: “I claim to be one of those whom God has chosen to to proclaim the eternal laws to people again, ... I claim to know the place where Satan is vulnerable, I claim to have the key that opens paradise for us. ”In 1923 he closed, supported by Strünckmann, the Christian revolutionary trade union movement founded by Kurt Pösger on a religious basis, the aim of which was the formation of a religious-socialist national community. He gave up painting.

In the next few years he came closer to the nationalist camp politically . The "Religious Week" that took place under his direction in Hildburghausen in 1930 , at which u. a. the Dadaist Johannes Baader , the inflation saint Friedrich Muck-Lamberty , Karl Otto Paetel and Gusto Gräser took part, should serve to found a religious-folk gathering movement in preparation for an “internal” national revolution. In the "megalomania" he spoke of replacing "the Hitlers " and " Thälmanns ". But the attempt to unite the highly divergent groups and individual representatives failed. The National Socialist Völkischer Beobachter reacted with huff: “The amalgamation of religion and politics is always annoying. And to the detriment of religion. Mr Schulze-Sölde should find out about that very soon - if he doesn't adjust himself in time! ”Nevertheless, Schulze-Sölde continued to seek contact with right-wing political groups, such as the national Bolshevik group around Ernst Niekisch and Otto Strasser and his revolutionary National Socialists .

For the sake of his wife, for whom family life was more important than “improving the world”, Schulze-Sölde had already accepted a teaching position at the Haubinda / Thuringia state educational home in 1926 . In 1930 he joined the reform settlement "Grünhorst" near Berlin, founded by Gusto Gräser's daughter Gertrud, which became a meeting point for the youth movement and the "biosophors" around Ernst Fuhrmann. In 1933 he finally ended his political and religious activities and returned to Soest as a painter and thus finally back into the middle-class milieu. In 1937 his pictures were confiscated by the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts as "degenerate" and some of them were shown as part of the traveling exhibition " Degenerate Art ". Nevertheless, he joined the same Reich Chamber as a member in 1941. From 1945 he was chairman of the "Kunstring Soest". He held the office until 1951. In 1947, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, there was a last major exhibition of his paintings in the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum in Hagen. The attempt to resume his religious and political activities with Strünckmann in 1946 and to found a "Sankt-Michaels-Bund" failed.

Politically, Schulze-Sölde changed direction several times, as the art historian Reimer Möller summed up his life in 2001, “from communist to anarcho-syndicalist, to non-church Christian missionary, to national conservative, to Strasser supporter, finally to Christian socialist and demonstrator against atomic death. Many of these changes of orientation were reflected in his pictures. The picture of Don Quixote, which he painted when he was 71, could possibly have been intended as a balance sheet of his political existence. "

Publications

  • Max Schulze-Soelde . Exhibition catalog Galerie Goltz . Düsseldorf 1919
  • Tasks and goals of the Christian socialists . Central office for the distribution of good German literature Neuhof, Teltow district, 1924
  • A man of that time . Flarchheim 1930 (autobiography)

Pictures in public collections

Remarks

  1. ↑ Linse, p. 129; The Westphalian author's lexicon is different : Afterwards he was taken prisoner by the French as a war participant.
  2. ↑ Lens, p. 130
  3. ↑ cit. n. Lens, p. 132; s. a. Reimer Möller: The painter Max Schulze-Sölde on the 'Lindenhof' in Kleve in the Wilster Marsch. An agrarian romantic 'noble communist' settlement experiment , in: Soester Zeitschrift 107 (1995)
  4. ^ Letter to Hertwig 1921, quoted in n. lens, p. 138.
  5. ↑ Lens, p. 144.
  6. ↑ VB quot. n. Lens, p. 149.
  7. ↑ s. Reimer Möller: Lecture to introduce the exhibition "Degenerate Art in Soest" , April 21, 2002, Wilhelm-Morgner-Haus Soest.
  8. ↑ cf. Hoeck, Hans Jürgen: The Kunstring Soest 1935–1961: a National Socialist foundation and what became of it . - Soest, 2013. ISBN 978-3-00-040934-9 , p. 9.
  9. ^ The city of Soest's art collection. Focus and conceptual change of 100 years of collecting work , in: Soester Zeitschrift 113 (2001), pp. 99–110

literature

  • Ulrich Linse: Barefoot prophets. Savior of the twenties . Berlin: Siedler-Verlag 1983 ISBN 3-88680-088-1 .
  • Reimer Möller: The painter Max Schulze-Sölde on the 'Lindenhof' in Kleve in the Wilster Marsch. An agrarian romantic 'noble communist' settlement experiment , in: Soester Zeitschrift 107 (1995), pp. 88-102.
  • Caroline Theresia Real: Studies on the painterly work of the artist Max Schulze-Sölde (1887–1967) . Dissertation University of Münster 2005.
  • Klaus Kösters: Max Schulze-Sölde (1887–1967) . In: Klaus Kösters (ed.): Adaptation - Survival - Resistance: Artists in National Socialism . Aschendorff Verlag, Münster 2012, ISBN 978-3-402-12924-1 , pp. 183-192.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Schulze-Sölde, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and saint of inflation
DATE OF BIRTH January 25, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Dortmund
DATE OF DEATH July 1, 1967
Place of death Theiningsen near Soest