Tisa from the Schulenburg

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Tisa von der Schulenburg (actually: Elisabeth Karoline Mary Margarete Veronika Countess von der Schulenburg ; * December 7, 1903 in Tressow , today part of Bobitz ; †  February 8, 2001 in Dorsten ) was a German visual artist. As a sister in the Order of the Ursulines (OSU) she was named Sister Paula .

Life

Childhood and youth

Tisa von der Schulenburg was born in 1903 on the Mecklenburg estate Tressow, now a district of Bobitz, as the daughter of the Prussian cavalry general and later NSDAP Reichstag deputy Friedrich Bernhard Graf von der Schulenburg (1865-1939) and his wife Freda-Marie countess von Arnim (1873–1939) born.

She spent her childhood and youth in London , Potsdam , Berlin and Munster , but mostly on her father's property in Tressow. She had a rather distant relationship with her brothers Johann-Albrecht (1898–1945), Wolf-Werner (1899–1944) and Adolf-Heinrich (1901–1940); to Fritz-Dietlof (1902–1944), who later became the resistance fighter from July 20, 1944, and her younger brother Wilhelm (1904–1936), however, she maintained a closer relationship.

In 1914 and in the following years, Tisa's father and the three oldest brothers went to war . During this time she was initially housed in the monastery Stift zum Heiligengrabe . Then she came to Lemgo to do a household apprenticeship , took private drawing lessons and learned to work wood with a chisel from a cabinet maker . The collapse of the empire hit the family hard - when the father and brothers returned from the war in 1919, the family's former wealth was almost consumed.

Art studies

At the age of 16, Tisa von der Schulenburg introduced herself to the artist Max Liebermann from the Berlin Academy with paper cutouts , with which she had been experimenting since 1917. He confirmed her talent, but her father did not agree to attend the academy until 1925. She studied sculpture with Fritz Klimsch , Edwin Scharff and Otto Hitzberger . During a semester abroad in Paris in 1927 she met Charles Despiaux , who praised and promoted her work. In Berlin and Paris she led a life in the spirit of the Roaring Twenties - unrestrained and intoxicating. At that time she met Bertolt Brecht , Paul Levi , Max Pechstein , George Grosz , Albert Einstein , Heinrich and Thomas Mann and other Berlin personalities in the house of the Jewish banker Hugo Simon , who initiated the New Fatherland Bund in 1914 together with Albert Einstein and discussed politics, science and art with them. At the age of 25, she also met the Jewish entrepreneur Fritz Hess (d. 1976), whom she married in 1928, to the displeasure of her father. Personally and artistically, however, she remained unsatisfied.

emigration

After Tisa von der Schulenburg shortly after coming to power of the Nazis Hitler's Mein Kampf had read, the couple emigrated in 1933 because of the persecution of the Jews and "active left" to London. However, her parents and brothers were sympathetic to Hitler and welcomed the Nazi seizure of power.

At the beginning of 1935 Tisa von der Schulenburg met the sculptor and painter Henry Moore in England and tried her hand at bronze sculptures; however, she did not like the sculptures, and so she discovered the relief for herself . Because she did not have a valid passport, she was unable to attend the funeral of her youngest brother Wilhelm, who was killed in a car accident - the loss hit the family hard. "Pain unites us, but politics divides us," she later wrote.

After her exhibition “ Degenerate Art ” in 1936, which was directed against National Socialist art policy , she was elected to the board of the anti-fascist artist group “Artists International Association” (AIA), which tried to close the gap between workers and artists. To give lectures on art and to give carving courses, Schulenburg visited County Durham in the north of England. In this coal mine she encountered the misery of the workers: 200,000 miners were unemployed at the time; those who were still employed in the mines worked under the toughest conditions. She showed her solidarity with the unemployed and helped organize food. As a reward for her social commitment in the region, Schulenburg was allowed to drive into a mine and saw the work “on site”. She traveled to the area several times each year until 1939 to give lectures and courses. Each time, new drawings and carvings were created under the impressions. After psychological treatment, she divorced Fritz Hess in 1938 after a 10-year marriage.

war

Six months later she traveled to Germany to visit her dying father. The father, meanwhile promoted by Heinrich Himmler to SS-Obergruppenführer , died shortly after a discussion with his daughter of old age tuberculosis . She was also able to talk to her brother Fritz-Dietlof , who had just been appointed Deputy President of Silesia ; here she learned that his work was only a camouflage and that he was already working in the resistance. When she wanted to return to England, she was refused entry because they thought she was a spy. She had taken a newspaper report from Germany about her father's funeral and British officials discovered a photo in it of Hitler as a mourning guest at the funeral. She suffered from having to remain under the control of the Hitler dictatorship, first lived with her brother Adolf-Heinrich in Cologne and then went to see her mother in Travemünde . Her mother had suffered several strokes and died a few weeks later.

In Travemünde she met her childhood friend Carl Ulrich von Barner and began a relationship with him. On the day the war broke out, von Barner was drafted, and on the evening of the same day they were civilly married. Tisa von der Schulenburg moved to Gut Klein Trebbow , about 15 km south of Tressow, which belonged to the von Barners , and took over management of the estate. From the end of 1942 onwards, Fritz-Dietlof and his wife Charlotte, who temporarily lived on the estate, kept them informed of the resistance plans . She got involved “on a small scale” and took in prisoners of war, for example. During the war, except for a few sketches, her art came to a standstill; too much distracted and burdened her.

Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg met Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg several times in 1944 at Gut Klein Trebbow. He visited Klein Trebbow again the day before the Hitler attack . The attack failed and her brother and her uncle Friedrich-Werner were hanged a few weeks later. Tisa von der Schulenburg was turned away when she tried to be admitted as a spectator at the trial of her brother at the People's Court in Berlin. After the execution of her brother in the autumn of 1944, she created a memorial plaque with the inscription “I have done it with my senses and now I have no regrets” (a motto by Ulrich von Hutten ) for the park of the Klein Trebbow estate. Because of this inscription, which openly sympathized with the assassination attempt by the resistance fighters, she was denounced to the local NSDAP in early 1945, but was not arrested. Her other brothers fell on the front lines or died of colon cancer.

post war period

After the end of the war, she fled the Red Army in the west to relatives in Travemünde. She accepted a position as secretary for the British Military Administration's Industry Officer. In 1946 the marriage with Carl Ulrich von Barner (1899–1978) was divorced. She moved to Glinde near Hamburg and worked as a welfare worker in the local military depot. She founded a kind of works council and provided the workers with basic food supplies.

Tisa von der Schulenburg sold cigarettes that friends had sent her from England and saved the money to be able to work as a freelance artist again. Initially, from 1947, she worked as a freelancer for the Hamburg newspaper “ Die Welt ”. She traveled to the Ruhr area for half a year to write a report . She lived in a colliery colony in Recklinghausen , where her brother Fritz-Dietlof had been government assessor from 1928 to 1938. It was able to drive into several mines, including "President", "Carolinenglück" and "Hanover-Hannibal" in Bochum , "General Blumenthal" in Recklinghausen and "Our Fritz" in Wanne-Eickel (today Herne ). With memories of the English mining industry, she began to draw and carve a lot again. With neighbors she discovered a book about the Bishop of Münster Clemens August Graf von Galen and the Catholic resistance against the Nazi regime. When she drove back to Hamburg, she decided to convert to Catholicism . She came to Dorsten through Recklinghauser acquaintances at the end of 1948 and made figures of Mary, crosses, Stations of the Cross and other sculptures for Dorsten churches and the Ursuline monastery that were destroyed in the war . At the age of 46, Tisa von der Schulenburg entered the Dorsten monastery of St. Ursula in 1950 as sister Paula.

In the monastery

Reed pen drawings of the Holocaust cycle from the 1960s in the Jewish Museum Westphalia

Sister Paula became an art history and drawing teacher at the schools run by the Dorsten Ursulines (first at the secondary school, later at the St. Ursula Dorsten high school ). After 13 years of teaching, from 1962 she devoted herself entirely to her art. She now had the time and energy to convert the sketches and scenes from her memory into wooden sculptures and with ink - in addition to religious topics, above all pictures about the plight of war, refugees, the persecution of Jews and extermination. She discovers cast bronze and aluminum for her relief work . After the strict enclosure was lifted , she also accepted orders from outside the monastery - fountains, columns, cenotaphs, window and wall designs. From 1962 the artist exhibited regularly under her real name. Upon invitation, she drove into the Dorsten mine “Fürst Leopold” - again the worker was her subject.

From 1968 to 1969 she worked for a leprosy station in Ethiopia . Their solidarity with the workers and the unemployed expanded into a social commitment for all those who suffer. Whenever she found out about the suffering and misery of other people, she processed the impressions in pictures or sculptures - this is how pictures came about of the Vietnam War , the hunger in Biafra and those politically persecuted in Chile . In 1972, Sister Paula was granted honorary citizenship by the city of Dorsten .

In 1979 she traveled to Israel and met survivors of the Holocaust in the Dorsten twin town of Hod haScharon and in Jerusalem . For the expansion of the “General Blumenthal” mine to include the “Haltern 1/2” mine, she designed several reliefs in 1984. During the unveiling of the sculptures, Sister Paula met the Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker .

In 1994, the then Federal Minister for Women and Youth, Angela Merkel , awarded her the Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon for her life's work and for her pronounced social commitment in the wages hall of the “Fürst Leopold” colliery . The planned closure of the Dorstener Zeche Fürst Leopold led to vigils in 1997 , in which Sister Paula - already known as " Saint Barbara of the Ruhr Area " in the seventies - took part. She demonstrated with the miners and created a bronze and stone sculpture.

Elisabeth "Tisa" Countess von der Schulenburg was 97 years old and died in February 2001.

plant

Memorial plaque for the vigil

The artistic work of Tisa von der Schulenburg moves formally mainly between drawing and sculpture . So the intermediate stage relief - the " drawing in wood, stone or bronze " - became her passion. Her drawings are very often black and white ; sometimes there are written comments and poems in the picture. However, there were also colorful, happy motifs for all creative phases. Drawings are often reminiscent of sketches, sculptures or sculptures of raw drafts. Outside of the main factory, Schulenburg also experimented with embroidery and the design of church windows.

Thematically, the industrial workers and the misery of the unemployed, starving, persecuted, refugees - in short, all suffering - are at the center of their work.

Literary publications

Schulenburg illustrated several volumes of poetry and contributed his own stories to several volumes of short stories. Together with the exhibition catalogs, she was involved in over 50 literary works. The following is a selection of his own literary, largely autobiographical, works:

  • Drawings - sculptures. 1963. (published by the Kreissparkasse Recklinghausen)
  • If you want - an encounter with leprosy. German Leper Aid Organization V., Würzburg and Georg Bitter Verlag, Recklinghausen 1970, ISBN 3-7903-0141-8 .
  • For each other: graphics - sculptures. 1972. (published by Kreissparkasse Dorsten)
  • Drawings - records. Praesentverlag Heinz Peter, Gütersloh 1974, ISBN 3-87644-042-4 .
  • Drawings, sculptures. 1976. published by the Kreissparkasse Dorsten
  • Ethiopian diary. Altenkirchen 1977.
  • I dared - sculptor and religious - an unconventional life. Herder publishing house, Freiburg i. Br. 1981, ISBN 3-451-07874-0 .
  • Mecklenburg - images from a childhood. 1982.
  • Like the edges of a wound - pictures of lament. Verlag Butzon & Bercker, Kevelaer 1983, ISBN 3-7666-9314-X .
  • The emperor's female cadets - schooling in Heiligengrabe between the empire and the revolution. Herder publishing house, Freiburg i. Br. 1983, ISBN 3-451-08057-5 .
  • Who will renew the face of the earth? Herder publishing house, Freiburg i. Br. 1983, ISBN 3-451-08000-1 .
  • What has become of us - Sketches and notes from the end of the war. Preface by Heinrich Böll . Herder publishing house, Freiburg i. Br. 1983, ISBN 3-451-08024-9 .
  • My dark brothers - As a sculptor among miners. Herder publishing house, Freiburg i. Br. 1984, ISBN 3-451-08114-8 .
  • Return to Freedom - Experiences between the Monastery and the World Herder Verlag, Freiburg i. Br. 1984, ISBN 3-451-08161-X .
  • Healing closeness. Together with Kurt Weigel . Lahn-Verlag, Limburg 1987, ISBN 3-7840-2664-8 .
  • Breaks in a biography. STOCK & STEIN Verlag, 1995, ISBN 3-910179-60-6 .

Quotes

"I cannot be silent."

"It's not that easy to throw your home behind you."

"If there was one area that attracted me, it was [...] the Ruhr area."

"The result: a nice provincial artist."

Tisa von der Schulenburg describes her motto as “I want to live freely and I want to die freely.” From Friedrich Schiller's Wallenstein's camp and “ Wake, plead and pray. “From Johann Burchard Freystein's Get ready, my spirit .

Foundation, endowment

The independent " Tisa von der Schulenburg Foundation " established by Tisa von der Schulenburg, the city of Dorsten and 39 other donors through the foundation business on May 4, 1992, was approved on September 17, 1993 by the Ministry of the Interior of North Rhine-Westphalia . Every three years it awards a sponsorship prize to young artists.

literature

  • Bernd Haunfelder : North Rhine-Westphalia. Country and people 1946-2006. A biographical manual . Aschendorff, Münster 2006, p. 428.
  • Anneliese Schröder, Ludwig Poullain : Tisa Schulenburg . Publishing house Aurel Bongers, Recklinghausen 1983.
  • Wolf Stegemann : Tisa - Elisabeth Countess of the Schulenburg. Photo documentation, 1993, ISBN 3-7647-0351-2 .
  • Klaus Kösters among others: Tisa von der Schulenburg - Art in the focus of the twentieth century. Aschendorff, Münster 2003, ISBN 3-402-05644-5 .
  • Johannes Zechner: Biographical stations. Catalog booklet for the exhibition 'I cannot be silent!'. Tisa from the Schulenburg in Mecklenburg. Drawings and documents. Plüschow / Mecklenburg 2003.
  • Tisa von der Schulenburg: I dared - sculptor and religious - an unconventional life , HUSUM TASCHENBUCH, autobiography, 2013, ISBN 978-3-89876-647-0 .

Web links

Commons : Tisa von der Schulenburg  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Philipp Holtmann on the Carl von Ossietzky Medal ( Memento from December 21, 2008 in the Internet Archive ). In: Jewish newspaper, December 2008.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on July 22, 2005 .
personal data
SURNAME Schulenburg, Tisa from the
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schulenburg, Elisabeth von der (real name); Sister Paula (religious name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German artist and nun
DATE OF BIRTH December 7, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Tressow , to Bobitz today
DATE OF DEATH February 8, 2001
Place of death Dorsten