Walter Karbe

(Hermann Wilhelm) Walter Karbe (born April 9, 1877 in Trechwitz ; † October 25, 1956 in Neustrelitz ) was one of the most important local researchers in Stargarder Land - Richard Wossidlo once called him "his best student" . Karbe discovered the Wendish silver jewelry, known as the Blumenhäger Silberfund, which caused a sensation in scientific circles.

He also collected a large number of relics of various kinds, which he always donated to the Neustrelitz State Museum, but the majority of which were lost in the castle fire in 1945. The extensive written records of Walter Karbe passed on to Annalize Wagner after his death , who founded the Karbe-Wagner archive from this estate .

The IGS "Walter Karbe" Neustrelitz , which also awards the "Walter Karbe" school award, was named after him.

Life

Karbe's father, Eduard Karbe (1847–1907), the son of Hermann Karbe from Gramzow, was the only one of his brothers who worked in agriculture and in 1876 had leased the Trechwitz estate. In the same year he married Anna Jonas (* May 30, 1855; † March 6, 1936), the daughter of a wholesale merchant and a Malay chief's daughter from Makassar . Walter Karbe was the oldest of the three children. One of his two sisters died six months after their birth.

Walter's aunt on his father's side was the local poet Anna Karbe (1852–1875) from Gramzow, known in the Mark Brandenburg .

In 1884 the Karbe family moved to Strelitz , where their father leased the Marly estate on the Chaussee between Altstrelitz and Neustrelitz . Walter Karbe first attended the Grand Ducal Civic School from 1886 and then the Carolinum grammar school . Due to fear of exams in mathematics, he left school in 1898 shortly before graduating from high school with the certificate of the senior class . When the family gave up the estate in 1896 and moved to Breslau , Karbe completed an apprenticeship in Stettin , studied from 1901 at the commercial colleges in Leipzig and Cologne and then went to Stockholm in 1903 for 2½ years as the private secretary of a major industrialist . Here he learned the Swedish language and acquired extensive knowledge of the history of Scandinavia . He then went via Germany to Paris , where he also worked in a translation office, and returned to Germany in the spring of 1907 after a few months on the Mediterranean coast . He enrolled in various universities as a guest student in order to expand his knowledge of ethnography , history , regional studies and folklore . In September 1907, after the father's death, he was called to the family in Breslau. In 1908 he moved back to Neustrelitz with his mother.

Between 1908 and 1910 Karbe worked as an unpaid volunteer in the Grand Ducal Library of Mecklenburg-Strelitz without getting a permanent position. It was not until mid-1914 that he was hired as a librarian on a trial basis and the probationary period was extended again in 1915 because he was expected to be called up. From the end of 1915 he served in the Landsturm as a radio operator and interpreter on the German-French border. In November 1918 he returned home from the war and resumed his work in the library and archive, initially on a probationary basis. On April 1, 1919, Walter Karbe was appointed assistant registrar for the archive, the state library and the collections in Neustrelitz. At the end of the year he became curator in the old library , which contained the grand ducal library, the antiquities and coin collection as well as the state and main archive.

In 1925 Karbe was a founding member of the Mecklenburg-Strelitzer Association for History and Local History (membership number: 1), for which Karbe worked as a speaker and hiking warden. He published his knowledge in lectures and essays in the Mecklenburg-Strelitzer Heimatblätter of the association.

From 1934 to 1945 Karbe campaigned primarily for the preservation of the Mecklenburg-Strelitz State Library, so that substantial parts of the valuable collections survived the Second World War . When the 120,000-volume library was about to be dissolved after the war, he tried to prevent this with sharp protests. But despite all objections, the library was closed in 1950.

Excavations

In 1922 Karbe and Robert Koldewey took part in the archaeological excavation led by Carl Schuchhardt on the Schloßberg near Feldberg . Until the 1950s it was believed to have found the Slavic sanctuary Rethra there.

While working on the stone dam for the road to Blumenhagen , Karbe discovered the silver jewelry of a Slavic chief's wife in the forest in 1924, the so-called “Blumenhäger Silberfund” . The find consisted of a 50 cm long chain, four braided neck rings, two bracelets made of sheet silver, two hollow crosses, an amulet, 16 earrings, two hollow pearls and around 300 " turning pennies " .

Through excavations in 1932 and 1934, Karbe identified a cemetery in the Bargensdorf area that was originally thought to be Slavic as a “Germanic cemetery” with body graves from the Roman Empire from the early 3rd / 4th centuries. Century

He found the village of “Saran” ( Serrahn ), which fell desolate in the 15th century, near Carpin in 1939 and carried out excavations there until shortly before his death.

estate

Karbes grave in the new Neustrelitz cemetery

Walter Karbe died unmarried and childless. In the deed of gift of January 29, 1952, he had already transferred his library and coin collection to the local researcher Annalize Wagner . In Karbe's will she was named the sole heir, and so after his death the entire remaining estate fell to Annalize Wagner. On this basis, she founded the initially private Karbe-Wagner archive , which today continues as a municipal cultural institution in Neustrelitz.

Works

• (with M. Pfitzner :) The old and the new Strelitz. Folklore, sagas, field names. Neustrelitz 1938
• Strelitzer Allerlei: Local history research. Neustrelitz 1938
• (with W. Gotsmann :) Around the Zierker See. Friends of nature and homeland, Neustrelitz 1953
• Chronicle of the city of Strelitz in Mecklenburg: 1349–1949. Neustrelitz 1999; Written for the 600th anniversary of the granting of city rights to Strelitz in 1949, but not published for the first time until half a century later
• (with W. Gotsmann :) Via Hohenzieritz to the Tollenseg area. Neustrelitz 1955

In addition, Karbe published countless large and small articles in newspapers, magazines and other periodicals.

In his last years he wrote down his insights and memoirs under the working title “Kulturgeschichte des Landes Stargard” , which remained unprinted for a long time due to considerable editorial deficiencies:

• Walter Karbe's cultural history of the Land of Stargard from the Ice Age to the present. Edited by G. Tschepego and P. Schüßler. Schwerin 2008. ISBN 978-3-940207-02-9

literature

• Annalize Wagner (Ed.): ... who wandered home. Hinstorff, Rostock 1957
• Harald Witzke: Walter Karbe (1877–1956). In: Freundeskreis des Karbe-Wagner-Archivs Neustrelitz eV (ed.): Mecklenburg-Strelitz Calendar 2001. Neustrelitz 2000
• Gundula Tschepego et al. (Red.): 1956 · 2006 - 50th year of death of Walter Karbes - 50 years of the Karbe-Wagner archive . In: Stadt Neustrelitz, Karbe-Wagner-Archiv (ed.): New series of publications from the Karbe-Wagner-Archiv Neustrelitz . No. 4 . Thomas Helms Verlag, Schwerin 2006, ISBN 3-935749-60-0 .

Remarks

1. ↑ The maintenance of ground monuments and thus also the collection of "relics" were among Karbe's central official duties. Naturally, such collectibles always ended up in the property of the employer in comparable cases (here the Neustrelitz State Museum). This can only mean parts of Karbe's private collections.
2. ↑ Sisters Editha (* May 7, 1878; † December 11, 1878) and Lydia (* April 29, 1882; † 1953)

Web links

• Literature by and about Walter Karbe in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature about Walter Karbe in the state bibliography MV
• Works by Walter Karbe in the state bibliography MV