Wilhelm Petersen (painter)

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Sculpture "Flora", memory of the figurehead of the whaling ship of the same name from Elmshorn

Wilhelm Petersen (born August 10, 1900 in Elmshorn , † May 22, 1987 ibid) was a German painter , illustrator and writer .

Life

Petersen learned from the Hamburg decorator Peter Gustav Dorén and attended the arts and crafts school . In 1918 he completed his apprenticeship with an emergency examination as a painter's journeyman and volunteered for military service. After the First World War he joined the Freikorps Marine Brigade Ehrhardt in 1919 and took part in the Kapp Putsch in 1920.

In the 1920s he painted, restored and copied for various clients. As a boatswain he made extensive trips to the Scandinavian countries. He later joined the NSDAP and was one of the prominent Nazi artists . In 1935 he was entrusted with depictions intended to make National Socialist thinking comprehensible in school lessons in order to provide “our youth with an artistically high-quality and scientific material”. On 30 January 1938 appointed him Adolf Hitler to Professor of Fine Arts, although Petersen played any study and no academic degree acquired. During the Second World War , Petersen was employed as a war draftsman and war correspondent. On the invasion of Poland Petersen took as a shooter in the Verfiigungstruppe SS part; he described his experiences in the illustrated book Totentanz in Polen . At the exhibition German Artists and the SS in 1944 in Breslau a study sheet from Russia was shown; in the Salzburg exhibition of the same name (also in 1944) his works were Russian farmers , concentrated loads are attached and Death rides . The Great German Art Exhibition , touted as the most important cultural event in National Socialist Germany , showed a total of eight works by Petersen in 1937, 1938 and 1940; the painting Inken was acquired there from Martin Bormann (head of the party chancellery of the NSDAP ); Hitler personally bought the drawing Dagny B. for his private collection. Hermann Göring's art collection contained five works by Petersen.

Petersen was appointed " SS war painter " and as such belonged to Kurt Egger's SS standard . He was the Untersturmführer of the Waffen-SS and was one of the illustrators of the SS-Leitheft magazine published by Heinrich Himmler . Petersen was awarded the Cross of Honor for Participants in the War  I and was appointed to the personal staff of the Reichsführer SS in 1943 . The culmination of his career was Hermann Göring's commission to furnish the Reichsjägerhof Carinhall with murals. Petersen's most intensive supporters were NSDAP Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg and his secretary Thilo von Trotha . After the end of the war, Petersen was arrested by the Allies and interrogated for months in the Neuengamme concentration camp, which had been converted into an internment camp by the British ; he was released in April 1946.

Petersen shaped with his pictures, it is said in Brockhaus of 1939, “new ideas of Germanism in a reality-enhancing form, but based on precise prehistoric studies; Wall paintings on the Nordic saga of gods and heroes, drafts for a series of the Nibelungs, series of pictures on North German fairy tales and spooky stories, etc. formed his oeuvre. In the magazine Volk und Rasse , for which Petersen also supplied cover pictures, one could read as early as 1935: From his "extraordinarily valuable paintings [...] the Nordic character and the Nordic mentality speaks unadulterated and uninfluenced".

For the so-called Germanic grave , Petersen provided drafts for a surrounding frieze, which was not executed.

After the Second World War, Petersen had great difficulties finding new work due to his past. In 1950 he found a job at Hörzu through the mediation of Eduard Rhein . Here he initially created drawings for the editorial section and front pages in the style of American magazines. Between 1953 and 1964 Wilhelm Petersen illustrated twelve Mecki books. He replaced Reinhold Escher as the draftsman for the Mecki books. Petersen's Mecki illustrations occasionally show intensive references to National Socialist racial theory and the National Socialist conception of art . Between 1958 and 1969 he worked alternately with Reinhold Escher on the weekly Mecki page of Hörzu . The Mecki volumes have been published by Esslinger Verlag since 2009 .

Appreciation

In 1975 Petersen was honored with the Friedrich Hebbel Prize for his painterly work.

Books by Wilhelm Petersen (selection)

  • Wilhelm Petersen: Ut de Ooken. Coasts Publishing House, Hamburg 1937.
  • Wilhelm Petersen: The Aalstecher Batavia. Coasts Publishing House, Hamburg 1938.
  • Wilhelm Petersen: Bark ship Flora von Elveshörn. Letters and diary sheets around a Greenland ship. Self-published by Wilhelm Petersen, Bordesholm 1938.
  • Wilhelm Petersen: Dance of Death in Poland. Coasts Publishing House, Hamburg 1940.
  • Wilhelm Petersen: The Gudrun legend. Volume 7 of the German heroic sagas . Köllnflockenwerke, Elmshorn 1953.
  • Wilhelm Petersen: He went by my side. Drawings 1939–1945. Drawings by the painter W. Petersen from wartime events. Munin-Verlag , Osnabrück 1980, ISBN 3-921242-43-6 .
  • Wilhelm Petersen: The buccaneers from Brook . Coastal Publishing House, Hamburg 1949.

literature

  • Uwe Christiansen, Hans-Christian Petersen: Wilhelm Petersen - the painter of the north . Edition Grabert, Tübingen 2008, ISBN 3-87847-124-6 (first edition: 1993).
  • Werner Fleischer, Gerhard Förster: Mecki - A legend returns. On the wondrous tracks of the HörZu editorial seal (1949–1978). In: speech bubble. No. 215, September 2009, ZDB -ID 133336-7 , pp. 5-24.
  • Eckart Sackmann: Mecki. One for all . Comicplus, Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-89474-034-5 .
  • Frank Möbus : Mecki and the race teachers. The "[un] secret rogue" Wilhelm Petersen as an illustrator of German children's books of the post-war period. In: Michael Fritsche, Kathrin Schulze (Ed.): Open Sesame. Images from the Orient in children's and youth literature. BIS-Verlag of the Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg 2006, ISBN 3-8142-2034-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On Petersen's biography cf. Lu Seegers: The Success Story of Hör zu (1946–1965) . Potsdam 2001. Lu Seegers: Listen! Eduard Rhein and the radio program magazines (1931–1965) . Potsdam 2003.
  2. ↑ a b Author abbreviation BR Sch .: To our art supplement . In: Volk und Rasse , 12/1935, p. 395.
  3. ^ Wilhelm Petersen: Dance of Death in Poland . Hamburg: coastal publishing house 1940
  4. ^ Reichsführer SS / SS-Hauptamt Berlin-Grunewald, Douglasstrasse 7–11 (Ed.): German artists and the SS. Exhibition Salzburg July 1944 . 2 volumes. Berlin 1944
  5. ^ Database on the major German art exhibitions
  6. ↑ dhm.de
  7. ^ Uwe Christiansen, Hans-Christian Petersen: Wilhelm Petersen. The painter of the north . Tubingen 1993.
  8. ↑ The New Brockhaus. All book in four volumes and an atlas . Third volume. Leipzig 1939, p. 524.
  9. ↑ The Bronze Age graves of Itzehoer Galgenberg, page 2
  10. ↑ Cf. Frank Möbus : Mecki and the race teachers. The "[un] secret rogue" Wilhelm Petersen as an illustrator of German children's books of the post-war period. In: Open sesame. Images from the Orient in children's and youth literature. Edited by Michael Fritsche and Kathrin Schulze. Oldenburg 2006, pp. 53-66.
personal data
SURNAME Petersen, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter, illustrator and writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 10, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Elmshorn
DATE OF DEATH May 22, 1987
Place of death Elmshorn