NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

THE HEINRICH SCHULZ AFFAIR

AN UNKNOWN DRAWING BY MAGNUS ZELLER

Anke Matelowski

Why are artists – among them Klaus Richter and Hans Purrmann – towing a Roman carriage emblazoned with an imperial eagle? Why is the carriage being driven by a Herr Schulz, who is also holding a money-bag and is in the company of Maja Kahn standing behind him? And why is a man clearly identifiable as the painter Otto Nagel lobbing a bomb into party? The picture seems puzzling. But Magnus Zeller (1888–1972), in this hitherto unknown and undated pencil drawing, took up an affair of the German Art Association in the closing years of the Weimar Republic. He dedicated the sheet – recently acquired by the Archives of the Akademie der Künste – to one of the protagonists, “s[einem] l[ieben] Otto Nagel” or “his dear Otto Nagel”.

The Deutsche Kunstgemeinschaft (German Art Association) was founded in the spring of 1926 on the initiative of Heinrich Schulz, a member of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of the Interior. In addition to Schulz and others, the working committee included Hans Baluschek, Charlotte Berend-Corinth, and the art writer Max Osborn, and the honorary committee included many people, among them Käthe Kollwitz and Max Liebermann. Financially supported by the Reich, the Deutsche Kunstgemeinschaft held regular exhibitions in the Berliner Schloss (Berlin Palace) from May 1926, and later at other locations in the capital and in other German art centres. The aim was to support contemporary artists by encouraging purchases of art. At the same time, the intention was to bring original works to the attention of broad sections of the population. On display were all styles of oil paintings, watercolours, pastels, graphic art, and sculpture. In the event of a purchase, a fund established by the Kunstgemeinschaft enabled the artist to receive the entire sum immediately. The buyer could pay off the amount in installments. Art hire and subscriptions from the Kunstgemeinschaft’s collection were also available. In addition to private prospective buyers, the purchasers of the works included municipalities, public authorities, and museums. The works were not only by young, unknown artists, but there were also successful ones among them. In October 1930, for example, the press re-ported the City of Danzig’s purchase of Otto Dix’s Portrait of Heinrich Sahm for 4,000 marks.

But several artists complained of being severely disadvantaged by the Kunstgemeinschaft’s low purchase prices. Magnus Zeller and Otto Nagel whose archives are managed at the Akademie der Künste, were among the critics, al-though, as the Kunstgemeinschaft’s annual reports show, these artists themselves exhibited and sold works through the association. However, the sales lists reveal large price differences between certain artists and works. For example, Nagel’s four paintings, sold up until the end of 1928, fetched 200 to 360 marks each, while Klaus Richter, Magnus Zeller’s childhood friend, received 2,000 marks from the Ministry of Culture for his painting Der sterbende Torero (“The dying torero”). Richter, a student of Corinth, later became Chair of the Verein Berliner Künstler (Association of Berlin Artists). He is best known for his two enigmatic portraits of Adolf Hitler, which are in the Stadt-museum Berlin (Berlin City Museum) and the Deutsches Historisches Museum (German Historical Museum). Henri Matisse’s student Hans Purrmann also exhibited at the Deutsche Kunstgemeinschaft, including in the autumn exhibition Neue Deutsche Kunst 1930 (New German Art 1930), alongside Richter and Zeller; no evidence of sales via the organisation has so far been found.

But what is the bomb all about? In the left-wing socialist Berlin newspaper Die Welt am Abend, Nagel published articles on 20 and 21 March 1931, accusing Heinrich Schulz of nepotism and wasting public money. Even in 1927, Nagel had claimed in the Sozialistische Monatshefte that the organisation’s administrative costs were out of all proportion to its turnover. And now he accused Schulz and his private secretary and partner Maja Kahn of high travel expenses, questionable buying and selling practices, the purchase of a new car, and the refurnishing of palace offices. In addition, he claimed Schulz gave pref-erential treatment to artists who were not in need and who already had a steady market. This is probably one of the reasons why Zeller “harnessed” Purrmann alongside Richter in his drawing.

Nagel’s accusations sparked a major scandal. At the annual meeting of the Kunstgemeinschaft and in an open letter, Schulz had to explain his position on the use of the funds. Although the Kunstgemeinschaft gave him a vote of confidence, another, probably also politically motivated, move was made against him afterwards by an official of the Ministry of the Interior. Schulz repudiated all the allegations. Nevertheless, as of August 1931, the Ministry’s regular grants were discontinued. In September, the longtime treasurer, the banker Hugo Simon, resigned. Schulz refused to resign from the management of the Kunstgemeinschaft, but died unexpectedly in September 1932. The Deutsche Kunstgemeinschaft was dissolved in August 1936.

ANKE MATELOWSKI is a Research Associate in the Fine Art Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES “… TO MEET MYSELF.” NATASCHA WODIN

Sabine Wolf

Natascha Wodin’s first German passport, under her then-married name Natalie Spitz, issued by the municipality of Forchheim in Upper Franconia on 11 June 1965.

On the left, Sergei Ivashchenko, brother of Natasha Wodin’s mother Yevgenia, accompanied by cousins on her mother’s side (de Martino), mid-1920s.

Rarely does autobiographical writing span events of world history lasting more than a hundred years. In her life story and family history, Natascha Wodin guides us into the deepest abysses of cruelty and suffering as they unfold, again and again, in a seemingly endless downward spiral. The author’s exploration of their origins penetrates the mechanisms of totalitarian systems and thus describes their far-reaching consequences for generations of people up to the present day.

The title of the work – for which Wodin was awarded the Alfred Döblin Prize in 2015 and the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2017 – took on new significance with the onset of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. The author conceived her book She Came from Mariupol as the story of an investigation. Breathlessly, readers follow her piecing together of the mosaic of her own origins. The information gathered fragment by fragment transforms the entire frame of reference of the first-person narrator. Her certain truths turn out to be false, and a new world emerges from the darkness. In this way, the reader is also drawn into a whirlpool of historical events that are of a new, startling relevance today.

Natascha Wodin was born to former Ukrainian forced labourers in Fürth in 1945 and grew up in the most challenging of circumstances, left to her own devices from an early age. She began her working career as a Russian interpreter and translator. At the age of almost 40, she emerged as a writer. Her thirteen prose books to date are all autobiographical. Wodin lets us share in the themes of her life and makes us aware of our own “German” interwovenness with events that we thought were far away in time and geography. In a highly exciting and emotionally upsetting narrative, she tells of personal fortunes that became caught in the “shredder of two dictatorships”.1 The first-person narrator thus penetrates the primordial depths of her own history and – after decades of a perceived lack of belonging – feels the ground beneath her feet for the first time. She had always been at pains to “escape her Russian-Ukrainian skin, to be something other than what I was”.2 But now she learns that her family, who settled on the Black Sea coast, were once wealthy and even of noble descent; a grandmother from Italy had married into the family, and an uncle had been a famous opera singer. Their prosperity ended with the revolution-ary upheavals following 1917, which were accompanied by disenfranchisement, humiliation, poverty, hunger, and perpetual danger. Born in 1920, the narrator’s mother never knew anything else and had a profound sense of inferiority, passing this on to her daughter. In her text “An meine Mutter” (“To my mother”, c.1978), Wodin seeks to “clarify something and maybe get things straight with you”. She settles accounts with her mother, who had withdrawn from her unhappy life early on by committing suicide and abandoning the family. The author wishes to oppose the inherited silence and fear and embrace life and humanity. In writing, she effortlessly succeeds in overcoming the division, establishing contact with her addressee, and (re)integrating her fate into her own life – interpreting it “as a piece of me”. The mother’s life culminated in a variety of the hardships that could befall a person in the 20th century. Included among the outcasts and destitute in the

Portrait of Natascha Wodin, Berlin, April 1997.

Natascha Wodin, first page of a typescript “An meine Mutter”, c.1978. The text was incorporated into the story “Niemandsmensch” (“Nobody’s human”) for the Suhrkamp volume In irrer Gesellschaft (“In crazy company”), published in 1980. This was Natascha Wodin’s first ever literary publication.

Soviet Empire, she was transported to the German Reich as a forced labourer in 1943. After 1945, she could not return to Stalinist society; her attempts to emigrate to America failed. In the post-war years, the family lived as stateless people, once again marginalised, without a sense of belonging, and viewed with suspicion by their German neighbours. Growing up, Natascha blamed her own parents first and foremost for the literally oppressive circumstances of their lives. Neither father nor mother protected their child from the violence of fellow pupils, from rejection and taunts. She had therefore to flee from this environment in order to find acceptance in German society. Wodin only received a German passport upon marrying for the first time in 1965.

After working in an office and attending a language school, she began interpreting in the 1970s for German companies and cultural institutions that were establishing relations with the Soviet Union. Wodin entered literary society as a Russian translator. For the most part, her work made Russian-language titles accessible to a German audience for the first time. The books of Venedikt Yerofeyev (Moscow-Petushki, 1976) and Andrei Bitov (Pushkin House, 1983), which she translated or co-translated, also circulated in the Soviet Union at the time as samizdat copies, as did the moving memoirs of Yevgenia Ginzburg, who spent decades in camps and in exile. Together with Sylvia List, Wodin translated Ginzburg’s “report” into German under a pseudonym in 1980.

Wodin made her fiction debut in 1983 with her story Die gläserne Stadt (“The glass city”), in which the author sets her very own tone of autobiographical writing. The themes she addresses in later books – homeland, otherness, and identity – are already present in her first work. In the romance between a West German interpreter and a famous Russian writer, she poses life’s existential questions. How can people understand each other if they come not only from different generations, worlds of experience, and cultures, but also from opposing societal systems? Their value systems are completely different, communication channels impenetrable, and their codes impossible to decipher. “I would love these people, but would never be able to understand them. I would never be able to understand this whole country. It was, as it were, the reverse side of the world I had grown up in and lived in, the reverse side even extending to the door locks that locked not to the right here, but to the left.”3 The couple and their circle of friends find what fundamentally unites them and a shared language in literature, in art.

More than two and a half decades later, Wodin once again imagines a relationship with a writer in her much-acclaimed and discussed book Nachtgeschwister (“Night siblings”, 2009). Barely veiled, the central character, Jakob Stumm, bears the features of Wolfgang Hilbig, to whom Wodin was married from 1994 to 2002. Intimacy and distance define their life together: “I was no longer alone. For the first time there was someone with whom I shared the lack of belonging to the others, I had met a second person in my desert, a German brother I had never dreamed of.”4 At the same time, she finds herself with him in a crumbling world; the merging of West and East Germany rocks all existing structures, and nothing stays as it was: “I never know what I am seeing here, where I actually am, in what time, in what place. Is this still the East or already the West; is it the past or already the future? I only know that I am in a world of the vanishing, every glance is a first and a last at the same time; tomorrow, within the coming hour, what I am seeing can be gone forever. I look and want to stop time, I feel like the last witness of a perishing reality, its only chronicler; I am in a constant race against time, from which I must seize what is constantly coming to an end.”5

The quote in the title is taken from: Natascha Wodin,

Nachtgeschwister (Munich: A. Kunstmann, 2009), p. 20. 1 Natascha Wodin, Sie kam aus Mariupol (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2018, p. 10; She Came from Mariupol, trans. Alfred

Kueppers (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University

Press, 2022). 2 Ibid., p. 15. 3 Natascha Wodin, Die gläserne Stadt (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1983), p. 161. 4 Natascha Wodin, Nachtgeschwister (Munich: A. Kunstmann, 2009), p. 21. 5 Ibid., p. 8.

SABINE WOLF is Vice-Director of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

With the establishment of the Natascha Wodin Archive, the papers of a great narrator will enter the Archives of the Akademie der Künste. Available for future research, Natascha Wodin’s biography and work are documented in manuscripts and early versions of all her works of fiction as well as unpublished drafts, diaries, and correspondence – with, among others, Efim Etkind, Ludwig Fels, Lew Ginsburg, Wolfgang Hilbig, Edgar Hilsenrath, Peter Jokostra, Peter Kurzeck, Christoph Meckel, Raisa Orlova-Kopeleva, Leonie Ossowski, Gábor Révai, Mario Wirz, and Christa Wolf – and in the touching testimonies from her family history.

HANS SCHAROUN ARCHITECTURE ON PAPER

Sibylle Hoiman

Die zu- und die abgekehrten Prinzipien der Baukunst (“The inward and outward principles of architecture”), 1920. first time, juxtaposed it with newly indexed sources from the Architecture Archive and other archives. The various phases and historical and personal circumstances of the execution and development of this unique collection of drawings, most of which have been preserved in excellent condition, are presented and contextualised in meticulous detail.

From his student days through to the 1940s, drawing was for Hans Scharoun (1893–1972) the most appropriate means of selfexpression and of giving free rein to his highly imaginative mind. Thus, in addition to the competition designs and plans for real building projects, he subsequently produced numerous visions of unrealised and even utopian architectures that were not even intended for realisation. The designs, executed in the shadow of the First World War and its aftermath, epitomise the great longing for society to start afresh and for which architecture was to lead the way. Here, with his visionary designs and ideas, Scharoun was close to a group of architects who came together in such groupings as the Gläserne Kette (Glass Chain) and the Ring.

Even during the Second World War, the drawing of utopian building designs helped the architect to process and transcend contemporary events. A precise look at the surviving drawings is therefore not only an aesthetic delight in itself; it is also worthwhile because it facilitates a retrospective glance over the shoulder of the person and designer Hans Scharoun: almost all the well-known buildings that have been completed – the Philharmonie and Staatsbibliothek in the Berlin Kulturforum, the playhouse in Wolfsburg, the private Schminke house, the houses of Dr. Baensch and the Matterns, and the housing estates and high-rises in Berlin and Stuttgart are just a few examples – can be seen in the context of these visions on paper. Ample material for this interpretation of Scharoun’s work, which has lost none of its relevance and fascination to this day, is provided in the volume Hans Scharoun. Architektur auf Papier: Visionen aus vier Jahrzehnten (“Architecture on Paper: Visions from Four Decades”).

Among the estates preserved in the Architecture Archive, the Hans Scharoun Archive occupies a special position. The sheer volume of material transferred to the archive upon the death of the architect and one-time President of the Akademie der Künste in West Berlin is more than impressive: 75 linear metres of written material and photographs as well as around 25,000 plans and drawings are available to the researching and interested public.

Of special interest are his more than 1,000 school-age and student drawings and utopian architectural sketches from 1909 and 1945. The works executed during the Weimar Republic stand out for their colourful brilliance, expressive style, and the confident stroke of the highly gifted draughtsman. It is therefore even more gratifying that Eva-Maria Barkhofen, former Director of the Architecture Archive and an outstanding connoisseur of Scharoun’s oeuvre, has now thoroughly researched this collection and, for the

SIBYLLE HOIMAN is Head of the Architectural Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

Competition design for the station forecourt in Duisburg, 1926.

Untitled, undated. Competition design for the redesign of the Münsterplatz in Ulm on the Danube, 1924.

Untitled, undated (between 1939 and 1945).

Untitled, undated (between 1939 and 1945).

Hans Scharoun. Architektur auf Papier: Visionen aus vier Jahrzehnten (1909–1945), ed. Eva-Maria Barkhofen in cooperation with the Akademie der Künste, Berlin (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2022).

Book presentation showcase presentation Welcome words: Werner Heegewaldt Lecture: Eva-Maria Barkhofen 25 November 2022, 6 p.m., Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg