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Friedrich Wield * 1880

Birkenau 24 (Hamburg-Nord, Uhlenhorst)

KÜNSTLERHEIM BIRKENAU 24
HIER ARBEITETE
FRIEDRICH WIELD
JG. 1880
GEDEMÜTIGT / ENTRECHTET
FLUCHT IN DEN TOD
10. JUNI 1940

Friedrich Ernst Martin Wield, born on 15.3.1880 in Hamburg, died on 10 June 1940 in Hamburg

Birkenau 24, formerly "Birkenau Artists' Home" (Hamburg-Uhlenhorst)

Ostracized as a sculptor by the National Socialists, Friedrich Wield took his own life on June 10, 1940 in his apartment, Ulmenau 3, 5th floor.
His last sculptor's workshop was located opposite the Hanseatische Hochschule für bildende Künste (today Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg), "Künstlerheim Birkenau," Birkenau 24.

During the search for the students and teachers of the Oberschule im Alstertal (today's Gymnasium Alstertal), who were persecuted by the National Socialists and expelled from school, it was noticed that in the school building on Erdkampsweg, a Fritz Schumacher building from 1927, the bronze cast figure on the marble fountain in the Rondel, 1st floor, had disappeared.

The figure is said to have survived the war period and not to have been melted down as a patriotic metal donation for the war. A former teacher recalled that it was said to have gone missing during a "prank" by students in the 1960s. The question arose whether it could still be found today, for example somewhere in a garden in Hamburg.

The research led to the sculptor Friedrich Wield, the creator of this sculpture. In the center of the drinking fountain made of red marble once a high column rose as it were from the water, on which was a naked youth in a sitting posture with crossed legs, "bending the blade of his rapier examingly above his head". (from the speech of the famous architect Fritz Schumacher on the occasion of the funeral service of Friedrich Wield).

In the estate of Friedrich Wield exists only one photo of this figure, modeled from plaster. A short time ago, surprisingly, pictures from 1929 were discovered by the photographers Gebr. Dransfeld - photos of the original bronze figure in its original location.

Friedrich Ernst Martin Wield was the son of Johanne Pauline Emilie, née Deest, born 10.3.1850 in Hamburg, and the master carpenter Christian Friedrich Wield, born 20.01.1847 in Hannover. On 14 June 1875 they had married in Hamburg.
Their first-born son Paul Karl Friedrich Wield was born on May 23, 1876. Four years later Friedrich Ernst Martin Wield was born on 15.3.1880 in Hamburg.

After his time at the Volks- und Gewerbeschule, Friedrich Wield began a sculptor's apprenticeship with Walter Zehle in Hamburg at the age of 16 and lived with his parents in the main house at Neustädter Neustraße 20 (today Neustädter Straße) on the 2nd floor. He then went to Paris to study.
During this time, his father died in his apartment on January 15, 1897, five days before his 50th birthday, as a result of chronic kidney disease.

On October 17, 1900, Friedrich Wield was accepted at the Academy of Fine Arts as a student in the "Sculpture School" under Professor Wilhelm Rümann in Munich.

Meanwhile, his brother Paul was drawn to the United States, having already been there once in 1899. On October 29, 1904, he arrived at the immigrant port of Ellis Island via Liverpool on the "Etruria" as a second-class passenger, officially registered there as a laborer.

In 1905 Friedrich Wield moved back to Paris. There he worked in his own studio in the Rue Vercingétorix; he was in contact with the famous sculptor Rodin. He was able to exhibit his works at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1909. He certainly also had a connection to Georg Oppenheimer (later Oppens), who also came from Hamburg and moved in the artistic circles of Munich, Paris and Italy under his artist name "Arvatal". Also Friedrich Wield undertook a trip to Italy at this time.

Back in Paris, he was accepted as a member of the Salon d' Automne, and his "Krugträgerin" (woman carrying a jar) received great recognition from the respected sculptor Aristide Maillols, where it was given a place of honor. At the outbreak of the First World War, Frederick Wield had to leave France, he traveled to Winterthur in Switzerland. From 1915 to 1918 he was a front-line soldier and medical orderly in Russia, during which time he also made grave crosses.

His brother Paul, who had returned to Germany in the meantime, had already set off again for New York before the First World War. He left Hamburg harbor on the "Patricia" on August 30, 1913, and reached New York on September 12, 1913. He was later granted American citizenship.

After the end of the war, Friedrich Wield became a founding member of the artists' association "Hamburgische Sezession" in 1919. The first exhibition took place on December 14, 1919 in the Hamburg Kunsthalle. In that year he created the impressive bronze busts of the painter Willy Davidson and the actress Anni Mewes, which can be seen today in the new sculpture hall of the Hamburg Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe. In 1922 he joined the Hamburg Artists' Association and the German Cultural Association.

His mother Johanne Pauline Emilie, née Deest, died at the age of 76, on September 20, 1923 of senility (marasmus senilis) in the Farmsen nursing home, August-Krogmann-Straße 100 (today one of the memorial sites in Hamburg: The facility with residential, administrative, commercial and factory buildings was built in 1903 as a branch of the "Werk- und Armenhaus" Barmbek. During the National Socialist era (1933-1945), many of the so-called asocial persons committed there were forcibly sterilized, incapacitated or deported.)

Friedrich Wield developed a deep friendship with the painter Dorothea Maetzel-Johannsen, also a Secession member, (born 6.2.1886 in Lensahn - died 8. 2.1930 in Hamburg).

He was given a studio in the Hamburg Kunsthalle. His friend, the textile manufacturer Richard Bühler from Winterthur, supported him as a patron.1925 Friedrich Wield moved again to Paris. Several of his sculptures from this and the coming period still have their place in the Hamburg public today.

1923 - Memorial with relief "Die Kauernde", cemetery Bergedorf, for the victims of the First World War.
1924/1925 - Bust of Mayor von Melle, donated to the University of Hamburg by newspaper publisher Alfred Broschek. Today placed in the entrance foyer of the main building.
1926 - "Die Startende", shell limestone, vocational school W 2, Uferstraße 9-10, Hamburg (Barmbek-Süd).
1927 - 1928 Two outdoor sculptures for the Bugenhagen Church in Hamburg.
before 1928 - "Mother with two children", made of shell limestone, in the courtyard of the former main building of the women's clinic Finkenau, today University of Applied Sciences (HAW), Finkenau 35, (Uhlenhorst).
1929 - "Senate plaque in memory of Aby Warburg", in the entrance area of the planetarium.
1930 - Monumental figure Mother Earth. (Destroyed.)
"the runner" bronze plaque
1939 - Monkey Rock

Back in Hamburg, after the death of Dorothea Maetzel-Johannsen in 1930, Friedrich Wield moved into her studio at Ulmenstraße 3 on the 5th floor.
In 1931 he wrote: "The portrait bust as a carrier of plastic problems”, in: Schleswig-Holstein Yearbook 1931, and "The portrait - thoughts on sculpture in the Hamburg Illustrated", 1935.

The artists' association "Hamburgische Sezession", of which he was a founding member, was to be banned in 1933 when the National Socialists came to power. However, the members, including Willy Davidson, its treasurer, prevented this. They dissolved the association and disposed of the remaining assets. Willy Davidson did not live to see the last artists' festival under the motto "Heaven for a Time"; he had died a few weeks earlier on February 4, 1933.

In that year, the Nazi cultural authorities sabotaged the completion of the monument "Ether Wave" for the Jewish physicist Heinrich Hertz (born 1857 in Hamburg), which had been begun by Friedrich Wields in 1931.
Gustav Pauli, art historian and museum director in Bremen and Hamburg (born 2.2.1866 in Bremen, deceased 8.7.1938 in Munich), provided him with a scholarship in Paris. In 1935 Friedrich Wield traveled to Sicily for some time. When he returned, he took on a teaching position at the Volkshochschule and boycotted commissions from the army administration as well as alternative designs for the planned replacement relief by Ernst Barlach.

In the period that followed, he was no longer awarded any state commissions. He could hardly pay the arbitrarily exaggerated rent increases for his studio in the basement of the Kunsthalle. He was put out of business socially, especially since he continued to work for Jewish clients. In 1936 he was given notice to quit his studio in the Hamburg Kunsthalle.

He then moved into the "Künstlerheim Birkenau" across from the Hanseatische Hochschule für bildende Künste (today Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg), very close to his apartment on Uferstraße.
At the request of the architect Eduard Hallier (1836-1889), a house had been built on the site at Birkenau, which had been provided free of charge by the High Senate. From August 1903, its studios were made available primarily to Hamburg artists for a small fee. After the amendment of the statutes on February 3, 1933, § 2 para. 2, the studios could then only be rented to "German nationals of Aryan descent" and at the same time the artists' association was deprived of its previous co-administration. Dr. jur. Eduard Hallier, son of the founder (1866-1959), remained the sole administrator.
Later during bombing raids at the end of July 1943, the Künstlerheim was destroyed and not rebuilt.

A good friend in his last days was the journalist and writer Hugo Sieker, senior editor of the feature pages at the newspapers Hamburger Anzeiger and the Hamburger Freie Presse as well as curator of the Ernst Barlach House.
In a farewell letter addressed to him on May 31, 1940, Friedrich Wield provides insight into his world of thoughts, his state of mind:

"Hamburg, May 31, 1940
Dear Mr. Sieker! For a few days now I have been busy having final conversations with my few friends. Since they now partly live in other cities, countries or continents, I have to do this in writing and unilaterally, and once so nicely on the train, you too, although in Hamburg, will receive a few enlightening words about a course of action that will appear to many as weakness or supreme unreasonableness. I intend to take permanent leave from life these days and know that some people may misunderstand that to whom it may appear that one should destroy because of unreasonableness in a moment what he has built up in more than forty years, renouncing the comforts of life, in ceaseless partly hard work - but always done with a joyful cheerfulness - by pressing the trigger.
And yet, I believe, there is reason in this apparent unreasonableness, if one were to realize for once how extraordinarily foolish it would be not to rise in time from the table of life and to expose oneself more and more to a slow crumbling away, to an ever more miserable vegetation, to a slow wearing down.
Realizing it futile to be able to work in the sense in which I educated myself, I prefer to get up from the table of life in full physical and mental vigor and walk away. I have taken my life into my strict hands and I make it a sacrifice so as not to humiliate it.
If I were economically independent, then I would undoubtedly have worked on the expansion of my plastic knowledge with the same joyfulness and unconcern as in the last nine months until my natural death, which will probably not occur for another twenty years due to my radiant health.
For you see, my talent does not lie at all in the field of the more or less commercial exploitation of a craft once learned. Rather, it lies in the field of an innate, almost instinctive plastic will. I still remember from the Academy in Munich how my good professor W. v. Ruemann once marveled that a work I did as his master student had so much style. At that time the term style was quite unclear to me, but it was in my blood. And this plastic will sometimes lets me create things that lie outside the generally accepted view. This talent, however, is the stronger and more tempting part of me, the part that has saved me from routine, from repetition and, frankly speaking, has given me the most beautiful hours of my life. It cannot be suppressed at all, and in the end it is infinitely more essential for the cultural status of a country than the applied discarding of a skill and adaptability, however highly developed it may be.
To give up my talent would be to revoke the meaning of my life, because the meaning of my life was my way of working, of understanding, of representing. I have always loved work for the sake of creating, and it was the only thing that made me feel that surge of inner serenity that fills and outshines the whole person, which can be called a feeling of happiness.
But now I am at the end of my resources. In order to be able to live, I would not only have to change my way of working, but above all I would have to completely change my inner man, who for forty years has been used to working on his ennoblement in a freedom that has never been abused. For this, however, one would have to have stronger ties than I have to the eternal repetition of daily life, which has gradually become boring."

The memorial book of his friend Hugo Sieker contains a last photo of Friedrich Wield, taken the evening before his death.

On June 10, 1940, Friedrich Wield took his own life, shooting himself in his apartment, Ulmenau 3, 5th floor.

Friedrich Wield had appointed his friend and art dealer Lore Kegel (born 9.10.1901 in Düsseldorf, died 15.11.1980 in Hamburg) as his sole heir and executor. This task was taken over after her death by her son Boris Kegel-Konietzko (born 8.2.1925 Hamburg, died 3.10.2020 in Hamburg).

She arranged the burial of Friedrich Wield in his parents' grave and had his work of 1938/39, the relief "Kreuzigung" made of Obernkirchen sandstone, placed there, grave location G19, No. 378/379. At his funeral service in Chapel 3, the responsible architect Fritz Schumacher, who was very close to Wield, held a speech in which he also referred to individual works of Wield. Among other things, he said: "Hamburg, however, could only give him the opportunity for such works from time to time in connection with his public buildings during those years of suffering. They have become little known, but I believe that anyone who encounters them by chance will take notice, even without knowing their creator. He will pay attention, for example, when he sees the mother with the two children at the doctor's house of the Institute for Obstetrics (former Frauenklinik Finkenau), or when he encounters the larger-than-life figure of a girl crouching on the ground about to rise (in front of the trade school on Uferstraße), or the bronze youth on the fountain of a high school (Gymnasium Alstertal), who bends the blade of his rapier above his head.”

In 1943, Ulmenstraße 3 was hit by bombs. Lore Kegel had still been able to save Wield's works from her burning house and continued to try to preserve them. She had to endure many a dispute about the whereabouts of his works afterwards.

In 1935, the Hamburg Zoo Society, the legal predecessor of the park, had commissioned four well-known artists to create four animal sculptures for the basin in Planten und Blomen. The result was large figures made of tufa limestone: a walrus by Friedrich Wield, a sea lion by Karl Opfermann and a polar bear by Hans Martin Ruwoldt and Ludwig Kunstmann (1877-1961). All artists were members of the Hamburg Secession, Ludwig Kunstmann only for one year.

During the redesign for the horticultural exhibition in Planten und Blomen in 1953, the remaining artists were informed that the animal sculptures there were to be removed. In agreement, it was decided on their new place on the children's playground. But they never arrived there and were initially untraceable.
Only the fate of Friedrich Wield's walrus was soon certain: it was destroyed with pneumatic drills and the crushed stones were used for a garden path. Later the three other animal figures were found in the backyard of a hauling company in Pappelallee. They had been given to the hauling company as wages for removal. Through negotiation, it was possible to have them placed in the city park after all.
About the destruction of the walrus, the Planten und Blomen administration claimed that the figure had suffered bomb damage and was too damaged to survive transport. This was implausible, because in this case a repair could have taken place. The destruction of the work could only have taken place with the consent of the executor of the estate. Lore Konietzko-Kegel saw it as a breach of copyright. She saw the memory of Wield, with its great artistic significance, damaged. She also saw it as a degradation of the value of his 30 other sculptures that were in her possession.
She recalled: "In the face of the fury of the flames and the rejection and ignorance of official and professional authorities, my strength and abilities failed me."

The plaster model of Friedrich Wield's "Aether Wave", ready for casting, was only rediscovered more than 50 years later in the basement of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. Commissioned by the cultural authorities, a bronze casting was created from it, which was initially placed in Eichpark in 1994.
In 2015, on the initiative of Henrik Hertz, a descendant of Heinrich Hertz, and Boris Kegel-Konietzko, it was decided to relocate the "Aether Wave" to the originally intended site.
The company Arnold Hertz & Co made it possible, and since 2016 the sculpture has stood in front of the NDR broadcasting building on Rothenbaumchaussee.

In memory of the outstanding sculptor and man Friedrich Wield, the search for the whereabouts of the missing bronze statue of the young man should also continue. The corresponding column is located in the school cellar.

As mentioned it is said that the fountain statue was on the fountain until the 1960s and disappeared after a "school joke". Perhaps former students from the graduating classes from that time will be able to track it down.

Stand: January 2024
© Margot Löhr

Quellen: StaH 131-1 II_2008, StaH 231-9_B 178, Künstlerheim-Hallier-Stiftung; StaH 332-3 Zivilstandsaufsicht, Heiratsregister, B 70 Nr. 1404/1875; StaH Standesämter, Geburtsregister, 1882 u. 2463/1876 Paul Wield, 1976 u. 1378/1880 Friedrich Wield; StaH 332-5 Standesämter, Sterberegister, 7906 u. 85/1897 Christian Friedrich Wield, 7032 u. 941/1923 Johanne Pauline Emilie Wield, 7239 u.762/1940 Friedrich Wield; StaH 351-8_B 129 Künstlerheim Hallier-Stiftung; StaH 352-5 Todesbescheinigungen, Sta 3 Nr. 85/1897 Christian Friedrich Wield; Sta 21a Nr. 941/1923 Johanne Pauline Emilie Wield, Sta 6 Nr. 762/1940 Friedrich Wield; StaH 363-2 Senatskommission für die Kunstpflege, Eb 365 Wield, F. (Bildhauer); StaH 621-2 Bauarchive/ 27 Fritz Schumacher, Oberbaudirektor; StaH 720-1/388 Firmen und Familienarchive — 23 Bauarchiv Schumacher, Fritz, 1910-1933 (Bestand); StaH Fotoarchiv 720-1/343-1_01404_24; StaH 731-8 Zeitungsausschnittsammlung, A 773 Wield, Friedrich Ernst; Hamburger Adressbücher 1880-1943; Hugo Sieker: Bildhauer Wield 1880–1940. Ein Gedenkbuch. Hans Christians, Hamburg 1975. Mit einem Geleitwort von Erich Lüth. Roland Jaeger und Cornelius Steckner: Zinnober Kunstszene Hamburg von 1919 bis 1933. Szene, Hamburg 1983; Maike Bruhns: Kunst in der Krise. Band 2: Künstlerlexikon Hamburg 1933–1945, Hamburg 2001; https://gedenkstaetten-in-hamburg.de/gedenkstaetten/zeige/blaue-tafel-zum-pflegeheim-farmsen; https://www.ndr.de/der_ndr/unternehmen/chronik/Die-Aetherwelle-Erinnerung-an-den-Physiker-Heinrich-Hertz,aetherwelle100.html, eingesehen am 1.7.2020; http://www.hamburgerpersoenlichkeiten.de/hamburgerpersoenlichkeiten/member_file_uploads/helper.asp?id=3370; https://www.kultur-online.net/inhalt/der-sammler-richard-bühler; http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/bsb00004662/images/index.html?
id=00004662&fip=217.237.113.238&no=&seite=220; https://sh-kunst.de/kuenstler/wield-friedrich/; https://blog.sub.uni-hamburg.de/?p=18732, Photos Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License; StaH https://www.bildindex.de/document/obj32037207?medium=mi11227a13, eingesehen am 17.1.2022.