Mark Hobbs on the life and legacy of Berlin artist Hans Baluschek…
On a fine and warm summer’s morning I headed to Schöneberg, a well-to-do suburban neighbourhood to the southwest of the city centre, in search of the Berlin artist Hans Baluschek (1870-1935). Disembarking from the train at Innsbrucker Platz I took a short walk to the Ceciliengärten, a Weimar-era housing estate comprised of four-storey apartment blocks ranged around a narrow tree-lined park.
It was quiet, and I marvelled—as I always do—at the preponderance of trees in this city; how they line most streets, providing protection from the heat of the sun and adding colour and life to the scenery, with their vivid scents of pollen and the incessant chirping of sparrows. I walked a circuit around the Ceciliengärten. I knew what I was looking for, but hadn’t found it yet, and who in their right mind would be in a hurry on a glorious day such as this?
Finally I caught a glimpse of what I’d come to see: a clay plaque on the wall above my head, depicting a cobbled street scene in which an elderly woman talks to a younger woman with a young child clambering over her shoulders. Alongside the picture there was a caption. It read: “Here lived, painted, drew and wrote: Hans Baluschek, 1929–1933.”
I knew that Baluschek lived on this estate, in an apartment given to him by Berlin’s government in recognition of his services to the city, but until now I had not known the specific dates. Knowing that Baluschek died in 1935 at the age of sixty-five, I wondered why the elderly artist didn’t live here until his death. But then again 1933 is an ominous year in German history, marking as it does Hitler’s accession to power. What happened to Baluschek in those final years of his life? To find the answer I needed to go back to the artist’s earliest years.
Baluschek was born in Breslau (Wroclaw) in 1870. Back then, Breslau was part of Prussia, now it lies in Poland. Baluschek’s father was a civil servant and supporter of the German Social Democratic Party, which had been founded in 1863. In 1876 Baluschek’s father took up a post in the civil service and moved his family to Berlin. According to Friedrich Wendel, Baluschek’s first biographer, two experiences in young Baluschek’s formative years bore an influence on his later art. First, he saw much of the city’s working-class quarters and factories at close-hand while accompanying his father on his professional errands. Second, Baluschek was profoundly affected by Zola’s novels: Germinal and L’Œuvre in particular, both of which were published in the 1880s.
Baluschek’s formative years coincided with the period of Berlin’s most intensive industrial urban development, when corporate giants such as the electrical engineering firms Siemens and AEG were rapidly expanding. At the time the Baluschek family was living in Schöneberg, close by to one of the city’s emerging new tenement districts known as the Rote Insel, or Red Island.
The Rote Insel was so called because it was surrounded on all sides by railways lines, and because of its inhabitants’ Social-Democratic leanings, creating a proletarian neighbourhood in the midst of a largely middle-class district. At the heart of this new neighbourhood lay Sedanstraße, now called Leberstraße, a long and straight street of uniform tenements. Construction activity along Sedanstraße ebbed and flowed through the 1870s to the 1900s, as the German economy went through a s…