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| 1927 The Edelmann family on a Sunday stroll |
| Hanno Edelmann was born in Hamburg in November 1923 |
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| 1929 Hanno Edelmann with his sister Lisa |
| His father's career goes into decline as a result of his union activities. So begins a time of constant moves for the family - one apartment after the other is 'rented dry'. (The first tenants in newly built apartments pay reduced rent for the first year.) The streets are the scene of fighting between Communists and the [Nazi] SA. |
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| 1930 The teacher Adolf Saggau with his class |
| Hanno Edelmann loves his teacher, Adolf Saggau. Saggau seeks to awaken an appreciation of the value of art - especially of music - in the children. He finds a ready audience in Hanno, since Hanno's grandfather was a famous violinist. Of his own accord Hanno takes violin lessons with his teacher until 1934, when Saggau disappears without a trace. Hanno sees the wrecked apartment through a keyhole. He is recommended for admission to gymnasium and funds for his fees are collected - his proud father refuses, wanting no charity. School rapidly becomes uninteresting and his preoccupation with art grows. Edelmann draws... red flags, a horse on the school's white wall, a vanished teacher. |
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| 1933 Evening classes at art school |
| To become an artist - No, his father won't agree to that. Hanno is supposed to learn a 'real' occupation. The ten year old is allowed to attend evening classes in drawing and calligraphy at the `Hochschule für Bildende Künste` [College of Fine Arts]. He meets young painters here and is invited to their studios - a wonderful and mysterious world opens itself before him. |
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| 1940 The Edelmann family |
| In 1936 Hanno Edelmann wins first prize in a painting competition sponsored by the Hagenbecker Zoo. The prize ceremony takes place in the same building and at the same time as the `Entartete Kunst` ['Degenerate Art'] exhibition opens - an exhibition of paintings and sculpture despised by the Nazi Party. Hanno Edelmann slips past a guard into the exhibit and is fascinated by the pictures. He is particularly impressed by Oskar Kokoschka's `Windsbraut`. His father arranges an apprenticeship for Hanno in an architectural firm. He draws - the view out the window, the architects at their drafting tables, portraits. He breaks off his apprenticeship; his parting gift from the architects is a paintbox. His father, who in the meantime is unemployed, finds him a place as a lithographer's apprentice in the art publishing house of Mühlmeister & Johler. He draws nudes and ever more portraits, this time together with the painters who earn their living there. |
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| 1941 At radio operator's training in Königsberg |
| The seventeen year old is drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1941. He is assigned to a telecommunications unit and is trained as a radio operator, first in Königsberg and later in occupied France. In France he draws and sketches in every free minute - people in a cafe, the bridge of Avignon, anglers on the Rhone. In 1943 he's transferred to an intelligence unit on the Eastern Front at Vitebsk and is soon captured by the Red Army and sent to a Siberian prison camp at Sverdlosk. He is there four years. Following an illness he is permitted to work in the camp's ceramics shop and he draws - fellow POWs peeling potatoes, Russian prisoners, the camp commandant. In 1947 he is allowed to return to Hamburg. |
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| 1947 Head nurse Dora in the studio |
Dora Klostermann, head surgery nurse in the university clinic, art lover and collector, comes to know Hanno Edelmann as a twenty-four year old patient. For Dora, Hanno is a discovery: his drawings and the unconditional seriousness with which he devotes himself to his work reveal him as an artist. She opens her collection of German Expressionists to him, supports him with modest sums of money, makes study visits to the country possible, and forges connections with collectors and gallery owners. |