American comic artist Art Spiegelman, whose parents survived the Holocaust, has made the odyssey of the ship St. Louis some seventy years ago the topic of his latest work. The commanders of the Hapag motor vessel attempted in vain to let more than nine-hundred Jewish emigrants from Germany go on land in Cuba. When the Cuban authorities declined to recognize their visas, the captain of the St. Louis tried to bring the passengers to safety in the U.S., but President Roosevelt refused them entry. Spiegelman took a number of contemporary American caricatures as a point of departure for his retelling of the tragedy in the form of a large-scale comic drawing, supplemented with his comments on the Americans' refusal to offer refuge.
A three-and-a-half page autobiographical text written by Bernhard Blanke of Bremen has been placed at the disposal of the German Maritime Museum. In it, Blanke - who lived from 1818 to 1877 - briefly describes his career from his employment as a ship's boy on a Bremen brig to his position as harbour captain in Bremerhaven. The text appears here as written, with a few cautious corrections in cases of obvious errors. Basic information is moreover provided on each of the ships he travelled on, taken from the reference works by Peter-Michael Pawlik and Wolfgang Walter as well as the municipal archive (Stadtarchiv) in Bremerhaven and the state archive (Staatsarchiv) in Bremen. The aim of this publication is to make a brief autobiographical document available to scholarship.
With its two turbine-driven express steamers BREMEN and EUROPA, launched in 1929 and 1930 respectively, the Norddeutscher Lloyd set new standards in terms of both external appearance and interior furnishings. Six architects were commissioned to provide artistic drafts for the firstclass- section interior of the BREMEN. The main rooms in First Class were designed by Düsseldorf architect Fritz August Breuhaus. Breuhaus was also the designer of the children's playroom. He commissioned the artist Walter Trier, a caricaturist and illustrator of children's books, to decorate the playroom with frescoes. The year 1929 also marked the publication of the first edition of Erich Kästner's famous children's book Emil and the Detectives, containing the illustrations by Walter Trier; they can still be found in today's editions of the work, which continues to delight young and old alike. Walter Trier avoided persecution by the Nazis by emigrating to Canada via England. Kästner personally witnessed the burning of his books in May 1933. Even though he stayed on in Germany he was forbidden to publish any more of his work. Neither the children's playroom nor the BREMEN itself survived the war: The ship was destroyed by fire in 1941.
Cornelius Wagner, one of twentieth-century Germany's most important marine painters, died fifty years ago. Unfortunately, his life and work have been neglected by research to the very present. In 1986/87, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the painter's death, the German Maritime Museum devoted itself to his oeuvre by presenting an exhibition of the estate. The project did not succeed in eliminating the inadequate state of the research. The museum was able, however, to acquire so many pictures that it can meanwhile call the largest publicly owned collection of the painter's works its own. The monographic study of marine painting in Germany has been a focus of the museum's research programme for many years. Within that framework, the first attempt has now been made to carry out an investigation of this artist and his oeuvre on the basis of the museum's own holdings. Wagner was from an artistic family which settled in Düsseldorf in 1873, and it was at the art academy of that town that he received his training. He had become acquainted with the sea already as a child, and as a painter was lured to it again and again his whole life long. He took study trips to England, Scotland, Belgium and Holland and travelled to the Caribbean and South America. In 1906 he settled in Kaiserswerth near Düsseldorf, where he would remain until his death. The lives of the fisherfolk in Polperro and Whitby, the hustle and bustle of the Hamburg harbour, the Lower Rhenish landscape in the vicinity of Düsseldorf – these were the themes with which Wagner distinguished himself. The oeuvre of this academically trained artist was informed by the conviction that not the finished product but the process of executing a painting was the most wonderful aspect of artistic work.
Since the foundation of the German Maritime Museum in 1971, scientific research of German marine painting has enjoyed such high priority that marine painting in Bremerhaven has become a research focus of national and international significance. In 1979 the decision was made as to the four fields of research that would be at the focal centre of the museum's research activities in connection with the "Blue List." (The German Maritime Museum was the sixth research museum to be included on the "Blue List" - so called because it was originally on blue paper - of research institutes to be supported jointly by the federal and state governments.) At that time, the museum's supervisory board agreed to place special emphasis on the research of the "pictorial depiction of German maritime history." In the thirty years since the foundation of the museum and until the very present, the collection of paintings has been continually expanded and is now the most important of its kind in public ownership in Germany. This unique source has frequently served as a point of departure for special exhibitions which would not have been possible without the research that had been carried out previously on the life and work of the respective painters. The results of this research are documented in catalogues, monographs, essays and biographical reference book articles, and have been made accessible to the public for general information and further research. Three monographs are particularly worthy of mention due to the attempt made in them to develop syntheses. Two of these books were written by researchers on the museum staff; one summary was actively supported by the museum. With the explicit encouragement of the German federal Scientific Council, voiced on the occasion of its evaluation of the research undertaken by the German Maritime Museum in the year 2000, the efforts will be further intensified in the future.
"Großbritannien war im 19. Jahrhundert die führende Schiffbaunation in der Welt. Alle wesentlichen Neuerungen im Schiffbau, vor allem der Übergang vom Holz- zum Eisen- und Stahlschiffbau sowie die Verwendung der Dampfmaschine anstatt des Segels zum Schiffsantrieb, nahmen dort ihren Ausgang. Der deutsche Schiffbau war in dieser Epoche von den Bemühungen geprägt, mit Hilfe von britischem Know-how eine heimische Schiffbauindustrie aufzubauen und die Abhängigkeit von Großbritannien zu verringern. Gegen Ende des Jahrhunderts war ein Punkt erreicht, an dem man glaubte, bereits mit dem englischen Schiffbau in Konkurrenz treten zu können." (Autorenreferat)
