"Vorläufig muss ich leben bleiben"2014
by Alfred Ahner
The Thuringian painter and draughtsman Alfred Ahner (1890-1973) was an incorruptible chronicler in images and words, who lived through four different social systems and two world wars. Stunningly clear-sighted descriptions of political and social realities, especially in Weimar, also characterise his wide-ranging diaries and letters. A selection of these are presented here for the first time in an annotated edition, as a long overdue addition to the artist�s previously described visual works. What motivated Ahner as a schoolboy in the last years of imperial Germany, as an art student among the bohemians of Munich and Stuttgart, as a medical orderly in the First World War, as a paterfamilias and as a freelance artist under the Weimar Republic, National Socialism and the German...