Carl Einstein - Biography

Biography

Carl Einstein who was born to a German Jewish family on 26 April 1885, in the Rhineland town of Neuwied. The second child born to Daniel Einstein, an active member of the local Jewish community, and Sophie Einstein, Carl was a year younger than his sister Hedwig, who would become known as a concert pianist and the wife of sculptor Benno Elkan. A third child born to Daniel and Sophie died in 1889. The young Carl Einstein spent much of his youth in Karlsruhe before moving to Berlin to study philosophy and art history in 1903. Originally given the standard German spelling of his first name as "Karl" at birth, he adopted the Latinized spelling "Carl" in the 1900s.

Like many German men of his generation, Einstein served as a soldier of imperial Germany in World War I. The majority of his wartime service was spent in German-occupied Belgium. The work carried out by German scholars on Congolese art during the occupation would prove to be considerably helpful in Einstein's later efforts to encourage the beginning of a serious appreciation of black African art by Europeans.

Einstein’s life after the First World War was marked by the violent political and social implications of the war and revolutionary sentiment following the Hohenzollern monarchy's collapse. He was actively involved in the Revolutionary Soldiers' Council in Brussels and to a lesser extent in the Spartacist Uprising in Berlin and later in the anarchist Durruti Column during the Spanish Civil War.

Einstein established a reputation as a well-known author and art critic on the basis of work ranging from his debut novel Bebuquin oder die Dilettanten des Wunders, to his widely read work on African sculpture Negerplastik (Negro Sculpture), credited as being one of first important books acknowledging African art in Europe (and especially its relationship to Cubism), the final volume of the prestigious Propyläen Verlag history of art series Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Art of the 20th Century), which may have gained him an invitation to teach at the Bauhaus (he declined), to the notorious play Die Schlimme Botschaft. Another Africa-related book is Afrikanische Märchen und Legenden, a compilation of African mythology in very expressive language. Einstein also worked on numerous journals and collective projects, among some of the more important: Die Aktion edited by Franz Pfemfert, Die Pleite and Der Blutige Ernst with George Grosz, and the legendary journal Documents: Doctrines, Archéologie, Beaux-arts, Ethnographie edited with Georges Bataille.

Einstein's avant-garde orientation and leftist political sympathies made him a marked man for right-wing attacks during the Weimar Republic. His passion play Die Schlimme Botschaft (The Sad Tidings, or The Bad News) was met with attacks as blasphemous; its 1921 publication resulted in a legal process and a conviction for blasphemy in 1922, and Einstein was forced to atone for the revolutionary ideas placed into the mouth of his Jesus Christ with a 15,000-mark fine.

Better received in France, Einstein left Germany for permanent residence in France in 1928; with Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the exile became permanent and officially mandated. Having met Lyda Guévrékian in 1928, Einstein married her in 1932. The French Cubist painter and sculptor Georges Braque served as a witness.

Einstein spent 1936-1938 fighting in the Spanish Civil War; returning to France where in 1940, he was arrested and interned along with the other German émigrés until his liberation later in the spring of 1940 as a result of chaotic circumstances in the face of the rapidly progressing German invasion. Although able to escape the German occupation of Paris during the Fall of France and flee to the south, he was left trapped on the French border with Franco’s Spain.

Bereft of alternatives, Einstein committed suicide in the Pyrenees town of Lestelle-Betharram on 5 July 1940.