On the night of 21 to 22 June 1943, having been bombed out and temporarily blinded, Georg Muche sits surrounded by his possessions on the Ostwall in Krefeld and meets the textile industrialist Hans Jammers. Jammers invites Muche and his wife El to move in to his family home on Bismarckstrasse 80. The desperate situation results in a close friendship that would last until Jammers’s death in 1974. Muche, a former Bauhaus master, moves to Krefeld in 1939 to take up a post as creative director of the masters class for textile art (which he had founded) at the textile engineering school, after having been dismissed without notice from the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Breslau by the National Socialists in 1933. During this period, he already gets to know Jammers, who works closely with the textile engineering school as the owner of the family firm “Mechanische Seidenweberei Carl Jammers KG”. Muche stays in Krefeld until 1958 and moves to Lake Constance in 1960. Over the years, the painter and textile industrialist exchanged over 240 letters. These letters have now been bequeathed to the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, where they augment the archival collection.
Literature:
Jens Voss, “Erinnerung an eine große Freundschaft” (Memories of a great friendship), in: Rheinische Post, 30 July 2014