"Vorläufig muss ich leben bleiben"

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 Democratic Republic? The book sheds light on the background to his artistic work and his formative friendships, such as that with Gerhard Altenbourg. Alfred Ahner’s diaries and letters always reflect in the most subtle way the everyday friendships and concerns which affect not only the people of the previous century.