Interned Artists: Ben Uri and the 80th Anniversary of Internment

Hermann Fechenbach was born in 1897 and grew up in Bad Mergentheim where his parents ran an inn. He was conscripted into the German army in 1916, wounded in August 1917, and was discharged after losing his left leg. He subsequently started training in a handicraft school for invalids, before attending the Academies in Stuttgart and Munich where he studied painting and restoration. Fechenbach painted in the contemporary style of Die Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity] mostly producing portraits and woodcuts, the latter based on the Old Testament. Following Hitler's rise to power in 1933, as a Jew, Fechenbach was expelled from the Reichskammer der bildenden Kuenste [official state register of artists] and banned from exhibiting. After a failed attempt to immigrate to Palestine, Fechenbach's wife Margarete took on a domestic position in London in January 1939, enabling her husband to join her in May of the same year. In 1940 Fechenbach was first interned at Warth Mills, where he started a hunger strike in protest. He was briefly imprisoned in Liverpool and then transferred to Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man. During internment Fechenbach started a series of linocuts 'My Impressions as Refugee' which partly satirised Nazi leaders and partly explored his own experiences as an internee. During the 1940s and 1950s Fechenbach continued to paint and exhibit, receiving a modest amount of public acclaim, but for a variety of reasons retired gradually from the public eye, working in isolation and earning his living from restoring porcelain. He died in Denham, Buckinghamshire, in 1987. This curious wartime image of Lenin features children from different races in the background, as a visual riposte to the pure racial philosophies of the Nazi regime, with the handwritten inscription below: "LENIN: the first statesman to enforce racial equality in practice as
well as in theory".