Hans Baluschek

Hans Baluschek (9 May 1870 – 28 September 1935) was a German painter, graphic artist and writer.


Baluschek was a prominent representative of German Critical Realism, and as such he sought to portray the life of the common people with vivid frankness. His paintings centered on the working class of Berlin. He belonged to the Berlin Secession movement, a group of artists interested in modern developments in art. Yet during his lifetime he was most widely known for his fanciful illustrations of the popular children's book Little Peter's Journey to the Moon (German title: Peterchens Mondfahrt).


Hans Baluschek, after 1920, was an active member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which at the time still professed a Marxist view of history.


Hans Baluschek was born on 9 May 1870 in Breslau, at the time Germany's sixth-largest city (now Wrocław, Poland), to Franz Baluschek, a surveyor and railway engineer and his wife. He had three sisters, two of whom died of tuberculosis in childhood. After the Franco-Prussian War and foundation of the German Empire in 1871, Franz became an independent engineer for the railways, and lived for a time in the much smaller town of Haynau (now Chojnów, Poland). It was during his childhood that Hans Baluschek developed a fascination with railways that later would be shown in his paintings.


In 1876 the family, with 6-year-old Hans, moved to Berlin, where during the next decade they changed their residence five times, living in a succession of newly built apartments developed expressly for workers. Berlin found itself in the midst of an economic crisis following the Panic of 1873, but Franz Baluschek was fortunate in maintaining railway employment and was able to support his family in kleinbürgerlich (petit bourgeois) style amid the family's less affluent proletarian neighbors.


Following primary school, Hans Baluschek at age 9 entered the Askanische Gymnasium, a secondary school in the Tempelhof-Schöneberg district of Berlin, which offered curricula in the humanities and natural sciences.


During the 1880s, young Baluschek was profoundly impressed by a Berlin exhibition of paintings by Russian artist Vasily Vereshchagin, whose works portrayed the horrors of war, particularly the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. These paintings were widely debated in Berlin artistic circles, where their graphic realism came as a shock to some. Baluschek began to copy pictures and to paint his own war scenes in the manner of Vereshchagin, whose influence may be detected in some of Baluschek's later works.


In 1887, his father took a job with the railway on the large German island of Rügen, and the family moved to nearby Stralsund, where Baluschek completed his Gymnasium education. In Stralsund he was influenced by instructor Max Schütte, who taught his students the principles of socialism, particularly emphasizing the relationship between economic and social issues — and who was ultimately dismissed because of his left-wing political views. Baluschek and his classmates devoted themselves to studying the political works of Tolstoy and Zola which were popular at the time. When Baluschek passed his Abitur (school-leaving exam) in 1889 and graduated from the Gymnasium, he stated that he wished to become a painter.

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