Dhe continent ends at a coat hanger. That’s what the islanders call the graceful bridge over the Fehmarn Sound because of its shape. The crossing over the water is just under a kilometer long. Nevertheless, the people of Fehmarn speak of “Europe” when they mean the mainland. That means: An island always remains a world of its own.
When Ernst Ludwig Kirchner traveled to Fehmarn for the first time in 1908, the bridge over the Sound did not yet exist. But there was another connection, namely the avant-garde artist group “Die Brücke” founded by Kirchner and colleagues, which is regarded as a pioneer of Expressionism. Kirchner was born in Aschaffenburg, grew up in Chemnitz, lived in Dresden at the time and later in Berlin. “All four Brücke painters were drawn to the big city, but they were also drawn to the sea,” the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Verein Fehmarn, founded in 1992, tells guests interested in culture. Every summer, the active members organize an art exhibition. For the twenty-fifth anniversary, it was possible to bring fifty Kirchner drawings to the island for this summer, thirteen of them with motifs that were created there.
In any case, Kirchner came to Fehmarn by ship and in the entourage of the siblings Emmy and Hans Frisch. His friends persuaded him to come along. Emmy will later marry Kirchner’s painter colleague Schmidt-Rottluff, who is also considered the namesake of the artists’ association “Die Brücke”. The world is small, not just on an island.
“NRW there” and “NRW not yet or no longer there”
Kirchner paints Emmy as a “woman in a white dress”, paints “houses on Fehmarn”, almost with an impressionistic look. Above all, however, he draws: farmhouses, coastlines, the church in the town of Burg. “I must draw to the point of frenzy . . . The technology is too beautiful,” he enthuses. You live on the outskirts of Burg, in the gable room of the “Villa Port Arthur”, which is still well preserved today. A conveniently located address: The small town as the center of the island was within walking distance, the port of Burgstaaken and the south coast as well as the Burger Binnensee were not far. motifs everywhere.
In 1912 Kirchner returned to the island. This time he is only traveling with his companion Erna Schilling, a “little dancer” whom he had picked up as a model in a Berlin bar. She will stay with him for the rest of his life, even without a marriage certificate, later only called “Mrs. Kirchner”. “Friend. Greetings from Fehmarn, where I . . . find everything unchanged without bathers”, the painter says on a postcard.
