Jean-Jacques Waltz

Jean-Jacques Waltz , alias Hansi is an artist Illustrateur French born the February 23rd 1873 with Colmar and deceased the June 10th 1951.

Childhood

Jean-Jacques Waltz is the youngest child of a family of four children born of the marriage of Jacques André Waltz and Rosalie Clémence Dunan. Waltz live in Alsace since the 17th century and one finds in their ancestors of the bakers, the hatters and the butchers. After having been first of all to stop like his own father, the father of Jean-Jacques Waltz becomes librarian with the public library of Colmar in 1881 and 1891 preserving of the Musée of Unterlinden. Autodidact, it acquires a very great knowledge of Alsace and Colmar, typically Alsatian city, but of French tradition. It is him which very early wakes up in his/her son an interest for the history and Article It is affected by the annexation which breaks the bonds that it maintained with France.

Jean-Jacques Waltz (Hansi) attends the imperial college since 1881. With the college, its favorite target are its professors of which some come sometimes from areas of Germany very far away from Alsace to teach French there. His/her father withdraws it from this college to his defending body.

To its exit of the college in 1894, his/her father sends it to Lyon to follow the courses of Draftsmanship of the Société of vocational training of the Rhone , it follows also the courses of painting and decorative arts, always in Lyon. Following a Pleurisy contracted in 1896, it must return to Colmar. Then it is found, up to 1909, as draftsman first of all in a textile factory with Cernay, then with the Herzog establishments with Logelbach.

A career of draftsman

After its stay in Lyon it turns over to Alsace where it becomes famous as draftsman of postcards, of which some are distributed by the Association of hotel and restorers of the High-Vosges. It is well-known for its big size, its lavalli2ere and its felt hat, distinctive signs of the artists at that time. The reasons for its illustrations often combine idyllic village scenes with corrosive Caricature S anti-allemandes. While with the first access, its illustrations appear innocent scenes of the Alsatian life, a more attentive observation makes it possible to detect there an aversion for German which will be the mark of Hansi.

Thanks to two painters Kreyder and Hornecker, it becomes acquainted with the artists of Strasbourg of the Alsatian Revue who work with the maintenance of Alsatian particularism, one of them is Charles Spindler. It engages against the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine (and especially of Alsace) by Germany, consequence of the Traité of Frankfurt which makes following the Franco-German Guerre of 1870. For that, it makes many German satirical drawings in Alsace which it makes ridiculous. His/her older brother is student in pharmacy and the assistance to publish his drawings in the bulletin of the Association of the students in pharmacy of Strasbourg (H2S or Hazweis), ironic, critical publication and anti-allemande. It is to sign these drawings that it uses for the first time the pseudonym Hansi which is at the same time Hans (Jean) follow-up of I for Iakob (Jacques). Hansi ridicules the German tourist whom it represents with his tyrolean hat, its backpack and its stick. It represents the expansionism German, itself encouraged by nationalist associations of which the League pangermanist. Like Colmarien, Hansi joined the opposition anti-allemande and anti-Prussian, whose leaders are the abbot Wetterlé, Jacques Preiss and Daniel Blumenthal, which is appointed with the Reichstag.

Thanks to this success, Jean-Jacques Waltz can print in 1907 a collection of watercolours entitled Tours and Portes of Alsace . This book which is not really committed nevertheless is prefaced by Joseph Fleurent, lawyer colmarien who defends the only French culture for the Alsatian ones. In 1908 its Bahy editor republishes the Vogesenbilder and publishes a second series Die Hohkönigsburg im Wasgenwald and Ihre Einweihung (Haut-Koenigsbourg and its inuaguration). Professor Knatschké is supposed to comment on the illustrations, which makes it possible Hansi to scoff the inauguration at the Château of Haut-Kœnigsbourg restored to the inititiave of Guillaume II.

The emergence of a caricaturist and a polemist

In 1908, appears at Bader the book Der Professor Knatschke which had been published before in the form of serial in the newspaper of Mulhouse the Express . Although Hansi is not implied in the policy, it is mixed with the Gneisse business. This headmaster of the college of Colmar had, in an article published in the Strasburger Post , supported the need for a teaching only in German not to allow the French army to obtain information on behalf of the Alsatian ones. Hansi publishes a caricature of Gneisse which carries felt sorry for and Hansi is condemned to five hundred marks of fine and the editor of the newspaper the Wetterlé abbot in two months of prison. In its number of Christmas 1911, the review the Illustration publishes watercolours of Hansi presented by Maurice Barrès. In 1912 appears a French edition of the Professor Knatschké due to Doctor Colli pseudonym of H. Colligno general secretary of the presidency of the Republic. For Christmas of the same year it publishes Histoire of Alsace told with the small children of France by the uncle Hansi , the history is presented there in a partial and partial way.

In the book, Professor Knatschke , Hansi had identified the ridiculous professor with his former headmaster of Gymnasium de Colmar, named Gustav Gneisse. It seems that the resemblance between the fictitious character and the real character existed more in the spirit of Hansi than in reality, since testimonys, of which that of Marie-Joseph Bopp, describe Gustav Gneisse like a good man. The business has consequence, since Gustav Gneisse becomes the symbol of Pan-Germanism and the stupidity, so that after the return of the French in Alsace it is expelled. Returned to Alsace in 1940 only, patient and almost blind, in order to live in his daughter who can deal with him, it is again constrained to pass by again the border towards Germany after the Release.

A continuation of lawsuit

Hansi in May 1913 is condemned to nine hundred marks of fine to have insulted, in its history of Alsace, the community of the Germans come to Alsace after 1870. July 9th, 1914, a new lawsuit opens in Leipzig, which condemns Hansi to one year of prison. It benefits from a passage to Colmar to escape and gain France.

The Great War

Hansi engages with the 152e regiment of infantry as an officer interprets. It is then affected with the service of air propaganda. In 1918 when Alsace reinstated France, it created a poster. After the victory of the Allies, it publishes two books in 1918, the tricolor Paradise and in 1919 happy Alsace . In this last book, he tells its démélés with German judges, his escape, his war, the entry of the French troops in Alsace and the departure of the emigrants. In 1920 it is made Officer of the Legion of Honor by president Millerand.

A declining popularity

Not only the popularity of Hansi decrease but also incomprehension settles, certainly the Alsatian ones accommodated the French Army with joy, on the other hand, they do not want to lose an identity preserved hard for the German period. Hansi is in a paradoxical situation: it does not approve the autonomism, but the defense of the Alsatian culture which was its combat under the German mode cannot be expressed in the French system. Its books the Voyage of Erika in French Alsace (1921) the the Fresco of Geispolsheim (1935) do not have an echo. He writes books which express its attraction for the beauty of Alsace: Colmar in France (1923), Bell-towers in the Vines (1929), With the foot of the Mont Sainte-Odile (1934) and Marvellous History of the good Florentin Saint of Alsace (1925). These works have a poor success. Hansi draws postcards, watercolours and advertisement drawings, as of the signs which one can still see, in particular in the streets of Colmar. Hansi succeeds his/her father like conservative of the Musée of Unterlinden died of this one in 1923 and takes again one of its manuscripts on the Heraldry in Alsace . Hansi is unmarried and lives with the couple of his/her brother and his sister-in-law in a house which they have in the old city of Colmar.

Two days after the declaration of war of 1939, Hansi goes very quickly to Burgundy, then in Agen where the services of the prefecture of Haut-Rhin were evacuated. In the night from April 10th to 11th 1941, it is beaten by three men of Gestapo and is left for death. Hansi draws some, lives in the South, then goes to Switzerland at the end of 1942 and lives with Lausanne. He survives by reproducing watercolours made in Alsace. Although Colmar, last released city of the Nazis, is to it on February 2nd, 1945, Hansi returns in its city only in June 1946. Weakened by the attack of which it was victim, it goes back nevertheless to work and paints advertisement drawings and signs. The book the professor Knatschké is republished in 1947 without much success, because there is no more audience for such a book anti-German. Hansi publishes its memories under the title the Memories of one annexed recalcitrant , in two volumes Mrs Bissinger takes her bath and the First Gramophone . Hansi acknowledges there that it had as a friend a German. Jean-Jacques Waltz-Hansi dies on June 10th, 1951. Its funerals are carried out by a company of the 152e regiment of infantry, the famous 15-2, in whom it had been useful.

A discussed author

Hansi took a clear party, in favor of France. That attracted enmities on behalf of the separatists to him, of the compatriots favorable to Germany and the Germans. Those reproached him its excesses, as its caricatures where it drew the brutally expelled Germans of Alsace. It drew them in all the cases carrying a clock. If its works are considered outrageous nowadays, they do not reflect of them less the emotions of its time. It is advisable to specify that excesses anti-Frenchwomen in the competitor artists were not less strong. Like many artists immediately marked by the wars, the work of Hansi must be restored in the historical and social context of its time.

The albums of Hansi, abundantly sold about the years 1910, where the Alsatian villages disappeared under the Tricolours, made accept the French public opinion too easily that the return to France would not pose any problem and contributed to hide the extent of the crisis separatist after 1924.

According to Tomi Ungerer, Hansi had talent. Its success besides does not cease growing; the drawings of Hansi are everywhere in Alsace, whereas other draftsmen like Simplizius, most known of the Alsatian draftsmen anti-French of the inter-war period from now on are forgotten.

A work of painter in watercolours who perdure

Today, if a book as My village guard a certain charm, only some amateurs still reads the albums anti-German like the Professor Knatschke , become hermetic with those which do not know the time. Then remain the artistic work of this draftsman, become a mine for the manufacturers of Alsatian memories: each detail is worked there with a meticulous care, so much so that it can become a reason with him all alone; i.e. one finds them with abundance on the cookie boxes, the plates or the napkins, free so that some are censured.

The teaching of French in Alsace

For the Alsatian schoolboys, French was often, with the Alsatian one, one of the two native tongues (since the Second Empire, the middle-class had often adopted it in family, and this use had spread after 1871 per spirit of opposition). Thus Hansi makes write in Elsa Knatschke:
French whom the Alsatian ones speak is not at all correct French; I was French always first at the school, and I did not include/understand a word of what they said. Initially they do not give a value to the “haspirée hasch”; in the second place, and that inter alia things, they cannot pronounce as must the finales in in and one . Although, in the traditional grammar of Plœtz, it is known as formally, lesson 28, qu ' it is necessary to pronounce the house: “the mäsong” and the morning: “lö matäng”, the Alsatian ones pronounce differently. It is because of that one makes come, now, of Kœnigsberg, the best professors of French than one has in Alsace (for example in Strasbourg).

Quotations

Hansi (Jean-Jacques Waltz, known as ), Alsatian caricaturist born in Colmar in 1873. It was made known by its fines and satirical observations of the Germans, in particular by his book the Professor Knatschke (1912), whimsical meeting of works of this large imaginary scientist and his Elsa daughter. Larousse of the 20th century, edition 1930.

The talent of Hansi is indisputable, of imagist, landscape designer and especially of satirist . Tomi Ungerer .

Hansi is shown by the historians to have presented mythical Alsace adapted to the ideology of Revenge and to be at the origin of the misunderstanding which emerged after the victory of 1918 between the French government anxious to erase nearly one half-century of German occupation and the Alsatian jealous ones of their regional specificity . Pierre-Marie Tyl, in the large book of the uncle Hansi .

Hansi him lived only in front of one horizon, of a troufionné blue, sterilized, desexué, fictionné of a in-sky-tricolor arc. Not but nevertheless! , tricolor! he speaks about Alsace like tricolor paradise! " Ein trikolorisches Paradies? " You cuts to Be color blind to as up with has formulated like that. But it is that, Hansi, the imagist plugged by a fanaticism of eunuque…. But the blood of its MUSE heinous went to make phlebitis elsewhere in a false folklore, chart postalifère. Tomi Ungerer, in the large book of the uncle Hansi .

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