The Germans of the East

Two colonies, two temperaments

The north of Mallorca drew painters to light and spectacle. The east drew people who needed somewhere to hide, or simply somewhere cheap and quiet to live.

A German village at the end of the world

Karl Otten described his move as going from “a modern metropolis to the end of the world”.

Cala Ratjada, in the municipality of Capdepera at the north-eastern tip of the island, was then a small fishing village. Between 1931 and 1936 it took in a group of central Europeans: German and Austrian writers and painters, Jewish refugees, pacifists, and also some Nazi sympathisers. German was heard everywhere in Capdepera. The mayor, Miquel Caldentey Ginard, was courting investors for a future in tourism.

Life centred on a handful of places: the beach, the fonda, and above all Jack Bilbo's Wikiki bar, an open-air café with jazz, cocktails and a coffin for a bar counter. Heinz Kraschutzki's raffia workshop gave work to local women. Franz Blei's circle lived, as one scholar puts it, “between beach, fonda and bar”.

It was never a safe paradise. Nazis in Cala Ratjada watched the emigrants, working with the Gestapo agent Kurt von Behr in Palma, and with the Falange they drew up blacklists. The Nazi party's Palma branch had been founded on 28 June 1932.

Who was there

Core figures of the colony first, then people at its edges, then context from elsewhere on the island. Each card ends with a memory hook.

Year by year

How it ended

On 18 July 1936 the British consulate urged anti-Hitler Germans on Mallorca to leave. The next day the military coup took the island, and Mallorca was on the Nationalist side from the first weeks.

Most of the exiles got away, many on British (some sources say French or American) ships. Erich Arendt left for the mainland and joined the Republican side. Karl Otten was denounced by the German consul, arrested a few weeks after the coup, in August, and escaped on a British warship. Franz Blei left in September (22 September, by one account).

Heinz Kraschutzki did not get away. Denounced by Nazi agents, he was arrested in Cala Ratjada by the Guardia Civil and passed through Can Mir, Bellver Castle and other prisons, later on the mainland. At Can Mir, prisoners were taken out and shot in groups. In October 1936 a Berlin radio bulletin announced that the Falange had shot him; it was false. Sentenced in 1938 to 30 years for “adhesion to the rebellion”, he refused any release that meant being handed back to Germany. British consular pressure finally freed him.

Sources differ: arrest on 19 or 29 July 1936; sentence 30 years (1938) or life (1937); release 1943 or October 1945.

Context: on 16 August 1936 a Republican force under Alberto Bayo landed at Porto Cristo, further down the east coast; its last troops withdrew on 3 September. Repression on Mallorca after the coup cost thousands of lives (estimates range from about 2,300 to 5,000).

What came after in the east

Between the end of the colony in 1936 and the next German artist to settle in the south-east, a quarter of a century passed: the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and the hard early years of Franco's Spain closed the island to the kind of life Cala Ratjada had briefly offered.

None of the colony's main writers and painters came back to live there. Kraschutzki, the one who had suffered most, returned to Mallorca only in old age, after retiring in 1956. When German-speaking artists did arrive again, they came by choice and for the work, not as refugees: the east was no longer a hiding place but a place of stone and light. The 1930s colony and the later arrivals are two separate stories, not one continuous community.

Santanyí · from 1962

Rolf Schaffner, sculptor in local stone

The German sculptor Rolf Schaffner (1927–2008), trained at the Munich Academy, came to Santanyí in 1962 and worked there, with interruptions, for almost fifty years. He carved and stacked Santanyí stone, some works built like the island's dry-stone field walls: Rey y Reina on the roundabout towards Es Llombards, the eleven towers of Zeugen am Weg, nearly two dozen monumental pieces at Finca Son Danús, and the southern stele of the European peace sculpture Equilibrio at Cala Santanyí. Santanyí opened a Schaffner museum in its Casa de Cultura in 2016.

Portopetro · 1971–72

Jørn Utzon's Can Lis (a Dane, not a German)

The best-known “northern European house in local stone” in the south-east is by the Danish architect of the Sydney Opera House. Utzon first visited Mallorca in 1966 and built Can Lis on the cliffs near Portopetro, in the municipality of Santanyí, from local marès sandstone, with Santanyí stone inside. His second house, Can Feliz near S'Horta, followed in 1994.

Sources differ: Can Lis completed 1971 or 1972.

Also in the 1930s, further south: the garden settlement of Cala d'Or was begun in 1933 by the Ibizan Josep Costa Ferrer, and the Austrian painter Lene Schneider-Kainer (1885–1971) built two houses there, leaving when the war broke out. Single source for Cala d'Or. Much later, the Swiss artist Rudy Schwizgebel settled in Ses Salines (1986). The German and Swiss gallery scene in Santanyí dates mostly from the 2000s.

What the record does not support

Claims from the first outline, checked in English, German, Spanish and Catalan sources.

The stone the south-east gave the Mediterranean

In the north, the painters brought pigment and canvas to catch the island's light. In the south-east, the artists and architects who came later worked with the material of the island itself.

The real continuity of the south-east is its stone. Described by the historian Miquel Fullana as a very fine-grained sedimentary stone, whitish, compact and easy to work, it resists erosion and hardens on exposure to the air.

• Quarries: the oldest and best are Ses Pedreres Grans at Es Dèume, just outside Santanyí; later ones near S'Alqueria Blanca; at Felanitx, Cala Sa Nau and the slope of Puig de Na Pau near S'Horta.
• Method: strip the soil and a coarse upper crust; the fine stone lies about 2 m down. Blocks up to about 3 m long were split with grooves, wedges and hammers, then moved with levers and ramps.
• Palma: the Cathedral (the Mirador portal workshop, 1397), La Llotja (Guillem Sagrera, from 1426), Bellver Castle.
• Naples: Sagrera's Great Hall of Castel Nuovo, begun 1452; around 1451 stone was shipped from Santanyí and Felanitx, chosen and cut in Mallorca.
• Barcelona: King Martí I ordered 1,000 blocks in 1406; the Palau de la Virreina (1772–76) used it in preference to Montjuïc stone.
• 20th century: Utzon's Can Lis and Can Feliz; Schaffner's sculptures.

Terminology: sources call it sandstone, “gres” or marès; its exact geological class has not been confirmed here.

Still to check

• Arthur Segal: sources place him in Palma; Cala Ratjada appears only in name lists. No source found for a painting school on Mallorca.
• Otten's dates: reached Mallorca 27 March 1933, wintered in Paris 1933–35, settled full time in Cala Ratjada in 1935 (one publisher says 1933).
• Jack Bilbo: in Cala Ratjada 1933–34 by one account, 1932–33 by another; the bar is spelt Wikiki and Waikiki.
• Konrad Liesegang: life dates not found; his profession is given variously.
• Thin sourcing: Hans Williger's power plant, Walter Benjamin's July 1933 visit and the Hotel Castellet as a Nazi base each rest on a single source. Rudolf Levy, F. W. Kleukens, Raoul Hausmann and others appear in one list only.
• Best next sources: Reinhard Andress (German Studies Review, 2001); Francisca Roca Arañó's UIB thesis (2016); the Capdepera municipal archive and the documentary El temps s'esmicola (2015); Kraschutzki's own memoir, published in Catalan in 2004.

Where this comes from