Qualla: Worpswede

Worpswede: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alinea, Public domain. In 1900 two art students climbed the church tower on the Weyerberg and rang the bells for fun. The village below heard a fire alarm. The two were duly fined, and neither Clara Westhoff nor Paula Becker had the money to pay, so the parish accepted payment in kind. Look up inside the Church of Zion today and the settlement is still there: cherub heads modelled by Westhoff at the pendentives, floral ornaments by the woman who would sign herself Paula Modersohn-Becker running along the columns to the ceiling. Westhoff would marry Rainer Maria Rilke the following year. Becker had seven years left to live and was about to change what German painting could do. Worpswede is a village of roughly that density - a few hundred houses on the edge of a drained bog, where an unreasonable share of German art history happened to occur.

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Image: Alinea | Public domain

Worpswede: A Shopkeeper's Daughter Starts It

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kürschner (talk) 10:41, 27 July 2011 (UTC), Public domain. The colony begins with an act of ordinary kindness. In 1884 Mimi Stolte, daughter of a Worpswede shopkeeper, was staying with her aunt in Düsseldorf when she met Fritz Mackensen, a young art student with no money. She invited him home for the holidays. He came, looked at the Teuf...

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Image: Kürschner (talk) 10:41, 27 July 2011 (UTC) | Public domain

Worpswede: What They Came For

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit picture: user:Concord, CC BY-SA 4.0. The landscape they painted was manufactured. Worpswede was first recorded in 1218, but the moor around it stayed impassable until 1750, when the moor commissioner Jürgen Christian Findorff began draining the Teufelsmoor and settling colonists on it. What that produced is a horizo...

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Image: picture: user:Concord | CC BY-SA 4.0

Worpswede: Paula

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Autor-in-crime, CC BY-SA 4.0. Paula Modersohn-Becker painted in Worpswede and in Paris, in short intense bursts, working toward something no one around her was doing - flattened, weighted, unsentimental figures and still lifes that read now as the doorway into German modernism. She died on 20 November 1907, a...

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Image: Autor-in-crime | CC BY-SA 4.0

Worpswede: Barkenhoff

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Till F. Teenck, CC BY-SA 2.5. In 1895 Heinrich Vogeler bought a cottage, planted birches around it, and named it Barkenhoff for the trees. It became the social centre of the colony, and when a railway was pushed through the moor Vogeler was handed the job of designing its stations. The Worpswede station opene...

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Image: Till F. Teenck | CC BY-SA 2.5

Worpswede: The Second Generation, and the Cheese Bell

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Till F. Teenck, CC BY-SA 2.5. Bernhard Hoetger arrived and built compulsively - the Niedersachsenstein, the Grosse Kunstschau, the café called Kaffee Verrückt, his own house Hinterm Berg - before going on to shape Bremen's Böttcherstraße, so the two places carry the same fingerprints. The strangest building c...

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Image: Till F. Teenck | CC BY-SA 2.5