The Wendish Research Exchange - Scholze-Šołta, Dietrich:“Painter and Writer” and their National Mission. Měrćin Nowak-Njechornski

Lětopis Abstract 2010 2: Scholze-Šołta, Dietrich:“Painter and Writer” and their National Mission. Měrćin Nowak-Njechorński (1900–1990) Died 20 Years Ago

The painter, journalist and writer Měrćin Nowak-Njechorński (German: Martin Nowak-Neumann), whose work spanned many decades, turned away from the avant-garde innovations of modernism at the beginning of the 1920s and chose a neo-romantic approach, designed to consolidate the national strengths of the Sorbs. As a painter and graphic artist he exploited the traditions of folk art and culture by focusing on the ordinary individual and in this way determined the preceptive rules of art. Nowak began to write professionally in 1924 as a reporter on the daily newspaper “Serbske Nowiny.” He introduced a new critical tone with his reports to the Sorbian press. His provocative attacks on the minorities policy of the Weimar Republic and the National Socialists required original means of expression: satire and irony, allegory and parable.

Nowak-Njechorński put his whole work at the service of the Sorbian nation, which had been deprived of its rights. The precarious nature of its situation moved him to produce polemical representations of reality. At the same time, he recognised the growing conflict between the traditional village way of life and economic and cultural modernisation. At the same time, he recognised the national question intuitively as a social problem, which also provided the basis for his political outlook and his extensive journalistic work after 1945. It was only shortly before his death, at the end of 1989, that Nowak came to support the “new movement” of glasnost and perestroika, which had by now reached Lusatia.