Egon Altdorf

b. 1922, Germany
d. 2008

Egon Altdorf was born in Pomerania in 1922 and moved to Berlin as a child. His initial artistic inspiration came via his grandfathers, one a potter and the other a blacksmith. Altdorf was drafted into the army in 1941 and was later captured in Tunisia and interned as a prisoner of war in Camp Mexia, Texas.

Altdorf was among the few prisoners who completed the intensive Getty-Wetherill education programme at Rhode Island, intended to create administrators to assist US military government personnel to reconstruct post-war Germany. On his release he chose Wiesbaden as a destination, knowing that he had lost his parents and home in Berlin.

In addition to his woodcuts and a small body of sculpture, Altdorf’s outstanding achievement was to design the interior, including sculptural fittings and several stained-glass windows, of the new synagogue in Wiesbaden, 1966. Although not a member of the Jewish community, Altdorf was chosen in 1953 to make a stone monument, which he inscribed ‘The world’s conscience is love’, commemorating Wiesbaden’s old synagogue destroyed on Kristallnacht in 1938. The new synagogue is now recognised as a highly significant example of post-war synagogue architecture in Germany.

CV