AP — ‘KRISTALLNACHT’ PRINTS DONATED TO WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA

AVV 4-4 #734619

By Paul Clark

Asheville Citizen-Times

ASHEVILLE, N.C. (AP) — In November 1938, in an event that portended the Holocaust, the German government orchestrated an attack against German Jews that included the destruction of Jewish synagogues, cemeteries and businesses.

As many as 2,500 deaths resulted from what the German government termed “Kristallnacht,” or “Night of the Broken Glass.”

Erwin Eisch, a glass sculptor from the German village of Frauneau, was 12 years old at the time. Now considered the pioneer and spiritual father of the studio glass movement in Europe, Eisch has created ten vitreographic prints made from glass plates to express the shame and anger he felt, he said.

The Asheville Citizen-Times reports that Eisch made the prints at the invitation of his friend Harvey K. Littleton, a Spruce Pine resident who is credited with starting the studio glass movement in the United States. Littleton, 85, and his wife, Bess Littleton, donated several vitreographs, including those by himself and Eisch, to the Fine Art Museum at Western Carolina University last year.

The prints are especially important now, said Deborah Miles, executive director of the Center for Diversity Education at UNC Asheville.

“To a 25-year-old, [1938] seems like a long time ago. But to many citizens in Western North Carolina and Asheville in particular, that’s like yesterday,” she said.

“I believe history has a very short memory, and anything that might help us prevent [genocide and intolerance] from happening again is good.”

From his home in Germany, Eisch wrote that he tried to show in his artworks “the brutality and stupidity” of the Nazis. “But even in our time all kinds of brutality is going on,” he added.

In the preface to the “Kristallnacht” exhibition, he wrote: “I want to try to come to terms with the burden, the shame, the anger and the fear which shaped my childhood.”

One groundbreaker inspires another. Littleton, contacted last week in the gallery he maintains in Fort Pierce, Fla., recalled meeting Eisch in 1962.

“I heard of a glass school in Zwiesel, a town in Bavaria [southern Germany],” he said.

“I got there in August, and everything was closed. So I went to a little cutting house [where they engrave and cut glass] on the same street. I looked around and saw some glass that didn’t look like it belonged there. It was the more interesting stuff. They said, ‘Oh, that’s made in a little factory about six miles from here.’”

Littleton made the trip and met Eisch, whose work was as groundbreaking in Europe as Littleton’s was in the United States.

Eisch was producing “very wonderful stuff,” Littleton said.

“I think I couldn’t have done what I did without his help and inspiration,” Littleton said. “I didn’t copy him, but on the other hand, he was quite an inspiration to me. Erwin was considered a little bit crazy, as I was. But we enjoyed one another.”

Eisch, who was born in 1927 in Frauenau, Germany, apprenticed as a glass engraver at 19 with his father. Four years later, the family started a glass factory in Frauenau, known for its glass blowing and cutting. Four years after that, Eisch created a studio in the factory so he could make glass sculpture.

His work has been exhibited in Germany, Austria, the United States, Japan, Czechoslovakia, France and Switzerland. It is in the collections of the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y.; the Elvehjem Museum of Art in Madison, Wis.; the Smithsonian Institution in Washington; and the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.