Tag: josef weiss

Illustrations for Edmund Weiss’s “Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt “

Illustrations for Edmund Weiss’s “Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt (Stellar Atlas)“, 1888-1892, Verlag von J.F. Schreiber, Stuttgart

Born at Freiwaldau, now Jeseník, a town in the Olomouc Region of the Czech Republic in August of 1837, Edmund Weiss was a professor and astronomer who became the director of the Vienna Observatory in 1878, a post he held until his retirement in 1910. 

Born to hydrotherapy pioneer Josef Weiss and his wife, Edmund Weiss was the twin brother of noted botanist Adolf Gustav Weiss, Professor of Botany at Prague. Edmund Weiss spent his early years in Richmond, England where his father was the director of the hydrotherapy center at Stansteadbury in Hertfordshire. After his fathers death in 1847, Josef Weiss returned to his native land where he studied at the Gymnasium in Troppau, now Opava, from 1847 to 1855. He continued his education at the Vienna University with studies in mathematics, astronomy and physics. 

On the completion of his studies, Weiss was appointed an assistant at the Vienna Observatory in 1858. While employed at the observatory, he continued his studies and was awarded in 1860 the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. As an assistant, Weiss was a diligent and skilled observer; he was noted for his accuracy in the measurement of a meridian arc during the period of 1864 to 1867. Although offered positions by astronomer Otto Wilhelm von Struve at the Pulkovo Observatory in Petrograd  and chemist Adolf von Baeyer at Berlin’s Geodetic Institute, Weiss remained in Vienna where he received the title of honorary professor in 1869 and, in 1875, a full professorship. 

In 1872, Edmund Weiss visited England and North America in order to study the leading observatories and new developments in optical works. The knowledge he gained was utilized at the building of a new observatory in the Vienna district of Währing as well as the purchase of its new instruments, among which were the 1882 twenty-seven inch equatorial by Dublin’s Grubb Telescope Company and an eleven three-quarter inch equatorial by Alvan Clark & Sons of Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. The construction of the Währing observatory was overseen by its director Karl Ludwig Littrow who died before the observatory’s  completion. Weiss was appointed its new Director in 1878 and retained that post until 1910 when he retired with the title Emeritus Director. 

The detailed observations at the Währing Observatory were related to the planets, comets, occultations (the concealment of celestial bodies by another), variable stars and meteors. From these studies, Weiss published a large number of papers among which were those that examined the connection between comets and meteors, the meteor swarm of Halley’s Comet, the magnitude of minor planets, the nebulae in the Pleiades, and a method of obtaining True Anomaly and the radius vector of great orbital eccentricity. He published a new edition of astronomer Joseph Johann von Littrow’s popular “Die Wunder des Himmels (The Wonders of Heaven)” and, in 1890, a revised edition of Wilhelm Albrecht Oeltzen’s 1857 astronomical catalogue “Argelander’s Southern Zones”. Weiss also published a pictorial atlas of astronomy in German, the 1888-1892 “Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt (Stellar Atlas)”.

Edmund Weiss made multiple journeys to observe astronomical phenomena, particularly eclipses. He observed the 1861 eclipse in Greece, that achieved just total before sunset; the 1867 annular (ring) eclipse from Dalmatia, Croatia; the 1868 total eclipse from Eden, Ireland; the total eclipse of 1870 from Tunis, Tunisia; and the 1874 Transit of Venus, the first of two transits in the nineteenth- century, from Jassy, Romania. These eclipse expeditions led to Weiss’s interest in solar physics and his membership with the International Union for Solar Research. 

Weiss developed a high reputation in Vienna as a lecturer on astronomy. He was elected a Fellow of the Vienna Academy in 1878 and an Associate of the Society in 1883. Awarded the Bessemer Gold Medal in 1883, Edmund Weiss died at the age of seventy-nine in June of 1917 after a long and painful illness. He was survived by his wife Adelaide Fenzl and seven children. The “Weiss” lunar crater along the southern edge of the Mare Nubium was named after him.

Notes: It should be noted that Edmund Weiss is not the illustrator for the “Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt”. If anyone locates the name of the artist, please make a note in the comment section.

An annular eclipse occurs when the Moon passes directly between the Earth and the Sun but does not completely cover the Sun’s disk, leaving the outer edge visible as a bright ring around the Moon.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Professor and Astronomer Edmund Weiss”, 1872, Vintage Photo

Second Insert Image: Edmund Weiss, Title Illustration, “Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt”, 1888-1892, Verlag von J.F. Schreiber, Stuttgart

Bottom Insert Image: Edmund Weiss, “Uppenines at Sunrise”, Illustration for “Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt”, 1888-1892, Verlag von J.F. Schreiber, Stuttgart

Stellan Rye and “Der Student von Prag”: Film History Series

Josef Fenneker, Lithograph Film Poster for Arthur Robison’s 1935 Version of “Der Student von Prag”, Deutsche Kimemathek, Museum für Film and Fernsehen, Berlin

Born in July of 1880 at the Danish city of Randers, Stellan Rye was a film director and screenwriter active during the early twentieth-century. In his short career, he wrote and directed three productions: the 1913 “Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague)”; the 1914 “Der Flug in die Sonne (The Flight into the Sun)”; and the 1914 “Ein Sommernachtstraum in Unserer Zeit (A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Our Time)”, co-written with German actor and horror novelist Hanns Heinz Ewers. 

Rye joined the Reichsheer, the German Army, at the onset of World War I. Taken prisoner almost immediately, he died as a prisoner of war in France on the fourteenth of November in 1914 at the age of thirty-four. 

Stellan Rye is best known for the 1913 German silent horror film “Der Student von Prag”, considered to be the first German art film, a pioneering work that raised cinema from its fairground origins to a viable art form. The film is loosely based on several literary works: Alfred de Musset’s poem “The December Night”, Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “William Wilson”, and the German legend of the Renaissance alchemist and magician Johann Georg Faust. 

“Der Student von Prag” featured German actor Paul Wegener in his debut film role as the poor university student Balduin. He acted alongside Austrian actor John Gottowt in the role of Scapinelli, and Austrian-German actress Grete Berger as Balduin’s love interest Countess Margit. “Der Student von Prag” was art director and set designer Robert A. Dietrich’s first production in a career that spanned more than a hundred films. The film was shot on locations around Prague and at the Babelsberg Studios, now the oldest large-scale film studio in the world, having produced films since 1912.

In this horror story, poverty stricken Balduin signs a contract with the diabolical Scapinelli that will award Balduin one hundred-thousand gold pieces in exchange for any item in his lodgings. Scapinelli, dressed in all black, chooses Balduin’s reflection in the mirror and takes it away. During his courtship of Countess Margit, Balduin and Magrit are terrorized by his mirror double. Magrit, too frightened by the sudden appearances of the double, discontinues the courtship. Depressed, Balduin shoots his double with a pistol and it vanishes. However, Balduin himself becomes stricken and falls dead. The evil Scapinelli arrives, tears up the contract and departs happily.

German cinematographer Guido Seeber employed new technical camera effects of seamless double exposures to create one of his most notable accomplishments, the doppelgänger image of Balduin’s mirror double. An accomplished technician and a pioneer in his field, he also employed chiaroscuro, sharp contrasts between light and shadow, to create distinct areas on the sets. Hungarian composer and pianist Josef Weiss wrote the historic piano score that accompanied “Der Student von Prag”; it was the first film score written for a German language film.

Stellan Rye’s “Der Student von Prag” was both a critical and commercial success. The film tapped into the real sense of dissociation and alienation that was prominent in a society struggling with the collapse of the German Empire. The themes of the film became a major influence on German cinema produced during the years of the Weimar Republic. The insecurity and social changes that followed the deaths and devastation of the first World War became major themes for post-war German film makers.

Expressionism, developed as an avant-garde style before the war, remained popular during the Weimar Republic and extended to a wide range of the arts, including music, literature, dance and architecture. Stellan Rye’s “Der Student von Prag” was remade twice: Austrian Expressionist director Henrik Galeen’s 1926 version with Conrad Veidt, and German director Arthur Robison’s 1935 version with Austrian actor Anton Walbrook. Other notable films produced during this time period included Robert Wiene’s 1920 “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and two films by Fritz Lang, the two-part 1922 “Dr. Mabuse”, and the 1927 “Metropolis”.

Notes: All insert images are film stills from the original 1913 “Der Student von Prag”, directed by Stellan Rye, that featured Paul Wegener, John Gottowt and Grete Berger.

A full-length version, with subtitles, of Stellan Rye’s “Der Student von Prag” can be found on the Internet Archive site located at: https://archive.org/details/der-student-von-prag-1913

Actress Grete Berger, born Margarethe Berg into an Austrian Jewish family, began her career in 1904 at the Deutsches Theater under prominent film and theater director Max Reinhardt. She was cast in several films directed by Stellan Rye or Paul Wegener, among which was her role in the 1913 “Der Student von Prag”. After the accession of power by the National Socialists in 1933, Berger fled with her husband to Italy where in April of 1944 they were arrested by the German occupational authorities. She was transferred, along with Austrian-Hungarian actor Jacob Feldhammer, in May of 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp where they were murdered on the twenty-third of May in 1944.

An 2023 article on Anton Walbrook, who performed the role of Balduin in Robinson’s 1935 version of “Der Student von Prag”, is located in the Film History Series of this site. A well known German actor who acted alongside some of Germany’s leading ladies, Walbrook, who was homosexual and the son of a Jewish mother, left Germany in 1936 to work for many years in the United States and England.