Abb. 2 Albrecht Dürer »Selbstbildnis im Pelzrock« “Self-portrait” 1500 Öl auf Lindenholz 67,1 × 48,9 cm Alte Pinakothek, München artist’s own facial features are transformed into a rocky landscape characterised by fissures and furrows by means of a natural red-brown, ochre, grey-green tonal palette and an elongated, landscape format. Marwan, who was born in Damascus, Syria and relocated to Berlin in 1957, discovered a method – in his architectural renderings of the human head – of retaining figuration while at the same time combining it with levels of abstraction in his engagement with the Informel painting- style of his teacher, Hann Trier (1915–1999), whom he held in high regard. Looking at Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler’s (1899–1940) Die Absinth-Trinkerin “(Selbstbildnis)” (The Absinthe Drinker [Self-portrait], fig. p. 111) from Marwan’s perspective, the (haggard) features can be described as a massif verging on the mountainous. Her mien is petrified, honest, empty and utterly bereft of hope. The self-portrait was drawn around 1931, when Lohse-Wächtler, completely penniless and exhausted, returned to her parents in Dresden, who then (once more) had her sectioned. As she did during her first stay in the psychiatric clinic in Hamburg-Friedrichsberg, she made portraits there of fellow patients. The pencil drawing Eine Kranke (A Female Invalid) from 1932 (fig. p. 125) is one of these physiognomic studies. The title of the drawing effectively reduces the sitter to a diagnosis or condition that seems entirely nominative, determining her being without any alternative description. From her own experience of social decline and mental illness, Lohse-Wächtler looks somewhat ruthlessly, yet sympathetically at eye level, at those people whom the Nazis most callously deemed “life unworthy of life” and summarily eliminated. Lohse-Wächtler
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