Adolf Hitler ruled Germany from 1933 until 1945. The murderous policies of the Fuehrer and his allies cost the lives of more than 20 million people. Ironically, in his heart Hitler always thought of himself as an artist: painter, architect.

Hitler's Germany also produced Hitler's antithesis: a serene, light-hearted woman who saw the world through artist's eyes. Her artistic reputation grows decade by decade. Berta Hummel was 37 when she died on November 6, 1946, nineteen months after Hitler's cowardly suicide in the ruins of Berlin. Hitler hated Hummel. For, in 1937, four years into the Nazi tyranny, she had published a satirical watercolor which sent the Fuehrer into paroxysms of rage.

The offending sketch is called "The Volunteers." Berta drew two three-year old boys. They wear short pants and long sleeved brown shirts resembling those of adult Nazi "S.A." thugs. The cowed boys goose step in unison from left to right. Their tiny combat boots have no strings. Their hair spills out from under their caps. Nearer to us, the first boy somberly beats cadence on a thin, gaily colored drum which resembles a castanet. On his right a less than happy marching partner rests his toy rifle upside down on his right shoulder. Berta Hummel had written beneath them in old German cursive script: "Dear Fatherland, let there be peace!" 

In late February [1999], with other Elderhostelers I visited the stunning Hummel Museum in New Braunfels, Texas [NOTE: since closed as a Hummel museum 06/09/2001]. In an hour long tour, docent Tom Ryan, a retired art teacher, lingered on the politics of "The Volunteers." He narrated Hitler's personal fury. One of Hitler's Nazi party magazines, "DER SA-MANN" delivered a slashing review of the watercolor. It announced that 
 

"there is no place in the ranks of German artists for the likes of her. No, the 'beloved Fatherland' cannot remain calm when Germany's youth are portrayed as brainless sissies.

Who was this young anti-Nazi artist? She was born Berta Hummel May 21, 1909 in rural Massing, deep in the most intensely Catholic part of Bavaria. Her father, Adolf, had hoped as a young man to become a sculptor. But economics made him go into business and also serve as mayor. Berta's mother, Viktoria, came from a prosperous farming family. Berta said that she grew up in a warm and loving "nest of Hummels." 

In 1915 Berta began school with Catholic nuns. Soon she was sketching classmates and teachers. In 1921 she went to a Catholic boarding school in Sembach. Once again her teachers recognized and promoted her painting skills. In 1927 she did what fewer and fewer German women would do until after World War II: she began higher education. She moved to the Munich of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger and other giants. At age 18, the sheltered girl from the countryside enrolled in cosmopolitan Munich's Academy of Applied Arts. She reproduced styles ranging from Fra Angelico and Botticelli to contemporary expressionists. She graduated with distinction in 1931. 

To general astonishment, she immediately became a nun. She spent the remaining 15 years of her life attached to a convent founded in 1259 in Siessen, Wuerttemberg, by Dominicans but since 1860 possessed by sisters of the order of St. Francis of Assisi. She was one of  300 consecrated Roman Catholic women who did good works outside the convent in addition to leading lives of poverty, obedience and prayer. As Sister Maria Innocentia, Berta Hummel taught art to young children whose parents regularly asked for portraits. 

Soon holy cards and postcards dashed off with the ease of Picasso were being published. On behalf of her convent she signed commercial contracts. In 1935 came the agreement with the W. Goebel Porcelain Works near Coburg which would popularize a fraction of her output through world wide marketing of brilliantly crafted three-dimensional reproductions of her drawings of boys, girls and angels: the so called "Hummel figurines," each bearing the  characteristic signature, "M.I. Hummel." To this day royalties from the sales of these figurines help sustain the works of the Siessen convent.

Since her 1946 death from tuberculosis, more works of M.I. Hummel continue  to be found in attics and elsewhere. Notable is her "Way of the Cross." Today we know of roughly 600 paintings and drawings from Berta's childhood and her pre-convent years as an art student. We also know of another 700 works from the convent years. The Hummel Museum in New Braunfels, Texas, holds the world's largest collection of her original artistic output. The museum, in addition, owns a very large collection of three-dimensional porcelain figurines: the medium through which most Americans know Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel. As Museum docent Tom Ryan forcefully pointed out during the Elderhostel tour, the greater art by far is in Sister's own works, not the figurines. The drawings and paintings are on loan to the Museum, which is trying to raise $12 million dollars to purchase them from the German owner. Senator Phil Gramm of Texas is among the stoutest supporters of the New Braunfels institution.

An excellent recent introduction to the life and work of M.I. Hummel is Angelika Koller's 1996 book, translated into English and issued in 1998 by Courage Books of Philadelphia as HUMMEL: THE ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS OF SISTER MARIA INNOCENTIA HUMMEL. A good website for the figurines, but also including a brief biography of the artist, is www.mihummel.com/. 

For the superb New Braunfels museum see http://bigmac.bullcreek.austin.tx.us/hummel/page6.htm/.

[NOTE: there is a museum there, but no longer  a Hummel museum. TPK 06/09/2001]

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