Graef, Richard

Richard Graef (1879-1945) was the son of a farmer, born in 1879. He was a black sheep of the family, being something of a rogue and a consummate artist. There's no record of where Graef trained, but he did spend some time in Leipzig, where he eventually married one of his patron's daughters, Sabine Licht. Licht was an artist in her own right, and they eventually had one child, Peter Graef. They lived both in Crossen on der Oder (a small town in what was once Prussia) and Munich. In Crossen, they were known as quite a Bohemian couple and loved hosting parties. One of the young people who frequented their home was a certain Peter Mildebrath, a printer, and his soon-to-be-bride Inge Wagner, the daughter of Sigfried Wagner, a military man who participated in the ill-fated plot to kill Hitler. This couple would eventually smuggle Peter Graef out of Germany with beautifully printed false papers.

The family's political sensibility was to cost them dearly. Richard had been a regular contributor to a political satire magazine called Simplicissimus, which roughly translates into "simplicity" but also means perhaps "simpletons" and other sly digs at the culture. Germans love puns and constantly play with language. The magazine had been around for decades and jabbed at everybody, but when Hitler came to power, he banned it. They simply went underground and kept on publishing. The only way Hitler could quash the paper was to kill the artists, which he eventually did, one by one.

Richard Graef went into hiding for a number of years; starving like many Germans. It was the courage and goodness of friends that kept him alive. At one point, before Sabine disappeared into hiding herself, she was taken captive in her own home by the Nazi's and forced to serve the officers who lived there and used the home as a headquarters. That period ended when she was told that the Russians were coming and she'd better take what she could carry and get out. She piled some family treasures into a wheelbarrow and fled. Her last look at her house was to see it blown up by low-flying Russian planes. Other than the few pieces in that wheelbarrow, the family owns nothing more by Graef.

Richard Graef was discovered by the Nazi's and summarily shot a few months before the war ended. He was 65.

My sincere thanks to Jocelyn Graef, the granddaughter of Richard Graef (and daughter of Peter Graef), who provided the biographical information above. It is because of the CAF galleries that Jocelyn found that I had work by her grandfather and contacted me. Jocelyn also provided the photos of Graef that are on this page.