'I ask you to keep the images and albums with the numerous drawings and models that I created for you humans.'
October 11, 2009 12:35 PM   Subscribe

The Leonardo of Wermsdorf: technical illustrations by Karl Hans (Joachim) Janke
posted by brundlefly (7 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
These, these are the people I wish to meet.

Not necessarily of the delusional type, but thinkers of such things as the Cyclop: First Large-borne aircraft, and of that airy interplanetary apparatus.
posted by past at 1:04 PM on October 11, 2009


You forgot to mention that this epic (ha!) blog belongs to none other than Mefi's Own peacay.
posted by spiderskull at 1:14 PM on October 11, 2009


Actually, I meant to!
posted by brundlefly at 1:19 PM on October 11, 2009


Previously on Metafilter.
posted by LVdB at 1:40 PM on October 11, 2009 [1 favorite]


Damn, that guy's got some fierce handwriting.

(Also, yay spaceships!)
posted by nebulawindphone at 2:27 PM on October 11, 2009


This is brilliant. Cheers
posted by dng at 3:07 PM on October 11, 2009


The drawings are mostly from the 1950s but they have a 1930s "Buck Rogers" vibe. Only a few drawings have the lethal sleekness of modern aerospace engineering; I wonder if he didn't have access to current (that is, 1950s - 1960s) magazines and books, or whether his mental illness wasn't too advanced in the 1930s and so that was his personal Golden Age, but he seems to have gotten stuck in the balloony cartoony look of the 1930s. There was also a pretty strong emphasis on German this and German that, and I wonder if that's a lingering echo of the ultra-nationalism of the 1930s.

Is it common for schizophrenics, as part of their general abnormal perception of reality, to get "stuck" in a previous era? Of course this guy could have simply been nostalgic for a better time in his life, or just liked the looks of 1930s comic books, but I wonder how schizophrenia played a role in his "engineering" process.
posted by Quietgal at 8:40 PM on October 11, 2009


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