About the man

Max Prantl

He was born the 6th of November 1912 in Innsbruck (Austria) and grew up in Mühlau - in that time an independant small town but in these days a district of Innsbruck. In these days, Georg Trakl now and then visited op bezoek in restaurant ‘Dollinger’, run by Max Prantl's parents. The ‘Trakl-park’, right opposite the restaurant at the Inn, still reminds of this fact.

On highschool his marked versatility was noted, though this developed at the price of a chronic illness, among which asthma. His poor health prevented him from studying medicine - a study he aspired to even during the war. A lonesome life, at the side of the normal course of succes in society and occupation, remained for him. All the more he indulged in his great passions: writing, painting, making music. He composed music and could improvise in a compelling way.

During the war he could temporarily register with the Academy of Arts in Karlsruhe, where he had been conscripted for the army and mainly did paperwork. With the last batch, he was sent to the eastern front at the end of 1944, when he was seriously wounded the next spring. His elbow was smashed, festering inflammations and wound fever occurred; his arm remained stiff. He was taken a prisoner of war by the Czechs, where the deprivation - even the grass next to the de barracks had been consumed - brought him very near to death. The Americans who took over de camp took care of him until he was in reasonable health again. In autumn 1945 he returned home.

Now many years of hard work followed, as if to redeem a promise made to himself: ‘I went through Hell, but it has not been able to really devour me. My gratefulness for that should be an untiring creation’. He destroyed what he had painted before the war. In 1949 he published his book 'Der Mensch ohne Angst. Licht aus der Herzmitte’, which had come forth from letters through which Max Prantl conveyed his mystical experiences and the menaing of his earthly mission to dr. Paul Bargehr, who was a medical doctor at the Zeileis Institute in Gallspach.

As far as we can know today from the information we possess, his outer appearance contrasts greatly with the radical claims that are made in Prantl's book and his other writings. His younger sister Elsabeth describes him as 'simple, modest, unpretentious'. Paula Schlier, employee at the 'Brenner', describes him as ‘a tall, handsome man with his unusually big eyes, making one reminiscent of the eyes of emperors and saints on pictures of Byzantine art’.

During lifetime, the outer succes of his artistic efforts did not correspond with the unremitting, total dedication of this painter-poet. Of Prantls ‘tales’ only two were published in magazines. The whole series, which Prantl put together to een 'series of myths' after the war, was presented for the first time in 1990 in ‘Aus dunklen Talen’, in which not only his myths but also several impressive paintings have been included. Some of the mountain-pictures used to hang in the rooms of pension 'Dollinger' and partly show traces of the shooting practices of occupying soldiers. Other paintings were damaged by a later indoor fire and show in different spots dull colors instead of the original lively ones.

In 1949, some flower-pictures were published in a folder with reproductions. Gottfried Hohenauer said about it: ‘Even if one wouldn't know the painter Max Prantl as the author of the book ‘Der Mensch ohne Angst’ ('The Shining Heart'), the images would yet on first sight reveal that the artist belongs to a world behind the objects. He doesn't unfold images of flowers in the traditional sense - the flowering forms of Prantl are so to speak keys to the fantastic spaces behind them, or materialisations of a blinding light- and color-plasm that either sends its beams from the center of the image or gropes its way in space as flocks or shrouds'.

Just once the painter Max Prantl stood in a brighter light of publicity, when in Oktober 1948 an exposition of young Austrian artists took place in the Künstlerhaus in Vienna. Among the participants from Tirol, Alfred Hochschwarzer, Max Weiler en Max Prantl received prizes. ‘This one and no other’, Herbert Boeckl, member of the jury, has said, pointing at Prantl's paintings (we don't know which ones these were). Since that time, people rather looked away when they heard about the painter and writer Max Prantl.

Since about 1953 Max Prantl was ‘very ill’. Onlookers had the feeling that already during liftime his soul, which he considered a being of light, didn't want to live in his body any more. Not only the attacks on his book have certainly broken his spirit, but also the fact that on expositions his paintings were refused. He died on the 21st of Februari 1957 and was buried in Mühlau, left of the entrance to the the parish church.

With regard to his artistic work, his personal letters show a great confidence. 1st of March 1944: ‘I'm surging with thoughts and plans’, so that he 'almost loses solid ground’. These plans relate to the preparing of projects in which writing, painting and music should play an even part. This ‘war on three fronts’ was to ‘be part of him throughout life’. Some verses from 1943 show motives that would ripen only after the war, in the paintings of the Dolomites:

Everything that builds the inner connection of his myth series has been preceded and prepared by a wishing vison. Yet this optimism - a sign of something creative that verges on powerfully breaking through - has a touch of feverish hurriedness. One suspects the pain of inner wounds and the deep tragedy of self-consumption, which possibly could not be made undone any more. This was certainly not only caused by the in these years growing awareness that Adolf Hitler's idea of the 'Third Reich', of which Prantl at first had great expectations, in fact was a daring deed 'against the general laws of nature'. In a play, which came into being together with the tales and which - throughout the different versions - clearly showed Prantl's change of mentality, is Roosevelt as the ‘true representant of jews and masons’ the 'arrogant world-redeemer Lucifer’, Churchill the ‘cynical, vital Belial’, and Stalin the ‘ice-cold strangler’. But Hitler emerges - still behind a mask, so to say - as the worst of all, because he combined the bad elements of all three. ‘This thought robbed me of my senses, so that I almost got out of my mind’, Prantl admits on the 31st of Augustus 1944. The apocalyptic situation took hold of him with all vehemence.