Hans Baluschek

Hans Baluschek (9 May 1870 – 28 September 1935) was a German painter, graphic artist and writer.

Baluschek was a prominent representative of German Critical Realism, and as such he sought to portray the life of the common people with vivid frankness. His paintings centered on the working class of Berlin. He belonged to the Berlin Secession movement, a group of artists interested in modern developments in art. Yet during his lifetime he was most widely known for his fanciful illustrations of the popular children's book Little Peter's Journey to the Moon (German title: Peterchens Mondfahrt).

Hans Baluschek after 1920 was an active member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which at the time still professed a Marxist view of history.

Hans Baluschek was born on 9 May 1870 in Breslau, then Germany's sixth-largest city (now Wrocław, Poland), to Franz Baluschek, a surveyor and railroad engineer and his wife. He had three sisters, two of whom died of tuberculosis in childhood. After the Franco-Prussian War and foundation of the German Empire in 1871, Franz became an independent engineer of railways, and lived for a time in the much smaller town of Haynau (now Chojnów, Poland). It was during his childhood that Hans Baluschek developed a fascination with railroads that later would be shown in his paintings.

In 1876 the family, with 6-year-old Hans, moved to Berlin, where during the next decade they changed their residence no less than five times, living in a succession of newly built apartments developed expressly for workers. Berlin found itself in the midst of an economic crisis following the Panic of 1873, but Franz Baluschek was fortunate in maintaining railroad employment and was able to support his family in kleinbürgerlich (petite bourgeois) style amid the family's less affluent proletarian neighbors.

Following primary school, Hans Baluschek at age 9 entered the Askanische Gymnasium, a secondary school in the Tempelhof-Schöneberg district of Berlin, which offered curricula in the humanities and natural sciences.

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