An interview with Gerhard Heilmann (1940)

The tremendous energy of an 81-year-old

A small conversation with Gerhard Heilman about a provincial town and Darwinism: “I too had to declare in public that I believed in the devil”

Yesterday, on his 81st birthday, Gerhard Heilmann, who together with Johannes Larsen is one of our most gifted bird illustrators, published a book with the title The Universe and Tradition . This work, which numbers over 500 pages and 1100 illustrations, deals with universal development from his Darwinist perspective on life: the natural history of the universe and the earth, each step from the origin of species to man. Both in extent and design it is an impressive tome which the old artist has presented to his Danish audience. Most people will remember Gerhard Heilman as the painter who decorated porcelain at the Royal Porcelain Works, and as the artist and ornithologist who co-operated on Lehn Schiøler’s great work, Denmark’s Birds . I had expected to find an exhausted man, when I looked for an audience with the author in his house on the Fuglebakken road. Instead, I encountered an old but energetic fellow who, although with a house full of guests, was generous enough to grant an unannounced interviewer a quarter of an hour.

What brought you to pusue studies in the doctrine of evolution? I asked.

Pursue studies, Gerhard Heilman repeats. I’d been engaged in those since 1873. You see, in that year, I did my confession of faith and received a first shock.

Which shock was that?

I had to declare, in public, that I believed in the devil. That is the way things are, and I was forced to do this, because it was in a small provincial town and there was no question of escaping.

What provincial town?

Does it matter? They’re all the same, damn them. During my entire childhood, I suffered from the fact that I did not think what others thought, but I had to suppress it. In those days, casting doubt on religious affairs was not tolerated. But then, a book arrived. It was Lütken’s portrayal of animal life in past and present, the first book in our house to deal with palaeontology. One of the questions he treated was whether birds descended from the crawling animals, and his conclusion was that he did not believe so. That came as a bitter disappointment to me, and it drove me to addressing the issue myself. I wrote an article, “Our present knowledge about the origin of birds”, which appeared in the Ornithologisk Tidsskrift. Johannes W. Jensen stated that it was ‘buried’ there, but later it appeared in book form in English, with the title The Origin of Birds . Now, and like other people I studied and followed everything that appeared on the subject.

When did you begin work on your new book, The Universe and Tradition?

Four years ago. It could not be done earlier than that.

Why not?

Good heavens, good chap, can you not imagine, simply because until that time, a series of important fossil discoveries that has been made in the past few years, was lacking. You can well imagine, that I would have preferred writing the book when I was forty years old. Now, four years ago I started, because the entire development appeared to be evident then, no link in the chain was missing. It was so much work, and it required such a great amount of knowledge, that a single man could impossibly do it. There ought to have been three or four of us, but there was no-one, and therefore I had to take it up myself. It has been difficult, especially the last part, with corrections, the index, etcetera, when one is on his own, which I was.

Did you draw the illustrations yourself?

Dear friend, did you not see the book?

Not yet.

Good heavens! Be gone, read it first, and then return. I have to see that I get back to my guests, and it is bit cold out here…

This is how correct and energetic Gerhard Heilman remains, only just after having completed a work like his The Universe and Tradition, and this at an age on which most people have long retired and are enjoying their pension.

Carol

From: Socialdemokraten , Oct. 24, 1940, p.8. Thanks go out to Carel Horstmeier for help with the translation. Note: Heilmann changed his name to ‘Heilman’ after the German invasion of Denmark (1940) because it sounded less German.