Johann Dieter Wassmann (1841–1898) is a fictitious artist and sewerage engineer, purportedly from
Leipzig
Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as ...
,
Saxony
Saxony (german: Sachsen ; Upper Saxon: ''Saggsn''; hsb, Sakska), officially the Free State of Saxony (german: Freistaat Sachsen, links=no ; Upper Saxon: ''Freischdaad Saggsn''; hsb, Swobodny stat Sakska, links=no), is a landlocked state of ...
, in east-central
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
. He is the creation of the American-born artist and writer
Jeff Wassmann. As a result of the widespread dissemination of his work, Johann Dieter Wassmann is sometimes mistakenly cited as a lesser-known figure among late-19th-century European artists; he is most often identified as an early purveyor of the
Dada
Dada () or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire (in 1916). New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Pari ...
and
Surrealist
Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to ...
movements and has become closely associated with several notable artists of the first half of the 20th century, including
Kurt Schwitters
Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) was a German artist who was born in Hanover, Germany.
Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including dadaism, Constructivism (art), constructivism, surrealism ...
,
Marcel Duchamp
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso ...
,
Eugène Atget and
Joseph Cornell
Joseph Cornell (December 24, 1903 – December 29, 1972) was an American visual artist and film-maker, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmm ...
.
Overview
According to his fictitious biography, Johann Dieter Wassmann was born in Leipzig, where he witnessed the
industrial revolution
The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going f ...
rapidly alter the once agrarian, guild-based and perhaps idealized
Electorate of Saxony. In portraying his character as fearful of a less humanitarian world—ill at ease with the changing roles of science, medicine, religion, education,
cosmology
Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', and in 1731 taken up in Latin by German philosopher ...
and time—the artist challenges the viewer to share in the conflicts and anxieties of this ubiquitous thinker. A pivotal event in the author's narrative is
Napoleon
Napoleon Bonaparte ; it, Napoleone Bonaparte, ; co, Napulione Buonaparte. (born Napoleone Buonaparte; 15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821), later known by his regnal name Napoleon I, was a French military commander and political leader who ...
's defeat at the
Battle of Leipzig (1813), recalled first-hand by the character's father. The artist uses Napoleon's rise metaphorically to represent the onslaught of the modern era and his defeat at Leipzig as hope all was not lost of the
Romantic era
Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate ...
.
The construction of Johann Dieter Wassmann trades heavily on the aesthetic philosopher
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (; 21 October 177225 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake ...
's notion of
suspension of disbelief to justify the use of certain fantastic or non-realistic elements. Coleridge asserts that if the author can bring a "human interest and a semblance of truth" into a fantastic tale, the reader/viewer will withhold judgement on any improbability that might normally render the story doubtful, a contention the artist is reliant on for his audience to fully engage.
As a sewerage engineer, we see Johann Dieter Wassmann participate in the development of a more modern and scientific approach to the control of
infectious disease
An infection is the invasion of tissues by pathogens, their multiplication, and the reaction of host tissues to the infectious agent and the toxins they produce. An infectious disease, also known as a transmissible disease or communicable di ...
in cities including
Hanover
Hanover (; german: Hannover ; nds, Hannober) is the capital and largest city of the German state of Lower Saxony. Its 535,932 (2021) inhabitants make it the 13th-largest city in Germany as well as the fourth-largest city in Northern Germany ...
,
Göteborg
Gothenburg (; abbreviated Gbg; sv, Göteborg ) is the second-largest city in Sweden, fifth-largest in the Nordic countries, and capital of the Västra Götaland County. It is situated by the Kattegat, on the west coast of Sweden, and has a p ...
,
Dresden
Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label= Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth ...
,
Mexico City
Mexico City ( es, link=no, Ciudad de México, ; abbr.: CDMX; Nahuatl: ''Altepetl Mexico'') is the capital city, capital and primate city, largest city of Mexico, and the List of North American cities by population, most populous city in North Amer ...
and
Sydney. As a lecturer at the
University of Leipzig
Leipzig University (german: Universität Leipzig), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 Decemb ...
, we experience him prompting students to fully explore the creative process, concerned as he is at the decline of
liberal education. But Wassmann's lasting legacy is found in his private devotion to his art. (See
#Gallery section below.)
Biography
![Arteriae Pelvis, Abdomimis, et Pectoris, 1883 F](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Arteriae_Pelvis%2C_Abdomimis%2C_et_Pectoris%2C_1883_F.jpg)
Johann Dieter Wassmann is born into a long line of carpenters on April 2, 1841, the son of August and Maria Wassmann. The youngest of five children to survive into adulthood, he is brought up in the
Lutheran
Lutheranism is one of the largest branches of Protestantism, identifying primarily with the theology of Martin Luther, the 16th-century German monk and Protestant Reformers, reformer whose efforts to reform the theology and practice of the Cathol ...
creed. After the
March Revolutions of 1848, the family flees from Leipzig to
Weimar
Weimar is a city in the state of Thuringia, Germany. It is located in Central Germany between Erfurt in the west and Jena in the east, approximately southwest of Leipzig, north of Nuremberg and west of Dresden. Together with the neighbouri ...
. A bout with
rheumatic fever forces Johann to delay the start of his schooling until the age of eight. As a cabinetmaker in Weimar, his father's clients soon include
Richard Wagner and
Franz Liszt, among others, in what becomes a
Grand Tour
The Grand Tour was the principally 17th- to early 19th-century custom of a traditional trip through Europe, with Italy as a key destination, undertaken by upper-class young European men of sufficient means and rank (typically accompanied by a tut ...
through 19th-century Germany's music, art, literary and academic elites.
Johann goes on to attend the University of Leipzig before joining an engineering practice, specializing in the emerging field of
sewerage management. At 34 he is offered a teaching post in Leipzig. In 1881, six years into his post, Johann sets out to challenge his engineering students through construction of boxed assemblage works enigmatically addressing medical and scientific themes that he feels go unresolved through traditional lecture practices. After an extended display at a
Dresden
Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label= Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth ...
clinic, they become known as the "Dresden Boxes." These works build on the tradition of German
wunderkammern and 17th-century Dutch perspective boxes, but display a stripped down aesthetic, precise, but refined.
Through his extensive travels in his private practice, Johann is exposed to the best and worst 19th-century urban development has to offer. His growing angst at what he sees as the encroachment of modernity causes him to begin a second, more personal series of boxes, escaping into a romanticized view of a pre-modern Saxony, much of it set in the ancient wood of
Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as tr ...
and amidst the hopeful spectre of the American
Transcendentalist authors
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champ ...
and
Henry David Thoreau. By this point Johann is comfortably married with three children, so the intent of this second stage of boxes is largely private: they are mostly shared with family.
In September 1889, an academic conference in
Potsdam
Potsdam () is the capital and, with around 183,000 inhabitants, largest city of the German state of Brandenburg. It is part of the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region. Potsdam sits on the River Havel, a tributary of the Elbe, downstream o ...
brings Johann together with the physicist
Max Planck
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (, ; 23 April 1858 – 4 October 1947) was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.
Planck made many substantial contributions to theoretical p ...
in what results in a seismic shift in Johann's thinking. From here onwards he outright rejects his boxed works of recent years, brandishing them reactionary and "
Biedermeier," before moving on to a third and final phase of work, the start of his "early Modern" period.
Johann comes to realize his angst is born not in the
modernity
Modernity, a topic in the humanities and social sciences, is both a historical period (the modern era) and the ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms, attitudes and practices that arose in the wake of the Renaissancein the "Age of Reas ...
of the 19th century, but in the earlier reaches of the
Enlightenment he was so recently praising. As the Newtonian perception of a clockwork universe merges with the force of
social Darwinism
Social Darwinism refers to various theories and societal practices that purport to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economics and politics, and which were largely defined by scholars in We ...
he recognizes that the rising mantra of "progress" has now split the world into two distinct entities: time and space. If he is to return to a unified field of time and space he knows his only choice is not to look back, but to move forward into the modern—into the unknown.
Planck is presenting a paper at the conference on the
second law of thermodynamics
The second law of thermodynamics is a physical law based on universal experience concerning heat and energy interconversions. One simple statement of the law is that heat always moves from hotter objects to colder objects (or "downhill"), unles ...
, the subject of his recent doctoral thesis. The first to call himself a
"theoretical" physicist, Planck opens his lecture in Potsdam with the revelation that, "My original decision to devote myself to science was a direct result of the discovery... that the laws of human reasoning coincide with the laws governing the sequences of the impressions we receive from the world around us; that, therefore, pure reasoning can enable man to gain an insight into the mechanism of the world." He concludes by expressing a belief that physical laws allow him to presuppose that the "... outside world is something independent from man, something absolute, and the quest for the laws which apply to this absolute appeared... as the most sublime pursuit in life."
In Planck, Johann discovers a friend and colleague dedicated to the pursuit of a non-Newtonian world-view in which the linear nature of
absolute time and space will dissolve into one of a multidimensional universe free of the strictures of past, present and future. Johann's remaining years will be spent expressing these early modern notions through his beloved boxes and an emerging interest in photography.
Planck soon introduces Johann to the writings of
Ernst Mach, particularly ''Analysis of Sensations'' (1886). Here Johann finds Mach arguing that all knowledge is derived from sensation. Mach credits his philosophical awakening to reading, at age fifteen, his father's copy of
Immanuel Kant's ''
Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics'': "The book made at the time a powerful and ineffaceable impression upon me, the like of which I never afterwards experienced in any of my philosophical reading. Some two or three years later the superfluity of the role played by “the thing in itself” abruptly dawned upon me. On a bright summer day in the open air, the world with my ego suddenly appeared to me as one coherent mass of sensations, only more strongly coherent in the ego. Although the actual working out of this thought did not occur until a later period, yet this moment was decisive for my whole view."
All scientific investigation is a result of the experience, or "sensation," of the observer, Mach argues—later a determining factor in the
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. But in the more immediate term, Mach has laid the groundwork for
Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity
In physics, the special theory of relativity, or special relativity for short, is a scientific theory regarding the relationship between space and time. In Albert Einstein's original treatment, the theory is based on two postulates:
# The laws o ...
, published in 1905.
Much like
Woody Allen's fictional 1920s character
Leonard Zelig, Johann Dieter Wassmann finds himself caught up in this cacophony of ideas, theories and movements, allowing him to take an active part in one of the great revolutions of the modern era.
Amongst the cacophony is the advent of photography. Throughout the 1890s, Johann continues to expand the visual vocabulary of his assemblage works, but he also begins to experiment with the latent image, using both a bulky glass-plate
view camera
A view camera is a large-format camera in which the lens forms an inverted image on a ground-glass screen directly at the film plane. The image is viewed and then the glass screen is replaced with the film, and thus the film is exposed to exactly ...
, as well as several of the newly developed hand-held roll-film cameras. Over an eight-year period he documents the landscapes, streetscapes, architecture and interiors of eastern Germany, in a style that extends beyond the topographic traditions of the day. These photographic works provide the missing link between the meticulous, but still largely prescriptive street imagery of mid-19th-century photographer
Charles Marville
Charles Marville, the pseudonym of Charles François Bossu (Paris 17 July 1813 – 1 June 1879 Paris), was a French photographer, who mainly photographed architecture, landscapes and the urban environment. He used both paper and glass negatives. ...
, and the lyrical melancholy of
Eugène Atget in the early 20th century. As a predecessor to his fellow countrymen
Heinrich Zille
Rudolf Heinrich Zille (10 January 1858 – 9 August 1929) was a German illustrator, caricaturist, lithographer and photographer.
Childhood and education
Zille was born in Radeburg near Dresden, son of watchmaker Johann Traugott Zill (''Zille'' ...
and
August Sander, Johann discreetly anticipates what vast potential the photographic arts holds for the coming age.
Until the modern era catches up with him, that is. On January 6, 1898, Johann slips on ice while boarding a tram in Leipzig; his right leg is crushed, requiring amputation. He dies of a streptococcal infection on March 18, 1898, two weeks shy of his 57th birthday.
The vast trove of artworks Johann has amassed travels to
Washington, D.C.
)
, image_skyline =
, image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...
with family members in 1910, but remains in storage through two wars with Germany. Only in 1969 is the
Wassmann Foundation established, with the works slowly coming to prominence in the years since.
This elaborate fiction allows Johann Dieter Wassmann to escape the conceptual and physical boundaries of the art of his time, making him a pioneer of German modernism, his work emerging as a long lost precursor to the modern art methods and movements we now know as
assemblage,
collage,
installation
Installation may refer to:
* Installation (computer programs)
* Installation, work of installation art
* Installation, military base
* Installation, into an office, especially a religious (Installation (Christianity) Installation is a Christian li ...
,
Constructivism
Constructivism may refer to:
Art and architecture
* Constructivism (art), an early 20th-century artistic movement that extols art as a practice for social purposes
* Constructivist architecture, an architectural movement in Russia in the 1920s a ...
,
Dada
Dada () or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire (in 1916). New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Pari ...
and
Surrealism.
Historical perspective
![Dasein (Being), 1897 F](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Dasein_%28Being%29%2C_1897_F.jpg)
Johann Dieter Wassmann is part of a long history of artistic pseudonyms and hoaxes.
Rrose Sélavy
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso ...
was just one of the pseudonyms used by the artist
Marcel Duchamp
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso ...
. In Jeff Wassmann's adopted home of Australia,
Ern Malley
The Ern Malley hoax, also called the Ern Malley affair, is Australia's most famous literary hoax. Its name derives from Ernest Lalor "Ern" Malley, a fictitious poet whose biography and body of work were created in one day in 1943 by conservat ...
was the creation of writers
James McAuley
James Phillip McAuley (12 October 1917 – 15 October 1976) was an Australian academic, poet, journalist, literary critic and a prominent convert to Roman Catholicism. He was involved in the Ern Malley poetry hoax.
Life and career
McAuley wa ...
and
Harold Stewart
Harold Frederick Stewart (14 December 19167 August 1995) was an Australian poet and oriental scholar. He is chiefly remembered alongside fellow poet James McAuley as a co-creator of the Ern Malley literary hoax.
Stewart's work has been asso ...
. The 1944 Ern Malley affair, as it is known, remains Australia's most celebrated literary hoax. In the late 1990s, the artist
Walid Raad
Walid Raad (Ra'ad) (Arabic: وليد رعد) (born 1967 in Chbanieh, Lebanon) is a contemporary media artist. The Atlas Group is a fictional collective, the work of which is produced by Walid Raad. He lives and works in New York, where he is curr ...
began constructing elaborate fictions chronicling the contemporary history of his native Lebanon, signing his work The Atlas Group and presenting it as a body of collective scholarship. More recently, a New York-based art collective known as the
Bruce High Quality Foundation has seen considerable critical and commercial success. In November 2013, a silkscreen by these anonymous artists, "Hooverville," depicting the New York skyline with hobos, was auctioned for $425,000 at
Sotheby's
Sotheby's () is a British-founded American multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, an ...
New York.
In an artistic intervention known as
culture jamming
Culture jamming (sometimes also guerrilla communication) is a form of protest used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert media culture and its mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. It att ...
, Wassmann has also intertwined his work with contemporary literary conceits. In 2006,
Rohan Kriwaczek created a sensation with his publication of ''
An Incomplete History of the Art of the Funerary Violin'' (
Overlook Press
The Overlook Press is an American publishing house based in New York, New York, that considers itself "a home for distinguished books that had been 'overlooked' by larger houses".
History and operations
It was formed in 1971 by Peter Mayer, wh ...
), which purported to trace the lost history of the funerary violin. Shortly before publication, the book was exposed to the ''
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' as a hoax by a book buyer at
Prairie Lights
Prairie Lights is an independent bookstore in downtown Iowa City, Iowa, founded in 1978, by Jim Harris.
History
The store's original location was a space on South Linn Street. In 1982, Harris moved the store to an space on South Dubuque Street, ...
Books in
Iowa City, Iowa
Iowa City, offically the City of Iowa City is a city in Johnson County, Iowa, United States. It is the home of the University of Iowa and county seat of Johnson County, at the center of the Iowa City Metropolitan Statistical Area. At the tim ...
. Wassmann stepped in to confuse matters further by using an additional character, a German curator, to defend Kriwaczek in online literary blogs and discussion pages, claiming that as a child in Leipzig, August Wassmann (the character's father) had known one of the funerary violinists Kriwaczek cites, further proof of the funerary violin. Wassmann had been sent an advance copy of the book by the owner of Prairie Lights Books, Jim Harris, allowing him to comment with apparent authority on the book's contents prior to publication.
Legacy and influence
The character of Johann Dieter Wassmann was launched under the supposed auspices of the fictitious Wassmann Foundation, Washington, D.C. in the solo exhibition ''Bleeding Napoleon'' at the
Melbourne International Arts Festival
Melbourne International Arts Festival, formerly Spoleto Festival Melbourne – Festival of the Three Worlds, then Melbourne International Festival of the Arts, becoming commonly known as Melbourne Festival, was a major international arts festi ...
2003. Since that time, the artist has created a rival institution vying to have the works of Johann Dieter Wassmann repatriated to Germany: MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
In the United States, Johann Dieter Wassmann is best known through a long-running Google
Adwords
Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) is an online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers bid to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, or videos to web users. It can place ads both in the result ...
campaign in the ''New York Times''. The ads, with politically charged entendres such as ''The Wassmann Foundation - art & philanthropy - forging a better tomorrow'', have received over nineteen million page-views in the newspaper's online Arts section. ''
Art in America's'' Washington, D.C. correspondent, James Mahoney, has written,
As the Wassmann Foundation and related characters have evolved, the project has come to function on three distinct levels. Firstly, the artist endeavours to scrutinise the ever-increasing presence of artist, curator and art institution alike, as
brand
A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's good or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition and, importantly, to create ...
s. In establishing his own artist, curators and institutions as wholly fictitious, the contemporary artist is free to explore these roles as pure brand, existent for no other purpose than critical assessment.
Secondly, the artist argues that the unresolved angst of our current age is the culmination of the mistakes of modernity. We catch a glimpse of this angst, as expressed by the sewerage engineer protagonist, before losing clarity to the mounting failures of the 20th and now 21st-centuries, distorting our anxieties beyond recognition.
Lastly, on a third level, the project points up a certain paradox created by the proliferation of the worldwide-web: in a mass society, the individual grows in importance, rather than diminishes.
For artists and individuals in what were formerly the planet's outer reaches, Wassmann has seen the web democratize access to the structures and machinations of power to an extent previously unimagined. He contends that little more than 25 years after the art world discovered there was an outside and a periphery, they suddenly find it is gone. In a
postcolonial
Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the impact of human control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. More specifically, it is a ...
/internet age, there is only the center to be fought over and for the artist, the ensuing chaos to decipher. Where once the internet merely informed the political process, Wassmann has argued that the internet would, and now has developed the immense capability of wholly transforming political process. While projects such as Wassmann's function on a relatively benign level, he believes the realigned power structures they allude to allow individuals outside the arts to masterfully, and often frighteningly, alter the real world irretrievably.
[Wright, Lawrence]
"The Terror Web: Were the Madrid bombings part of a new, far-reaching jihad being plotted on the Internet?"
''New Yorker'', August 2, 2004. Retrieved September 24, 2014.
Gallery
Assemblage boxes
File:Arteriae Pelvis, Abdomimis, et Pectoris, 1883 F.jpg, ''Arteriae Pelvis, Abdomimis, et Pectoris'', 1883. 70 x 55.5 x 8 cm. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
File:Foucault’s Pendulum, 1884 F.jpg, ''Foucault’s Pendulum'', 1884. 36 x 18.5 x 9 cm. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
File:The Case of the City of London, 1894 F.jpg, ''The Case of the City of London'', 1894. 39.5 x 29.5 x 26 cm. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
File:L'Hotel de Vie, 1886 F.jpg, ''L'Hotel de Vie'', 1886. 52 x 70 x 15.5 cm. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
File:Phrenology of the Brain, 1895 F.jpg, ''Phrenology of the Brain'', 1895. 36 x 30.5 x 9 cm. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
File:Trephining of the Skull, 1895 F.jpg , ''Trephining of the Skull'', 1895. 36 x 30.5 x 9 cm. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
File:Harmonisch, 1895 F.jpg, ''Harmonisch'', 1895. 14.5 x 14.5 x 7 cm. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
File:Prince Otto von Bismarck, 1896 F.jpg, ''Prince Otto von Bismarck'', 1896. 66 x 53 x 13 cm. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
File:Pipe, 1896 F.jpg, ''16969'', 1896. 38 x 28 x 10 cm. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
File:Appareil Auditif, 1896 F.jpg, ''Appareil Auditif'', 1896. 46 x 35 x 10 cm. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
File:L’Hotel des Spheres, 1896 F.jpg, ''L’Hotel des Spheres'', 1896. 80 x 49 x 24 cm. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
File:Nebula, 1896 F.jpg, ''Nebula'', 1896. 17.5 x 17 x 11 cm. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
File:Nietzsche, 306P, 1897 F.jpg, ''Nietzsche, 306P'', 1897. 38 x 28 x 10 cm. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
File:Dasein (Being), 1897 F.jpg, ''Dasein (Being)'', 1897. 48 x 26 x 7 cm. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
File:Ehepaar (Married Couple), 1897 F.jpg, ''Ehepaar (Married Couple)'', 1897. 30.5 x 25 x 5.5 cm. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
File:Vorwarts! (Go Forward!), 1897 F.jpg, ''Vorwärts! (Go Forward!)'', 1897. 57.5 x 31 x 9.5 cm. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
Photography
File:Freundschaftstempel, Potsdam, 1896.jpg, ''Freundschaftstempel, Potsdam, 1896''. Albumen silver print, 18 x 23 cm. The Wassmann Foundation, Washington, D.C.
File:1000 Oaks, 1897.jpg, ''1000 Oaks, 1897''. Albumen silver print, 18 x 23 cm. The Wassmann Foundation, Washington, D.C.
File:Berlin, 1897.jpg, ''Berlin, 1897''. Albumen silver print, 18 x 23 cm. The Wassmann Foundation, Washington, D.C.
File:Freyburg, 1897.jpg, ''Freyburg, 1897''. Albumen silver print, 18 x 23 cm. The Wassmann Foundation, Washington, D.C.
File:Nikolaikirche, Leipzig, 1894.jpg, ''Nikolaikirche, Leipzig, 1894''. Albumen silver print, 18 x 23 cm. The Wassmann Foundation, Washington, D.C.
File:Quedlinburg, 1897.jpg, ''Quedlinburg, 1897''. Albumen silver print, 18 x 23 cm. The Wassmann Foundation, Washington, D.C.
File:Schloss Sanssouci, Potsdam, 1896.jpg, ''Schloss Sanssouci, Potsdam, 1896''. Albumen silver print, 18 x 23 cm. The Wassmann Foundation, Washington, D.C.
File:Weinbergterrassen, Park Sanssouci, Potsdam, 1897.jpg, ''Weinbergterrassen, Park Sanssouci, Potsdam, 1897''. Albumen silver print, 18 x 23 cm. The Wassmann Foundation, Washington, D.C.
Ephemera
File:Worn apothecare print.jpg, Worn apothecare print. French, 1870s. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
File:Biedermeier snuff box.JPG, Biedermeier snuff box. German, 1840s. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
File:Envelope to Anna Peterson.JPG, Envelope to Anna Peterson. Swedish, 1890s. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
File:Swedish family death notice.JPG, Family death notice. Swedish, 1890s. MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.
References
External links
MuseumZeitraum blog
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wassmann, Johann Dieter
Literary forgeries
Nonexistent people used in hoaxes
Artists from Leipzig
Modern artists
Assemblage artists
Hoaxes in Australia
1898 deaths
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Engineers from Leipzig
Fictional German people
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