Hoffmann, Curt Karl Opp. Ein Sammlerleben (1890-1966

A commemorative publication on the 50th anniversary of the death of the collector and local historian in 2016, with illustrations in the text and picture plates commemorating his collections.

The collector and local historian Karl Opp from Borthen near Dresden was born in Altchemnitz in 1890. As it was not possible for him to attend a grammar school and study, he learned the trade of metal spinning. Autodidactically, he acquired extensive knowledge and continued his education throughout his life. In 1908 he found a job in Dresden, where he worked until retirement age. He began collecting as a child and continued to do so seriously from 1908 in Dresden. A coincidence showed him the clay pits and gravel pits in Dresden-Prohlis as productive sites. There he collected remains of ice-age animals, including spectacular mammoth finds, as well as various mineral specimens and fossils as boulder findings, but also artefacts of prehistoric people from the Stone Age and the Bronze Age. In the process, he discovered work and camp sites, which he excavated himself. His prehistoric collection was the largest private collection of its kind in Germany at that time and made him known nationwide. The same applied to his large collection of documents on the "peasant astronomer" Johann Geirg Palitzsch, who lived in Prohlis in the 18th century. Otherwise he collected everything worth preserving for the sake of preservation. Early on, the aura of a local historian was attached to him. He saw himself more as a "home collector" and often added this attribute to his name and his collections. His lifelong dream of having his own museum remained unfulfilled. After his tragic death in an accident in 1966, his collections could not be kept together, but were scattered. The now 85-year-old author Curt Hoffmann, who knew Opp personally in his younger years and was a friend of his, describes Opp's life as a collector and his circle of friends, which included the Erzgebirge painter Gerhard Schiffel (1913-2002), and adds anecdotes told by Opp as well as those he himself experienced. In order to make Opp's lost collections visually tangible in the present, he has reconstructed them in parts on the basis of old photos and documents, but also his own knowledge with objects of other provenance, which were, however, present in Opp's collections, and presented them in an opulent, largely colourful picture section. This is a worthy memorial to the local collector Karl Opp.