Art stele Dr. Fritz Wichert

He found his final resting place next to a good friend. Six years earlier, Professor Dr. Wilhelm Waetzoldt had been buried in the Keitum cemetery. Now, on a damp January day in 1951, Fritz Wichert followed in his footsteps. A simple heather boulder, to which a bronze relief was added two years later, adorns the freshly made grave. Fritz Wichert was born in Mainz. There, the son of an officer initially struggled with his career choice: "I was completely undecided about whether I should follow in my uncle's footsteps and become a writer and poet." But then he changed his mind and studied philosophy and art history. In 1909, Fritz Wichert took over the directorship of the newly founded Mannheim Kunsthalle, and in 1923 he moved to Frankfurt am Main as director of the art academy. His penchant for modern art proved to be a disadvantage when the Nazi regime began: He tried in vain to appeal to Joseph Goebbels to avoid his dismissal – in 1934 the art historian was forced into retirement. Bitterly, Fritz Wichert reorganized his life. He remembered his first vacation on the island of Sylt in 1931: "The sea is absolutely wonderful. When you walk along the shore with the waves rolling in, you want to rip your clothes off and run into the water," he enthused at the time. Now he was having a house built in Kampen. He could see for himself every day what it would look like: a scale model stood on the table in his Frankfurt apartment. In 1936, Wichert moved into his new home, "built in the old Frisian style with a low ceiling and a low-slung roof," as the Sylter Zeitung reported. The new resident was once again enthusiastic about Sylt's nature – the Wadden Sea, "which shimmers like blue silk in the sun," the "roaring sea," the "graceful dunes," and the air, "which is like a drink from heavenly hands." Fritz Wichert sums it up: "You can never get tired of the landscape here. You are always amazed anew." Once again, in the last stage of his life, Wichert held office: He led Kampen as mayor from 1945 to 1948, and during this time he "worked primarily for the preservation of the landscape and for the welfare of the refugees," as the press noted. When Fritz Wichert died in 1951, the municipality of Kampen commemorated his achievements in an obituary: "One of our best representatives, who always championed the interests of his adopted homeland in an exemplary manner and whose kind nature was evident everywhere, has been recalled from our midst.