Franz Sedlacek

Franz Sedlacek (21 January 1891 – 1945) was an Austrian painter who belonged to the tradition known as "New Objectivity" ("neue Sachlichkeit"), an artistic movement similar to Magical Realism. 

Franz Sedlacek saw monsters. He saw hooded ghosts sat like vultures on the branches of leafless trees, hideous beings in the home and in the streets, and evoked the macabre, anxious, witty and sinister in his paintings of running people isolated against the inky black of a looming forest and still cityscape.

Not that the Austrian painter of magical realism minded all monsters. For some yers he was an Nazi. An educated man, the Austrian fought in the World War 1 and surviving that horror had joined the Nazi party to be part of the greatest crime.

Was he a willing member of the self-styled master race?  In 1939, Sedlacek was conscripted to the Wehrmacht, rising to the ranks of First Lieutenant and later Captain of Wehrmacht. He fought in Stalingrad, Norway and Poland, where he was last seen  during the battle of Torun Fortress. In 1972, in spite of lack of evidence to prove it. he was pronounced dead.