Ilsenburg iron foundry

In the truly charming Ilsenburg, you can still find plenty of industrial history. To explore it, there is the Iron Trail “From Ore to Metal”. It not only stops at the iron foundry, which since its privatisation in 1993 has again proudly borne the traditional name Fürst-Stolberg-Hütte. It also leads to the Ilsenburg Ironworks and Technology Museum. There you can find depictions and models of the old Ilsenburg art foundry.

Doris Derdey worked for many years in the museum, in Wernigerode and at Falkenstein. Through extensive research, she brought the forgotten Harz painter Ernst Helbig back into our awareness. In the church records of Stolberg/Harz, she deciphered his origins as the fifth child of the head gardener. In Dresden, she found his traces between 1824 and 1830 and even wrote to Oslo, where the diary of his Dresden teacher Christian Clausen Dahl is kept. Doris Derdey searched in Halberstadt, where Helbig tried his hand at lithography and copying works by Carl Hasenpflug from 1830 onwards. She went through the entire Wernigerode Intelligenzblatt from 1843 to 1861 to find adverts and notices about Helbig, and in the Wernigerode archive she found letters to the count with moving pleas for commissions and money. She also eventually found tax records mentioning him from 1857 onwards as disabled and paralysed, unable to pay the monthly tax of two silver groschen. In Halle, she read the diary of his friend Friedrich von Suckow, who ordered five paintings from him at alarmingly low prices. At last, she found in the administrative records of the Johanniter hospice in Mansfeld evidence of his death in poverty and blindness in 1866. On the 200th anniversary of the painter’s birth in 1802, she was finally able to present an exhibition in Wernigerode and a catalogue of works with 128 paintings. In 2007, Doris Derdey died at only 63 years old after a short, serious illness. Without people like her, who carry out their work with intelligence and empathy, nothing works anywhere—least of all in culture.