Jim Nolan's Blog

Adolf Paul, 1890s

A shot of my great-grandfather from a beautifully designed book by Glenda Dawn Goss entitled Silbelius: a composer's life and the awakening of Finland. You can order it from Amazon here. Goss's two pages about Adolf comprise the only English-language biography I can find of him. The more I learn about him, the less I like him. Apparently, his friends began to like him less as well when he started publishing novels with them "thinly disguised" as other characters. Strindberg borrowed money from him, and grew to hate him, but Strindberg hated everybody. He did give Adolf one of his paintings however, maybe to pay off a debt, and Strindberg was a fantastic painter. 

John Münsterhjelm's John Hancock

Located on the side of Natalie Paul's bust. Would've been faster to simply use a Sharpie.

 

 

Busted Part III

Finnish sculptor John Münsterhjelm (1879-1925) in his studio. He lived in Germany from 1902-1911, according to Wikipedia. If you look behind him, you'll see the bust of Adolf Paul featured in the previous post.

Busted, Part II

My maternal great-grandfather, Adolf Paul. Adolf wrote plays and stories, none of which are well known today. His Wikipedia page is a stub, and it gets his birthplace wrong. He was not born in Bromma, Sweden, but Bromö, an island in Lake Vänern. The family moved from there to a 70,000-acre estate called Jokkis in what was then Sweden and is now Finland. It had a 20-kilometer railway. They just lived there; they didn't own it. Family legend says it was lost by the guy who did own it to pay a gambling debt. Adolf's birth name (January 6, 1863) was Georg Wiedersheim-Paul, but he changed it to Adolf Paul to annoy his mother and father. He died September 30, 1943 in Berlin. My mother says "I was in Sweden and remember my father writing to me with the news on very thick, black-rimmed stationary."

Adolf's bust, also sculpted by John Münsterhjelm in 1906, sits in storage in the National Museum of Finland.

Busted

My maternal great-grandmother, Natalie Paul, or "Tali" for short. The back of the photograph says "Okt. 19," which either means October 1919 or October 19th, her birthday in 1878. The marble bust was made by sculptor John Münsterhjelm in 1906 in Berlin, where Natalie and her playwright husband Adolf Paul lived. He was Swedish; she was German, born to a wealthy Lubeck family, the Brehmers. Adolf hung out with Jean Sibelius, August Strindberg and Edvard Munch, and spent all her money. Maybe that's why the bust looks wistful.