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For a year the family lived on a farm in Konjitze,Yugoslavia. Back in Munich, Koelz's publisher, Berg, was using his influence with the authorities to rehabilitate his friend.
Koelz built a studio, painted full-time, and made significant progress on what had become his major preoccupation - the triptych. It travelled back to Germany with them when Berg's support at home had removed threats of property dispossession and sanctions, and all seemed safe.
In Hohenbrunn Koelz continued to further his career and in 1936 a second major museum purchased one of his paintings. But his principles were increasingly at odds with what was happening around him. Always stubborn and uncompromising in his views, he was now, on occasion, rashly outspoken.
 By 1937 he had published some fifty satirical anti-military poems in the left-wing press. Even more dangerously, in discussion with fellow artists on the growing influence of the State on art, he was scathing about Hitler's policies.
Summoned to court to answer a charge of "Insulting the Fuhrer" he found himself, luckily, in front of a judge whose hobby was painting and who "allowed me to talk myself out of the situation I had talked myself into".
That summer an SS general arrived at Hohenbrunn to offer a commission - a portrait of Hitler, for reproduction as a title page in a propaganda publication. A great honour and a seductive fee; also, perhaps, an attempt to persuade this difficult but very talented artist into the Nazi fold. But a condition of the commission was that Koelz should wear the brown shirt of the Nazi Party for the eight planned sittings. He was appalled. "...I just could not see myself...a writer and artist who had committed himself to democratic ideals... identifying myself visibly and publicly with a crowd of adolescent hooligans and nitwits...I refused politely, but firmly".
And, of course, there was always the triptych - that explicit and harrowing anti-war statement. It had received Yugoslavian press coverage in 1934 and had undoubtedly been seen at Hohenbrunn.
Koelz had now put himself in real danger.
©
DACS 2001
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