Collofino
German writer and cigar maker (1867-1947)
Josef Feinhals (1867-1947), aka Collofino, was a German cigar and cigarette maker, patron of the arts, and writer from Cologne. Under his pseudonym, he wrote Non Olet ("It does not stink"), an 1,100-page scatological collection (1939). He was a good friend of Hermann Hesse and assisted Hesse in some of his projects. His pseudonym, Collofino, is Italian for "slender neck", an approximate translation of his real name, "Feinhals".
01Patron of the arts
Feinhals is praised as an important supporter of the expressionist movement in the Rhineland, having contributed to the 1906 Art Exhibit in Cologne. His company also supported individual artists, such as his friend, the poet Johannes Theodor Kuhlemann (1891-1939), who had worked for eight years in Feinhals's "tobacco museum." Kuhlemann subsequently wrote a book on tobacco, Vom Tabak, which Feinhals published in 1936.
02Feinhals and Hesse
Feinhals was a friend of Hermann Hesse, who had stayed in his Marienburg villa in 1914. Hesse made a number of (sometimes oblique) references to him and the antiquarian anecdotes he had collected in Die Geschichten des Collofino, a book privately published in 1918. In Hesse's short story "Journey to the East," the character "Collofino der Rauchzauberer" ("Collofino the Smoke Magician") is based on Feinhals. In turn, Feinhals helped Hesse with translating German passages into Latin for Hesse's magnum opus, The Glass Bead Game, for which he is thanked and named as "Collof."
04Villa in Marienburg
Feinhals lived in a villa designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich, built 1908-1909, completed by Bruno Paul, and destroyed in World War II. Here he had a noteworthy collection of modern art on display. Artworks in collection included Ernst Kirchner's Das Boskett, which was seized by the Nazis as "Degenerate Art" after Feinhals donated it to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne.
05Works by Collofino
- Das Geheimnis der Marchesa oder Giorgione da Castel Franco. N.p. 1918.
- Die Geschichten des Collofino: Eine Sammlung merkwürdiger Begebenheiten und rätselhaften Abenteuer, märchenhafter Schilderungen und höchst seltsamer Beobachtungen aus dem Leben von Menschen und Tieren aller Zeiten, Länder, und Zonen. Cologne: N.p. 1918.
- Non olet oder Die heiteren Tischgespräche des Collofino über den Orbis Cacatus nebst den neuesten erkenntnistheoretischen Betrachtungen über das Leben in seiner phantastischen Wirklichkeit erzählt von ihm selbst. Cologne: N.p. 1939.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Collofino”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Fathomly is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Spotted a problem? Tell us.