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The Imaginary Engineer – Karl Hans Janke's Flights of Fancy

Karl Hans Janke’s flights of fancy

“In sum, I would like to state that a spiral nebula, bar magnet, tree or bush, a swallow, animals, and human beings with head and motor organs, as well as clouds, stones, atomic systems, transmitters—even manifestations such as war and peace—should all be measured using a single form!” Janke was in fact delivering his lecture not to a learned society but to a group of hospital staff and fellow inmates at the Hubertusburg Federal Psychiatric Institution, located in the village of Wermsdorf in the Saxony region of East Germany. By the time he died in 1988, Janke had produced more than 4,500 drawings and hundreds of models of various technological inventions, chief among which were fantastic flying machines rendered in exquisitely detailed technical sketches. In his final testament, he wrote, “I ask you to keep the images and albums with the numerous drawings and models that I created for you humans.” His archive was to be forgotten in an attic at the hospital for more than a decade until doctors at Hubertusburg rediscovered it in 2000.

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