As of: February 10, 2024, 3:00 p.m
By: Sabine Hermsdorf-Hiss
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A house with an eerie history: the slowly decaying Villa Max in Ammerland.
© sh
Once built as a country house, Villa Ammerland now looks like nothing more than a ruin.
In the horror novel “The Ghost Villa” by Fritz Fenzl, the old building is now at the center of the story.
Münsing – Villa Max, once built as a country house, is now a ruin on the Südliche Seestrasse in Ammerland.
The owner was Gabriel von Max, occultist and spirit painter.
The house is a place that is almost predestined for scary stories.
And a place where Fritz Fenzl, the youngest tower writer in 1982, long-time head of the “Monacensia” literary archive, winner of various literary prizes and author about Bavaria's magical places, cannot pass by.
Horror novel “The Haunted Villa”: Villa Max in Ammerland is at the center of the story
In his current work “The Haunted Villa”, a connection between fiction and reality, the decaying house is at the center as the trigger for an eerie story.
It's about secret societies that demand human sacrifice, the undead and the evil that lives in people's minds.
Original sketch: A draft by Gabriel von Max. © Sh
The inspiration for the book was the oil painting “The Anatomist”, a work by Gabriel von Max and an original preliminary sketch by the artist, which is in Fenzl's possession.
The latter itself shows a man sitting in an armchair, his hands folded.
Is he sleeping, contemplating – or is he even dead?
And what do the handwritten lines next to them mean?
The finished work, “The Anatom,” is a dark but fascinating picture.
It depicts a pathologist sitting thoughtfully next to the corpse of a beautiful young girl who is next in line for autopsy.
There are skull bones on the desk, and on the right - at the foot of the stretcher - sits a moth as an allegory for death.
The inspiration for the horror book was an oil painting
In Fenzl's book the picture suddenly changes, it comes to life.
And it continues spookily: Suddenly a mysterious dead person wakes up in the dilapidated haunted house.
“He is,” as the author describes him, “a descendant of the Teutonic Order, an occult association of power-hungry people that was in full bloom 100 years ago.” With Fenzl, the group prepared the ideological ground for “the occult background of the world's darkening the first third of the 20th century - a lodge dedicated to evil that demands a life every year by drawing lots”.
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Author Fritz Fenzl.
© Sabine Hermsdorf-Hiss/Archive
But who really was the author of the work and owner of the villa around which so many true and fictional stories are based?
Gabriel Cornelius Max was born in 1840 as the son of the sculptor Joseph Max and his wife Anna Schumann.
His artistic talent, which his father encouraged, became apparent at an early age.
He experienced his breakthrough in 1867 with the work “Martyr on the Cross”.
Von Max's preference for the supernatural was also based on his friendship with the writer and philosopher Carl du Prel and the parapsychologist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (often popularly referred to as the “Spirit Baron”), both of whom are considered representatives of transcendental psychology.
Through her he comes into contact with the occult.
Horror novel by Fritz Fenzl: The author has never been to Villa Max himself
There is talk of secret séances in which the participants make contact with the dead, as well as experiments with X-rays.
The second meeting of the theosophical society “Germania” took place in his Ammerland villa in 1884.
In parallel, Max's interest lies in Darwinism and anthropology.
In 1900 the artist was raised to the nobility and was henceforth allowed to call himself Gabriel Cornelius Ritter von Max.
He died in Munich in 1915.
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Fenzl describes himself as a “Gabriel von Max fan”.
He also “generally collects pieces from the 19th century, especially symbolist pieces.
I'm basically spending my last money on this.” Even though he describes the interior of the villa in his book, he has never set foot in the house.
“But I knew an artist and carpenter, now deceased, who was once commissioned to do renovation work.”
Fenzl is convinced that, true to the motto “The spirits I called”, revenants and spirit beings can still be found in this “highly active ghost place”.
He quotes the Benedictine Father Frumentius Renner from St. Ottilien: “Dying does not mean being dead.” Because memory keeps the dead alive.
SABINE HERMSDORF-HISS
The book
“The Ghost Villa” by Fritz Fenzl was published by Omnino Verlag under ISBN 3958942725 as a paperback for 16 euros.
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