Peter H. Feist
Peter Heinz Feist (most often Peter H. Feist) (29 July 1928 – 26 July 2015) was a German art historian. Life. Feist was born in 1928 in Warnsdorf in northern Bohemia, where he grew up. His father Georg H. Feist was a surgeon and in 1926 he moved with his wife from Prague to Warnsdorf, where he took over the management of the municipal hospital. Peter's mother, Isolde Feist née Sojka, was a nurse who as a so-called half-Jewish woman converted to Lutheranism before her marriage in 1923; her father was a wealthy wine and  spirits merchant from Reichenberg. In 1932 Peter's parents divorced. His mother was later murdered together with her second husband and half-brother in 1944 in the Auschwitz concentration camp. In Warnsdorf Feist attended elementary school and Gymnasium from 1934 to 1944. His Latin teacher was Rita Hetzer, the later Romance scholar and literary scholar Rita Schober, who was also the reviewer of his habilitation in 1966 and whose professorial colleague he became in 1968 at the Humboldt University of Berlin (HUB). As a youth, Feist was still deployed in the last months of the Second World War from 1944  to early 1945 as Luftwaffenhelfer in Malbork. After the war the family moved to Lutherstadt Wittenberg. In 1947 he caught up his Abitur there and studied art history, history and classical archaeology and oriental archaeology at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) until 1952. In his diploma thesis he wrote about "Untersuchungen zur Bedeutung orientalischer Einflüsse für die Kunst des frühen Mittelalters" (Investigations on the meaning of oriental influences for the art of the early Middle Ages). After his studies he worked at the MLU from 1952 to 1958 as assistant, aspirant, senior assistant and lecturer of Wilhelm Worringer  at the Art History Institute. On 11 March 1958 he received his doctorate there with the thesis "Die Stilstruktur von der altorientalischen bis zur romanischen Kunst" (The stylistic structure from ancient oriental to Romanesque art). He had been a member of the SED since 1954." Before he moved with his family to East-Berlin in 1962, he first worked from 1958 as a senior assistant and preceptor at the Humboldt University of Berlin (HUB). On 14 November 1966, after submitting a thesis on "Bereicherung und Begrenzung der Malerei durch den französischen Impressionismus. Ein Beitrag zur Problematik der Kunstgeschichte in der  zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts" (Enrichment and limitation of painting by French Impressionism. A contribution to the problems of art history in the second half of the 19th century) he obtained his habilitation. In 1967 he was appointed as a lecturer, in 1968 as a professor with a teaching position and in 1969 as professor in the Aesthetics and Art Sciences section of the HUB. From 1966 to 1968 he worked as interim director of the Institute of Art History, then until 1973 as deputy director of the Aesthetics and Art Studies Section, and from 1977, as head of the  Art Studies Department within this section. Feist undertook many study trips and conference visits beginning in 1950, as well as delivering lectures in most European countries (including London, Lund, Moscow, Munich, Paris, Prague, Sofia, Stockholm, Uppsala) Burma, India and the USA. In 1961 his first book on the painter Auguste Renoir was published, and translated into Polish and Hungarian. In 1987 a revised licensed edition followed in Cologne; the book has since been translated into about 20 languages. From 1982 until his early retirement in mid-1990, Feist was director of the Institute for Aesthetics and Art Studies of the Academy  of Sciences of the GDR. He was a member of the . He retired in 1993. He worked on several books and published reviews and art criticism in daily newspapers. In 1950 Feist and Gisela Münster (1927–2004) whom he got to know as a student of German and English language and literature in Halle married; she was then a lecturer at the (ABF) of the University of Halle until 1959. In 1953, the son Michael Feist was born. He studied chemistry at the HUB from 1971 to 1975, and in 1980, after an aspirancy at the Moscow State University, he became  a professor at the University of Halle (MGU) and since then has worked at the HUB as a research assistant. He has two daughters: Ulrike Holzapfel "née" Feist (b.1978) and Katja Feist (b. 1998). Feist last lived in Berlin-Pankow and died three days before his 87th birthday.