Caspar David Friedrich School in Greifswald

Six six-foot panels with motifs of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous works are attached to the walls of the gymnasium of the Caspar David Friedrich School in the Greifswald borough of Ostseeviertel. This is one of the school’s ways to demonstrate its commitment to the heritage of Caspar David Friedrich. The panels were created by pupils of the tenth grade supported by the Greifswald artist Karin Wurlitzer on the occasion of the school’s renaming ceremony on 7 May 2008. At that time many Greifswald citizens had requested that one of the city’s schools should bear the name of Greifswald’s most famous son. Thus, a City Council resolution decided to rename the former ‘Martin Andersen Nexö am Ryck’ School as ‘Caspar David Friedrich School’.

The school aims to contribute to an improved understanding of Friedrich’s life and work and seeks to promote the students’ creativity via a variety of events, projects and excursions. To this end, teachers and students work in close collaboration with the Pomeranian State Museum, the Caspar David Friedrich Centre and the Caspar David Friedrich Institute at the University of Greifswald. Every year in May, during the School’s Caspar David Friedrich Festival, the students display their artworks in an exhibition. In grade five, the boys and girls organise a poetry workshop under the heading ‘Romanticism’. Students of the sixth grade have the opportunity to discover their creativity at an art camp at the Heimvolkshochschule in Lubmin. In the seventh grade, students follow the Caspar David Friedrich Trail, which explores the life and work of the artist. Traditionally, Dresden, the town where Friedrich lived after his childhood in Greifswald and his studies in Copenhagen and where he finally died in 1840, is the destination of the end-of-school trip by the end of grade ten. One of the highlights of this trip is a visit to the Dresden State Art Collections (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen) where several of the artist’s works can be seen.

In 2014, the School participated in the organisation of the Greifswald City Festival, entitled ‘A Day with Caspar David Friedrich’, held in the city centre.