Josef Feinhals (1867–1947), aka Collofino, was a German

cigar A cigar is a rolled bundle of dried and Fermentation, fermented tobacco leaves made to be Tobacco smoking, smoked. Cigars are produced in a variety of sizes and shapes. Since the 20th century, almost all cigars are made of three distinct comp ...

and

cigarette A cigarette is a narrow cylinder containing a combustible material, typically tobacco, that is rolled into Rolling paper, thin paper for smoking. The cigarette is ignited at one end, causing it to smolder; the resulting smoke is orally inhale ...

maker, patron of the arts, and writer from

Cologne Cologne ( ; ; ) is the largest city of the States of Germany, German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the List of cities in Germany by population, fourth-most populous city of Germany with nearly 1.1 million inhabitants in the city pr ...

. Under his pseudonym, he wrote ''Non Olet'' ("It does not stink"), an 1,100-page

scatological In medicine and biology, scatology or coprology is the study of faeces. Scatological studies allow one to determine a wide range of biological information about a creature, including its diet (nutrition), diet (and thus habitat (ecology), where ...

collection (1939). He was a good friend of

Hermann Hesse Hermann Karl Hesse (; 2 July 1877 – 9 August 1962) was a Germans, German-Swiss people, Swiss poet and novelist, and the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His interest in Eastern philosophy, Eastern religious, spiritual, and philosophic ...

and assisted Hesse in some of his projects. His pseudonym, ''Collofino'', is Italian for "slender neck", an approximate translation of his real name, "Feinhals".

Patron of the arts

Feinhals is praised as an important supporter of the expressionist movement in the

Rhineland The Rhineland ( ; ; ; ) is a loosely defined area of Western Germany along the Rhine, chiefly Middle Rhine, its middle section. It is the main industrial heartland of Germany because of its many factories, and it has historic ties to the Holy ...

, 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.

Feinhals and Hesse

Feinhals was a friend of

, 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 A masterpiece, , or ; ; ) is a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or a work of outstanding creativity, skill, profundity, or workmanship. Historically, ...

, '' The Glass Bead Game'', for which he is thanked and named as "Collof."

Books authored

In 1911 Feinhals authored ''"Der Tabak in kunst und kulture".'' ''Die Geschichten des Collofino'' (1918) is a collection of anecdotes and observations. Privately published by the author and printed by Dumont Schauberg in Cologne, the book is very rare. ''Non Olet'', privately published in 1939 under the pseudonym Collofino, is a "rare eccentric compilation on scatology and smoking, with songs and verse." The "thousand page compendium and discussion" is representative of what has been called "a strong anal component in he Germannational character." The book contains anecdotes and observations, a number of which Collofino claims to have gleaned from old German chronicles. It also includes the proposal for a society which should occupy itself with various matters related to feces. For instance, the society should study the fart as "a natural phenomenon, a problem in pneumatics, an acoustic phenomenon, an insult, a means of defense, an educator," and in "its dependence on other functions, its relation to the cosmos, in literature, in society, in politics, in its relation with subordinates," as well as "among the church fathers."

Villa in Marienburg

Feinhals lived in a villa designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich, built 1908-1909, completed by

Bruno Paul Bruno Paul (19 January 1874 – 17 August 1968) was a German architect, illustrator, interior designer, and furniture designer. Trained as a painter in the royal academy just as the Munich Secession developed against academic art, he first ca ...

, and destroyed in

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

. 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.

Works by Collofino

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Collofino 1867 births 1947 deaths German male writers 20th-century German writers