Remembering Kirchner: denounced by the Nazis for his 'degenerate art' the troubled German expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner spent his final decades in Swiss exile. Swiss News recalls that era in Davos through the eyes and ears of Kirchner's former neighbour.

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Remembering Kirchner: denounced by the Nazis for his 'degenerate art' the troubled German expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner spent his final decades in Swiss exile. Swiss News recalls that era in Davos through the eyes and ears of Kirchner's former neighbour.

Seventy years have passed since Barbara Augustin, then 16-year-old 'Babi' Ruesch, heard two pistol shots ring out near her family farmhouse in Davos-Frauenkirch.

The shots of June 15, 1938 signalled the final desperate act of her distraught neighbour--suicide, by an acclaimed painter hounded by Hitler's Nazis, even while in Swiss refuge.

Tragic times

As Mrs. Augustin, now an 86-year-old widow, recounts the events...

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