Jewish resistance – “Don’t be sad, you are brave”

Dear Mom and her other 3, now we’ll get it, on Wednesday it should go on … The prospects are more than bad … so dear ones, when will we see each other again and whether? … I don’t make you very happy mums. Don’t be sad, you are brave. You know how dear you have. ”Lines from Paula Straus’s farewell letter, dated August 15, 1942, shortly before her deportation. The gold and silversmith, born in Stuttgart in 1894 in Stuttgart and murdered in Auschwitz on February 10, 1943, was one of the first industrial designers in Germany, had made a name for itself in the so-called golden twenties in a male domain.

No, even if the millions of murder of the Jews of Germany and Europe is omnipresent here, the women presented in this exhibition are not portrayed as victims, but as self -confident and self -determined, clever and creative artists who prevailed against a number of resistances, patriarchal structures as well as gynecological and hatred of women at the beginning of the 20th century and the modernization of German society promoted. Many of them are hardly known today, some of them have not even survived a photo. German anti -Semites tried to wipe out their traces, to repay memories. Which should not be done entirely.

At the 400 exhibits, this worldwide offers the first comprehensive exhibition on Jewish designers. She owes a chance discovery by historian Michal Friedlander, studied orientalist, who specialized in Jewish history, worked in museums from New York to Los Angeles to Berkeley and now curated Berlin exposure with passion. Her father, Rabbi Albert Friedländer, had the pogrom night of 9/10 as a child in Berlin. Experienced November 1938; The following year he was able to emigrate with his family via Cuba to the USA, with the last ship, the legendary MS »St. Louis «.

Michal Friedlander reports on a silver jewelry at the opening of the new show in the Jewish Museum Berlin, which she bought as a museologist. The auction house had no idea what a treasure it was, the pure material value in many cases exceeded. Fortunately for Michal Friedlander with the shopping institution, as the curator reveals mischievously. It was a work by Emmy Roth, one of the most important German silversmith in the past secular. Her works could be seen at the Leipzig trade fairs and even in 1937 at the Paris World Exhibition, in the Pavilion “Israel in Palestine”. Emmy Roth had managed to escape from Nazi Germany in good time. Cancer – and certainly also under the emotional burden of the eliminatory German anti -Semitism angry in Europe – she committed suicide in Tel Aviv in 1942. “Your work was forgotten like the many great Jewish artists,” says Michal Friedlander, who has now started to correct this.

In the exhibition, everyday objects, dishes and cutlery, Modeutschenilen, bags and hats, oj notes that served religious ceremonies, as well as costumes for theater, opera and film, are to be admired in the exhibition. An eye-catcher is the timelessly beautiful bright red, square wall clock in the Bauhaus style by Margarete Heymann-Loebenstein, which was one of the few of the 62 designers to be experienced here a high age; She died in London over 90 years in 1990.

The fashion designer Dörte Wolff, who designed costumes, had also been able to save himself into British exile, including Marlene Dietrich. However, she became famous with her colorful Gouachen for the satirical magazine “Ulk”, with which she banned the high society of the Weimar Republic on paper and which she signed with “Dodo”. In England she could no longer build on her success in Germany.

They are not portrayed as a victim, but as self -confident and self -determined, clever and creative artists.

It should not be surprised that dolls and toys are also present in the exhibition, the women were also mothers. Käte Baer Freyer became known with her biblical puppet games. She made movable wooden figures on the stories of her husband Albert Baer written in verse. The couple emigrated to Palestine as early as 1933.

Touching Edith Samuel’s testimony: »It was a cruel time for us Jews. Families were torn apart. Parents saved their children abroad and remained lonely. Then came the first shy inquiries whether I could make portrait dolls for photos … I didn’t always like it … So a mother wished her daughter’s children’s portrait who emigrated to South Africa. I did it as best I could. But when the mother saw the doll, she called disappointed: ‘That should be Marianne?’ I was deeply ashamed and took the doll back home. ”The exhibition shows a funny self -portrait of Edith Samuel as a fabric doll. And also dolls by Marianne Heymann, who caricatured their male artists Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer.

It is reminded of the costume and stage designer Hanna Litten, the amazing resemblance to Anne Frank and also died young, with 22 in Riga, which the German aggressors had transformed into a huge ghetto. Lilli Szkolny was also murdered in the capital of Latvia, who had illustrated the once popular children’s book by Meta Samson “Spatz” (1938); The writer was killed in Auschwitz, in the same year as her illustrator: 1942. A cursed year that began with the Wannsee conference at which the “final solution” was coordinated.

In addition to a “Palestine Quartet”, there is a picture book for preschool children, which introduces Jewish festivals and public holidays with secular German culture: “Also Jewish children like to drive sledges.” Not only a Palestine domino, Anni Rosenblüth, but also known in her time, but also German And international popular fairy tale figures such as Hans in Glück, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood and the Bremen Town Musicians, who received the “Best of British” predicate in 1951 at a national constellation in England. With delicate puppets, based on the traditional Indonesian shadow play (Wayang), only here with King Salomon and the clever, beautiful queen of Saba, delighted Käte Baer-Freyer, who died in a Kibbutz in Israel in 1988, another Jewish children. Speaking of which, the exhibition does not conceal the fact that many Jewish designers were in favor of socialist ideas.

The contribution is informed about the contribution of Jewish artists on reform pedagogy in the Weimar Republic with child -friendly fibles and educational games. The Reimann School is presented, founded in 1902 by Albert and Clara Reimann in Berlin. It united theory and practice, also taught in artistic and manual subjects (one remembers the POS, the polytechnic high schools of the GDR). The Reimann School was devastated during the November pogroms in 1938.

Nd.Diewoche – Our weekly newsletter

With our weekly newsletter . We’re Doing Look at the most important topics of the week and read them Highlights our Saturday edition on Friday. Get the free subscription here.

Funny the “Pritzel Puppe” (1913) by Lotte Pritzel, Advertising agency for the biscuit company Bahlsen, who under the swastika of Jewish competition, the exploitation of forced laborers and the classification as a “war -important company”, “iron rations” for the Wehrmacht fabricated, crackle bread and rusks. Unfortunately, such information cannot be found in the exhibition. Likewise, the post-war history of the Cologne chocolate factory Ludwig Stollwerck, which had commissioned a mini-saving machine for children from Elli Hirsch. The “renovated” company “renovated” in the financial stumbling in the 1970s in the German “Association” by taking over the state -owned Thuringian chocolate plant Rotstern, once the largest chocolate factory in the GDR.

There would still be a lot to report on the exhibition “Resistances”. There is a lot to discover and experience there, even for children who can equip themselves with clothes cuts for paper dolls (who still knows something like this?). A carefully opened, solid accompanying catalog offers essential authors.

Of course, the Jewish designers have explicitly positioned themselves politically. A poster by Esther Berlin-Joel, created around 1935 in Palestine, announces: “We only buy our own products”. It called for the boycott imported to protect the products of Jewish farmers and workers. Also a form of resistance, of the struggle for survival. A graphic from Esther Berlin-Joel also comes that shows a ship on a stormy seas with Jewish refugees on board: “Zion, will you not take care of the well-being of your illegal prisoners?” This too is a highly current message. And how nice: After the official opening, young people danced in the courtyard of the Jewish Museum to disco music. That would have liked the persecuted, displaced, murdered.

»Resistance. Jewish designers of modernity «, Jewish Museum Berlin, until November 23, daily 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Catalog (Hirmer Verlag, 304 pages, 250 Fig., € 45); Accompanying program www.jmberlin.de/widerstaende