Resurrected exhibit provides insight into Jewish artists during, after the Holocaust
‘Munich Displaced,’ at the Munich Jewish Museum through March 17, portrays the city when it was a hub for 200,000 displaced Jews who survived the war
A resurrected art exhibit currently on display at the Munich Jewish Museum provides insights into how Jewish artists expressed themselves during and immediately after the Holocaust.
The artworks were forgotten until about a year ago when Jutta Fleckenstein was gathering materials for an exhibit called “Munich Displaced: The Surviving Remnant,” portraying the period when Munich, Germany was the administrative hub for the more than 200,000 Holocaust survivors who lived in the American-Occupied Zone of Germany between 1945-1949.
The display, which is open through March 17, 2024, is running in parallel with an exhibition at Munich’s nearby City Museum titled “Munich Displaced: After 1954 and Without a Homeland,” which closes on January 1.
When Fleckenstein, the curator of the Munich Jewish Museum, came across a catalog listing works displayed in a November 1948 exhibit at Munich’s Lenbachhaus Municipal Art Gallery, she scoured galleries around the world in search of the original works. She located a number of the paintings created by four of the five participating artists and was able to get them on loan from collections in Australia, Poland, Israel and the United States.
“Their artworks go beyond any documentary historical account and reveal a remarkable variety of forms of expression,” notes Fleckenstein. She points out that some of the paintings were created in ghettoes and concentration camps and later retrieved from hiding places. Others were created after the survivors regained their freedom and were living in Munich or nearby Displaced Persons (DP) camps.
A series of 14 paintings by Maximillian Feuerring offer a subtle commentary on his years of captivity in a German prisoner-of-war camp for Polish soldiers. The paintings repeat an identical landscape view — the mountains, lake, sky and fence are the same. Only the time of year and the time of day changes. Each image has the feeling of a haiku poem, an immersion into the here-and-now of nature without regard to any outside distraction.
The German guards kept Feuerring and other Jewish prisoners separately in the attic of a building, yet indulged in the skills of the accomplished 44-year-old artist, whose works had been exhibited before the war in leading galleries in Paris, Berlin and Rome, by demanding that Feuerring paint their portraits. Besides creating more than 2,000 portraits during six years in the POW camp, Feuerring continued to compose works of his own, all done while knowing that the Germans had murdered his wife, parents and brother.
When he was liberated by the US Army in April 1945, Feuerring, like most Holocaust survivors, chose not to return home to his native Poland. He found work in Munich teaching art at a center operated by the UNRRA refugee organization and in 1948 was one of the organizers of the “Exhibition of Jewish Artists” at Munich’s Lenbachhaus Municipal Art Gallery.
Three of the other exhibiting artists had grown up in or near the Polish town of Lodz and been forced by the Nazis into the town’s Jewish ghetto. The youngest, avant-garde artist Pinkus Schwarz, was 22 years old when the war broke out. From Lodz he was deported to the Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen concentration camps before being liberated by the Soviets. In poor health, he did not begin painting again until after he recuperated at medical facilities set up for DPs in St. Ottilien and Gauting.
An oil painting that he created in 1945 shows a solitary figure slumped over beside what appears to be a bundle of clothes. The unmistakable desolation conveyed in Schwarz’s painting contrasts sharply with the subdued yet cheerful mood in a work by Ewa Brzezinska. Her softly-colored landscape suggests a nostalgic memory of her hometown of Lodz, or perhaps a view of the Bavarian town of Bad Worishofen where she was housed in a DP camp.
Brzezinska, the only woman in the group, was 28 years old when the Germans forced her into the Lodz ghetto.
“She must have been a very strong person,” says Fleckenstein, noting that she continued to paint in the ghetto and took 30 paintings with her when she was deported to Auschwitz, where they were confiscated by the Nazis. She was later transferred to the Bergen-Belsen and Dachau concentration camps before being freed. A strikingly happy smile on Brzezinska’s face, in a photo of her taken at the time of the 1948 exhibit, seems to hide these grim details.
Hirsch Szylis, the third Lodz painter, weighed just 81 pounds when he arrived at the Feldafing DP camp after surviving four concentration camps. In the Lodz ghetto, he used the oil paints he was given to paint portraits of SS officers to secretly depict ghetto life on scraps of paper and grocery sacks. Several of these paintings were recovered after the war and included in the 1948 exhibit.
One of these works, “Manure Wagon in the Lodz Ghetto,” is colored in extremely somber tones and shows a sign at the ghetto entrance forbidding the entry of outsiders.
Another painting by Szylis created in 1940, not displayed in the 1948 show but included in the current exhibit, reveals the harsh feelings many Jews felt towards Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the controversial head of the Lodz Judenrat (Jewish ghetto administrative council). Szylis depicts Rumkowski as a larger-than-life figure, with a guilt-stricken expression on his face, looking down at pleading Jews. It was Rumkowski who complied with Nazi demands to relinquish the children and the elderly who were not fit to work in the Lodz munitions factory. Near the end of the war, Rumkowski was himself sent to Auschwitz where he was reportedly murdered by fellow Jews.
Rumkowski’s damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t decisions remain debatable today. He was condemned by many as a collaborator yet his actions did result in Jews surviving in Lodz for two years longer than in the Warsaw and other ghettoes. As historian Prof. Yehuda Bauer has pointed out, had the Soviets liberated Lodz only a few months earlier, many people may have looked at Rumkowski in a different light.
The current exhibit also includes several caricatures of the DPs from a book created by Arie Navon, a cartoonist with the Israeli newspaper Davar, who visited the DP camps in 1945. Navon accompanies his depictions of the DPs as being weak and frightened with bitingly sarcastic captions. As the writer Lea Fleischmann suggests in a review of Navon’s work, his stereotypes were typical of the condescending way in which Holocaust survivors were viewed by many in pre-state Israel.
A more positive view of the survivors interestingly was offered by German art critics published in 1948. The Süddeutsche Zeitung described Feuerring as a “strong, disciplined talent” whose layered gouaches “are unmistakably influenced by the study of Parisian painting, in particular Matisse and Bonnard.”
The Munchner Merkur also commended the artists: Feuerring’s flower pieces “shine in their own, harmonious splendor,” Szylis is praised for being able “without resentment or irony to execute from memory with charcoal and pastel pencils pictures of dark oppression,” and Brzezinska is complimented for the “texture and decorative style of her colorful carpet of landscapes.” In summary, Munchner Merkur notes, the survivors’ “colorful reflections of the world became a comfort during their suffering.”
It is from these German press reviews that we have the only description of the works of the fifth artist, Warsaw-born Leon Kraicer, who lived in the Geretsried DP camp. According to the Munchner Merkur, the facial expressions in Kraicer’s wood sculptures “maintain an illustrative naturalism.”
Fleckenstein continues to search for more information about Kraicer, as nothing is yet known about his whereabouts after 1948. She is hopeful that visitors to the current exhibit, especially the descendants of DP families, may yield additional information not only about the DP artists but about the DP period itself, which she points out has been largely ignored.
One discovery that has already resulted from the exhibit concerns a poster commissioned by the Central Committee of Liberated Jews to encourage the DPs to submit testimonies about their experiences. The poster was signed by an artist called Pinkus Schuldenrein. Upon seeing a photo of the poster, Schuldenrein’s son, David Sharon, living today in New York, identified the poster as being the work of his father, who changed his name to Paul Sharon after emigrating to the US.
It is ironic that the 1948 exhibit took place at the Lenbachhaus Municipal Art Gallery. Located near the destroyed headquarters of the Nazi Party, the Lenbachhaus had during the 1930s banned the works of Jewish artists and showcased the works of German artists favored by the Nazi regime.
The 1948 DP exhibit, taking place just a few months after Israel declared its independence, occurred when Jews began to look to the future with a renewed sense of optimism. It capped off the post-war period that was preoccupied with an introspective look at the past.
The participating artists would soon disperse to other parts of the world — Feuerring to Australia, Szylis to France, Brezezinska and Schwarz to Israel. Like most Holocaust survivors in the ensuing years, they would put aside memories of those days as they focused on rebuilding their lives in a new country.
