Arnold Strauss

Arnold Ferdinand Strauss (born September 9, 1902 in Barmen , † November 6, 1965 in Norfolk (Virginia) ) was a German-American pathologist and art collector. For years he was in correspondence with Irmgard Keun , whom he supported financially and to whom he considered himself engaged.

Life

Arnold Strauss was the son of the Barmen physician, writer, painter and art collector Arthur Alexander Strauss and his wife Lucy, nee. Hertz. His relatives included the writer Else Lasker-Schüler and the physicist Heinrich Hertz . He studied medicine in Freiburg , Basel and Bonn and passed his state examination in 1927. He did his doctorate in Basel with Robert Rössle . His dissertation was entitled Acute Posthemorrhagic Spleen Swelling . In 1928 he became an assistant in Basel, in 1929 he followed his doctoral supervisor to Berlin, where he became an assistant doctor on November 1 of the same year. He also continued his education at the Medical Polyclinic Hamburg . Strauss made friends with Heinrich Kleiser , Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill ; he belonged to the premiere audience of the film The Blue Angel . A career at the Charité seemed to be emerging after Rössle had proposed his appointment as senior assistant on April 1, 1933 in February 1933.

But even before the Professional Civil Service Act came into force, the “non-Aryan” Strauss was dismissed by the management of the Charité. Rössle, who initially did not agree to this termination, recommended that he leave Germany. Strauss then went to The Hague and in the spring of 1934 to Florence . In August 1935 he emigrated to the United States and became a pathologist at a hospital in Montgomery before he got a position at DePaul Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia. He worked at this hospital for 29 years; he also had a practice with a laboratory together with Robert J. Faulconer. He became Associate Professor of Pathology at the Medical College of Virginia and Consularius of the Chief Forensic Medicine Officer of Virginia and numerous military hospitals.

Strauss' parents hesitated to leave Germany for several years even after their son had emigrated. Then they shipped their household effects and their art collection to the USA and first emigrated to the Netherlands themselves. You had contact several times with the writer Irmgard Keun, who also went into exile and with whom Strauss was in close contact for years, but mainly by letter. He saw himself as Keun's fiancé, which made his parents skeptical. Numerous written documents from the period from 1933 to 1940 have survived, including 271 letters from Irmgard Keun to Arnold Strauss, from which it emerges that he not only supported them financially, but also tried to move them to the USA. He also tried to get visas for his parents. But Irmgard Keun secretly traveled back to Germany and went underground there. Arthur and Lucy Strauss committed suicide in 1940 when they saw no more chance of escaping the National Socialists.

Arnold Strauss married the pianist, art historian and human rights activist Marjory Spindle in 1941. When a law was passed in Virginia to segregate blood items by race of donors, the couple advocated its revocation.

Strauss, who, like his parents, collected works of art , gave lectures on Honoré Daumier at the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, later the Chrysler Museum of Art . In the post-war period he traveled regularly to Peru , where Kleiser had emigrated in 1933, and built up an extensive collection of Peruvian pre-Columbian art. Works of art from his parents' collection went to the Chrysler Museum after the death of his widow.

After his death, together with Gabriele Kreis, Strauss' daughter Marjory S. Strauss gave a selection from Keun's letters to her father and from the correspondence with his parents. The book was first published in 1988 under the title I live in a wild vortex . Keun wrote to Strauss again in the post-war period; he had sent her a CARE package , but apparently no longer replied to her messages.

Keun announced an autobiography in her later years, but never wrote it. For the period from 1933 to 1940, her letters to Strauss can serve as a substitute: "Without the correspondence with Arnold Strauss, little would be known about Irmgard Keun's life from 1933 to 1940. The author never spoke about this man again later", wrote Eva Pfister in 2018.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Albert Herzog published his first poems in 1886, cf. Albert Herzog, your happy eyes. A Karlsruhe journalist tells from his life , Karlsruhe 2008, ISBN 978-3-88190-500-8 , SS 280
2. ^ Udo Schagen and Margaret S. Travers: Arnold Strauss. On: gedenkort.charite.de
3. ↑ Eva Pfister, A Long Night on Irmgard Keun. “A woman who writes with a sense of humor, take a look!” , August 18, 2018 on www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de