Clara Rosenthal

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Clara Rosenthal (born April 9, 1863 in Karlsruhe , † November 11, 1941 in Jena ) was a German art patron. At the beginning of the 20th century she was considered to be the most beautiful woman in Jena. In 1941 she committed suicide under the pressure of anti-Semitic persecution by the National Socialists . The “Clara and Eduard Rosenthal Scholarships” of the “Villa Rosenthal” cultural center in Jena, founded in 2009, are named after Clara and her husband Eduard Rosenthal .

Life

Clara Rosenthal was born on April 9, 1863 as Fanni Clara Ellstätter. She was the daughter of Jakob Julius Ellstätter and Clementine, née Herz. Julius Ellstätter came from a respected family of merchants and manufacturers, his brother Moritz was Baden's finance minister. The mother Clementine was the daughter of William Herz and his wife Sara, b. Reinach, from Weilburg. Clara was raised in the Jewish faith of her ancestors. On February 17, 1879, Clara's mother, who was already widowed at the time, died.

On August 9, 1885, Clara Ellstätter married the lawyer Eduard Rosenthal in Heidelberg . The witnesses were the Viennese banker Bernhard Rosenthal (37) and the businessman Wilhelm Ellstätter (48) from Karlsruhe. The young family initially lived in Weilburg. On August 15, 1887, the only son in the family, Curt Arnold Otto Rosenthal, was born in Jena and baptized as a Protestant. The family lived at 4 Kahlaische Strasse at the time.

The Rosenthalvilla in Jena

In 1892 the family settled in their villa, which was built according to their ideas, at Kahlaische Strasse 6, today Mälzerstrasse 11. From February 2 to April 8, 1900, Clara Rosenthal stayed in the Jena psychiatry. The diagnosis and the clinical picture are unknown today. Before the First World War , Clara Rosenthal rose to be the most attractive woman in town. Her advocacy for the arts was widely recognized and admission to her circle was considered a privilege.

Eduard Rosenthal was the first chairman of the Jena Art Association in 1903, and Clara was on the advisory board of the Society of Friends of Art in Weimar and Jena. The couple owned works by renowned artists such as Ludwig von Hofmann , Hans Thoma and Christian Rohlfs .

Her son Curt was killed in his unit's first battle on October 30, 1914 in Bas-Maisnil (Northern France). He had signed up as a volunteer and so possibly fought against his former classmates whom he had met during his studies in London and Paris. After a serious illness, her husband Eduard died on June 25, 1926.

In 1928 Clara Rosenthal signed over the villa to the city of Jena because she could no longer pay for their maintenance. But she secured a lifelong right of residence.

Stumbling stone for Clara Rosenthal in front of the Villa Rosenthal in Jena, Mälzerstraße 11

When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, anti-Semitic repression began . Clara Rosenthal was no longer allowed to attend concerts or performances and even the telephone and gramophone were confiscated. She was also forced to take the name Sara . From April 11, 1936 to January 27, 1937, Clara Rosenthal was admitted to the Jena psychiatry. There she suffered a stroke and had to be fed artificially for weeks.

On September 22, 1939, the Rudolstadt regional finance office issued a so-called security order against Clara Rosenthal. As a result, she was no longer able to freely dispose of her property. In addition, the mayor of Jena, Armin Schmidt, tried to drive her out of her villa, but this failed thanks to the appeal of the Jena legal office.

On November 11, 1941, Clara Rosenthal took her own life with Veronal in her villa . Your suicide note is missing. Her body was buried in the north cemetery in Jenas, the grave site is unknown today. Her sole heir was Grete Unrein , the daughter of Ernst Abbes , who had been a friend of her husband. Clara Rosenthal came with her suicide of the deportation and extermination of Thuringian Jews only a few weeks earlier. She no longer had to experience the deportations of Thuringian Jews from spring 1942 to extermination camps in the east such as Auschwitz or Theresienstadt .

The retrieval and identification of a portrait of Clara Rosenthal, created in 1896 by Raffael Schuster-Woldan , attracted media attention in 2014 . Until 2014, the painting of an unnamed lady with a dog was in the possession of the Archdiocese of Paderborn , most recently in the Liborianum Paderborn. In February 2014 it was returned to the Villa Rosenthal based on research by the historian Stephan Laudien.

Villa Rosenthal has been a Jena cultural center since 2009 and awards the “Clara and Eduard Rosenthal scholarships” named after the Rosenthal couple. The villa offers living and working opportunities for two scholarship holders in the fields of fine arts and literature / urban writing. The villa can also be rented for celebrations and meetings. On the upper floor there is a permanent exhibition on the fate of the couple and the history of the villa, a ballroom and the non-public rooms for the scholarship holders.

Spellings

Fanni Klara Elstaedter is in the birth register of the city of Karlsruhe. In most of the later documents the family name is given as Ellstätter.

Web links

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rosenthal family , villa-rosenthal-jena.de, accessed on August 30, 2019
  2. ^ Stephan Laudien: Fate in the Second World War. Adored, ostracized, but not forgotten. on spiegel.online, February 26, 2013
  3. ↑ Illustration of the painting
  4. ↑ The beautiful Clara Rosenthal returns home , nw-news.de, February 8, 2014, accessed on July 19, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Rosenthal, Clara
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Elstaedter, Fanni Clara (maiden name); Elstaedter, Fanni Klara (maiden name); Elstadter, Fanni Clara (maiden name); Ellstätter, Fanni Clara (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German victim of anti-Semitism, wife of Eduard Rosenthal
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH Karlsruhe
DATE OF DEATH November 11, 1941
Place of death Jena