David Friedmann (Artist)

Stumbling block for David Friedmann

David Friedmann (born December 20, 1893 in Mährisch-Ostrau , Austria-Hungary , † February 27, 1980 in St. Louis , Missouri ) was an Austro-Czech-American artist and a survivor of the Holocaust .

Life

David Friedmann came from a humble background. He had three siblings. He was interested in art from an early age, but also in playing the violin. Friedmann trained as a sign painter and moved to Berlin in 1911 , where he became a theater painter, graphic artist and press illustrator . He studied with Leo Kober and in the painting school of Lewin-Funcke .

Since he had later learned painting from Lovis Corinth , which, as well as training in graphic techniques, had been helped by a recommendation from Max Liebermann , he was employed as a war painter on the Russian front during World War I. In 1918 he became a Czech citizen. After the war he settled in Berlin again, where he had his studio at 23 Xantener Strasse. Felix Nussbaum worked in the same house, but it is not known whether the two artists knew each other.

Friedmann studied violin under Carl Flesch in 1921 , but mainly worked as a press draftsman, including for sheets of the Ullstein publishing house , and published works in the Jewish magazine Schlemiel . He created portraits of numerous celebrities and exhibited regularly, including at the Berlin Secession .

Stumbling block for Olga Schweitzer

After he was banned from working as an artist in 1933 , he gave up his studio and founded a painting company. The operetta singer Olga Schweitzer , who had performed under the stage name Olga Sarny or Olga Sarni, worked for him as a secretary during this time. Olga Schweitzer and David Friedmann had known each other since 1914; it can be assumed that it was not least because of her that he stayed in Berlin. Arrested in 1938 after an intrigue and sentenced to prison, Olga Schweitzer committed suicide in autumn 1938. David Friedmann made sure that she was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weißensee (Section W II, Row 9, Grave No. 97529). The grave site is unmarked.

Stumbling block for Mathilde Friedmann

Stumbling block for Mirjam Friedmann

Four years after the National Socialists came to power, Friedmann married Mathilde Fuchs, a daughter of Professor Maximilian Fuchs . The daughter Mirjam Helene was born in September 1938. A few months later, in December 1938, the family fled to Prague . David Friedmann had to leave his complete artistic work behind. At first he was able to store part of his property and his pictures with the forwarding company Silberstein & Co.; However, this was later confiscated by the Gestapo there - probably in autumn 1941 . About 1300 works are said to have been lost on this way; According to Friedmann, he lost around 2,000 of his own works of art during the Third Reich .

From 1939 to 1941 Friedmann worked again as an artist in Prague. During this time he created a series of portraits of members of the local Jewish community. David Friedmann was deported with his wife and child to the Litzmannstadt ghetto on the first Prague Jewish transport on October 16, 1941 , after all of his artistic work had again been confiscated. In the ghetto he was able to design small jewelry, cigarette boxes and similar things until 1942 and also paint and draw scenes from the ghetto whose chronicle he wanted to create. Photographs of some drawings from this period have been preserved. The ghetto was dissolved in August 1944. Friedmann's daughter was sick at the time and was in hospital with his wife. Separated from one another, the family members were deported to Auschwitz , where Mathilde and Mirjam Friedmann perished.

David Friedmann survived in the Gleiwitz subcamp by working as a painter for the SS guards. After a death march , he was liberated on January 25, 1945 in the Blechhammer camp in Upper Silesia . He returned to Prague, where he learned that his wife and child were no longer alive.

In the following years he created numerous works of art in which he thematized his experiences in the ghetto and camp. In 1948 he married a second time. His second wife, Hildegard Taussig, had survived the Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Christianstadt camps. He fled with her to Israel via Austria and Italy in 1949 after the communists came to power in Czechoslovakia. In 1950 his second daughter, whom he again named Miriam, was born. From 1954 the family lived in the USA . There David Friedmann worked for an advertising agency and made posters. From 1960, the year of his naturalization, he called himself David Friedman.

Four stumbling blocks in front of the house on Paderborner Strasse 9 in Berlin remind us of David Friedmann, his first wife, his first daughter and Olga Schweitzer . A lodge brother from the Freemason Lodge Germania zur Einigkeit , which Friedmann had belonged to since 1922, took care of the laying of these stumbling blocks.

Friedmann's works can be found in the Yad Vashem Art Museum in Jerusalem , the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC , the Jewish Museum and the National Museum in Prague, the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin and the Royal Dutch Library in The Hague .

Web links

Commons : David Friedmann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e} biography on www.chgs.umn.edu
2. ↑ ^{a b c} lostart.de
3. ↑ Stumbling blocks at Paderborner Str. 9 . On the homepage of Berlin.de (Lexicon: Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf from A to Z Stolpersteine ​​Paderborner Str. 9) (accessed on June 30, 2013).
4. ↑ Stolpersteine ​​in Paderborner Straße 9