Eleonora von Mendelssohn

Eleonora Gabriella Marie Josepha von Mendelssohn , 1919–1926 Eleonora Fischer (born January 12, 1900 in Berlin , † January 24, 1951 in New York City ) was a German actress.

Life

Eleonora von Mendelssohn was the daughter of the private banker Robert von Mendelssohn (1857–1917), partner in Mendelssohn & Co. , and his wife, the concert pianist Giulietta, who in turn was a daughter of Michele Gordigianis . After Robert von Mendelssohn's death in 1917, Giulietta von Mendelssohn left the family villa in Berlin-Grunewald , which also housed the family's art collection, to her two children, Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn . The siblings added a few works, for example by Toulouse-Lautrec , but the focus of interest for Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn was more acting, literature and music. Eleonora von Mendelssohn corresponded with Rainer Maria Rilke and Hugo von Hofmannsthal . On stage she worked with Fritz Kortner , Alexander Moissi , Gustaf Gründgens , Heinrich George and Werner Krauss . Among her lovers were Max Reinhardt and Arturo Toscanini .

The morphine addicted and often unhappy in love Eleonora von Mendelssohn married the Swiss pianist Edwin Fischer in 1919 , the Hungarian Rittmeister Imre von Jeszenszky in her second marriage, the Austrian actor Rudolf Forster in her third marriage and the actor Martin Kosleck in her fourth marriage .

After the takeover of the Nazis Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn emigrated, although they were baptized and had initially feared reprisals. Eleonora von Mendelssohn moved to Schloss Kammer am Attersee - in August 1925, half of the castle was acquired by her and her future husband Emmerich von Jeszenszky, who became the sole owner after the divorce in 1936. In 1934 Eleonora von Mendelssohn went on a European tour under Max Reinhardt. To finance this, she sold El Greco's Laocoon . In autumn 1935 she emigrated to the USA with her brother. Eleonora von Mendelssohn tried to continue her career on Broadway and also worked as a spokeswoman for the German-language news broadcasts of the Office of War Information, Francesco von Mendelssohn became Max Reinhardt's assistant director. Both supported other emigrants who were in financial need.

Eleonora von Mendelssohn was able to export some of her works of art and furniture to Austria as removal goods. In this way, works by Corot , Manet and Monet could be saved. She had transported a self-portrait by Rembrandt and a portrait of Hendrikje Stoffels to Basel ; in Berlin only copies made by grandfather were left. The Basel art dealer Christoph Bernoulli kept the real paintings until a cousin of the siblings, Robert von Mendelssohn, insisted, for fear of discovering the fraud, that they should be returned to Germany and deposited in the Mendelssohn Bank. This was "Aryanized" in 1938. In 1940, at Alfred Hentzen's instigation, the pictures were placed in the Prussian State Bank to make it impossible to sell them abroad. Aldo Cima , Giulietta von Mendelssohn's asset manager, had numerous works from the Mendelssohn collection sold by the Viennese art dealer Otto Schatzker , including Degas ' Harlequin and Columbine , two tree landscapes by Corot, L'Inconnue by Manet and Une Allée du Jardin de Monet, Giverny by Monet and the two paintings that were still attributed to Rembrandt at the time. Schatzker offered these two works at the same time to the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna and Hans Posse , who was shopping for the Führermuseum in Linz . The Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien initially acquired both paintings, but Baldur von Schirach intervened and secured the Hendrikje Stoffels for the Linz project at a price of 900,000 Reichsmarks.

Meanwhile, Eleonora von Mendelssohn found herself forced to sell works of art from her collection in the USA in order to earn a living and the treatment of her brother who had been alcoholic since 1937. She sold Vincent van Gogh's irises in 1939 , a Pissarro landscape in 1941, a painting by Alfred Sisley in 1942 and, after the Second World War, the port of Bordeaux by Manet.

In 1946 she traveled to Europe and met with Aldo Cima to develop strategies for the recovery of the picture collection. Cima advised her to bribe the museum directors, but her lawyer disapproved of this suggestion and advocated regaining possession of the paintings either through legal channels or by buying them back. The problem for the lawyer Karl Trauttmannsdorff, whom she hired in 1948 to have the pictures returned, turned out to be the fact that Giulietta von Mendelssohn herself was not of Jewish descent and did not seem to have sold the paintings under duress. At the Central Collecting Point in Munich, where Hendrikje Stoffels turned up, Eduard Hanfstaengl even claimed that Giulietta von Mendelssohn was an enthusiastic supporter of National Socialism.

In 1950 she made her only film appearance in a supporting role in blood revenge in New York at the side of Gene Kelly .

In January 1951, Francesco von Mendelssohn was arrested after a fight and subsequently suffered a stroke. Eleonora von Mendelssohn's fourth husband threw himself out of the window at the same time in a love crisis and suffered a spinal injury. While the two men were in the hospital, Eleonora von Mendelssohn was found dead in her accommodation on January 24, 1951. She had an ether-soaked gauze cloth on her mouth, over it lay a towel and a bath mat. A tube of sleeping pills and a half-empty bottle of ether were found next to the dead woman, and several syringes were found on her bedside table. An autopsy found no signs of third-party fault, but rumors persisted that Eleonora von Mendelssohn had been murdered.

After Eleonora von Mendelssohn's death, her executor Lillian D. Rock and her brother continued to seek restitution of the works of art. Attempts were made to prove that Giulietta von Mendelssohn had given the art collection to her children on December 31, 1932. Even Albert Einstein lobbied for the return of the paintings, but the application was refused in Germany in 1953 and Lillian D. skirt was then no longer active. Francesco von Mendelssohn was no longer able to take care of the matter. He first lived in a psychiatric clinic, where a lobotomy may have been performed on him, and later with Lilly Wittels, the widow of the psychiatrist Fritz Wittels . When the case of the pictures from the Mendelssohn collection was tried before the Restitution Commission in Vienna in 1964, no representative of Francesco von Mendelssohn appeared. Heirs of Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn tried again at the beginning of the 21st century to prove that Giulietta von Mendelssohn had to give up the pictures due to persecution.

literature

• Thomas Blubacher : "Is there anything better than longing?" The siblings Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn. Henschel-Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-89487-623-4 .
• Thomas Blubacher : Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn. 1900–1951 and 1901–1972. In: Melissa Müller and Monika Tatzkow, Lost Pictures. Lives lost. Jewish collectors and what became of their works of art , Munich ²2009, licensed edition for the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt, ISBN 978-3-534-23471-4 , pp. 72–85.
• Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945. Edited by the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem. Saur, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 .

Web links

• Eleonora von Mendelssohn in the Internet Movie Database (English)