Franz Monjau

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Franz Monjau (born January 30, 1903 in Cologne ; † February 28, 1945 in the Ohrdruf subcamp (S III) of the Buchenwald concentration camp ) was a German painter and art teacher .

Life

Franz Monjau was born in 1903 in Cologne to Catholic parents. His father Max Monjau was a manufacturer in Barmen ; his mother Paula, née Meyer, came from a Jewish wine merchant family from Mainz. Around 1910 the family moved to Düsseldorf, where the father settled down as the main representative of the AM Eckstein Söhne cigarette factory and Franz Monjau attended the preschool of the municipal reform high school on Rethelstrasse. At the age of nine, Franz Monjau switched to the Hindenburg School in Klosterstrasse (today Humboldt-Gymnasium ) and graduated here in 1922 with the school-leaving certificate. From 1922 to 1926 Franz Monjau studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy with Willy Spatz and finally as a master student with Heinrich Nauen . As a freelance painter, he became a member of Junge Rheinland in 1926 and later the Rhenish Secession . He saw himself as a progressive artist and was politically close to the KPD . He received one of his first major commissions in 1926 at the GeSoLei . In collaboration with Walter Lehmann and Emil Pohle, Monjau made a wall frieze in the Rheingoldsaal (coffee room) on the Rheinterrasse and for the “History of Medicine and Natural Sciences” department he painted a painting each of the scholastic Albertus Magnus and the doctor and opponent of the Witch persecution Johann Weyer . With the fee for the contract, Monjau made it possible for himself to stay in Paris for several months.

On May 10, 1930 Monjau married the trained gymnastics teacher Marie Mertens (1903–1997), called Mieke, whom he had met the year before at a carnival party. From 1931 to 1933 he was a student trainee (factory teacher) in Duisburg and in Düsseldorf at the Real-Gymnasium in Rethelstrasse. Starting in 1928, he had attended lectures in educational science and psychology at the University of Cologne, as well as art history, in order to expand his art studies with training as an art teacher.

As part of a wave of arrests against "leaflet distributors and functionaries" in the KPD environment, Franz and Mieke Monjau and friends were briefly imprisoned by the National Socialists in June 1933 . Among those arrested were Karl Schwesig , Hanns Kralik and Julo Levin , with whom Monjau had studied at the art academy. The student trainee Monjau was given compulsory leave due to the law to restore the civil service , could not take the pedagogical examination, and in September 1933 he was dismissed from the civil service, as well as being expelled from the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts .

Stumbling Stone Franz Monjau, Leopoldstrasse 22

From 1936 to 1938 he taught as a drawing teacher at the private “Jewish elementary school” on Kasernenstrasse. During this time he made painting studies on the Rhine, the North Sea, in Holland and in Belgium. Until the end of 1941 Monjau gave illegal drawing lessons, also at various Jewish schools in Berlin, because his wife had lived and worked there since 1941. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War , Monjau had received retraining from the employment office to become a technical draftsman and became an employee at Alphons Custodis , which was active in the construction of furnaces and chimneys.

His mother Paula Monjau, widow since 1935, lived in 1936 at Helmholtzstrasse 53, in 1940 at Litzmannstrasse 22. After his mother was deported to Theresienstadt, he went into hiding as a first-degree Jewish mongrel for fear of his own deportation . Franz Monjau's works and most of his studio in Düsseldorf were destroyed in a bomb attack on June 12, 1943. Franz and Mieke Monjau last lived in Düsseldorf at Leopoldstraße 22. Ultimately, Monjau was denounced by an employee at Custodis and arrested in October 1944 for “refusing to give the German greeting” and taken to the Ratingen StaPo prison in Wiesenstraße. In January 1945 Franz Monjau was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp , in whose subcamp Ohrdruf (S III) he died on February 28, 1945 as a result of imprisonment and abuse.

A memorial stone for the painters Franz Monjau, Julo Levin, Karl Schwesig and Peter Ludwigs was erected in the southern part of the Golzheimer Friedhof in 1962 . In Berlin, Mieke Monjaus was in close contact with Levin, with whom she had been a close friend since the mid-1930s. Before Levin's deportation in 1943, he gave Mieke Monjau his own works and the collection of drawings by Jewish children that were still with him. From the estate of Franz Monjau and Julo Levin, as well as the collection of children's drawings, the Düsseldorf-based “Monjau-Levin Foundation” emerged in 1998. A stumbling stone was laid in memory of Franz Monjau at Leopoldstrasse 22 .

Works (selection)

  • 1925: Portrait of Johann Weyer , 90.5 × 75 cm, oil on canvas, Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf
  • 1928: Still life with guitar, 50 × 65 cm, oil on canvas, Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn
  • 1929: Three women in the garden , 70 × 55 cm, oil on canvas, Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf
  • 1929: In the café , 81 × 65 cm, oil on canvas, Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf
  • 1929: Carnival (The artist with his wife), 95 × 75 cm, oil on canvas, Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf
  • 1929: Sleeping couple , 46 × 54 cm, oil on canvas, private collection
  • 1929: Southern landscape , 41 × 65 cm, oil on canvas, Museum Kunstpalast , Düsseldorf
  • 1940: View from the Leopoldstrasse studio in the snow , 37 × 50 cm, gouache, Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf

source

  • Brochure of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation from 2013 artist biographies

literature

  • Mieke Monjau (ed.): The painter Franz Monjau 1903–1945, Düsseldorf 1993
  • Elfi Pracht-Jörns: Jüdische Lebenswelten in Rheinland: annotated sources from the early modern times to the present , Böhlau Verlag, Cologne Weimar, 2011, ISBN 978-3-412-20674-1 , pp. 310-313

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Officially commissioned address book of the city of Düsseldorf . Second part of the alphabetical list of residents. Address Book Society, 1924, p. 367 , urn : nbn: de: hbz: 061: 1-483383 ( digitized version ): "Mojau, Max, main representative of the cigarette factory AM Eckstein Sons, Dresden, Worringer Str. 56"
  2. ↑ Friederike Schuler: In the service of the community: Figurative wall painting in the Weimar Republic , Tecum Verlag, Marburg, 2017, ISBN 978-3-8288-3768-3 , p. 441
  3. ↑ Alphons Custodi's story: since 1876 in Düsseldorf, Münsterstrasse 359.
  4. ^ Monjau, Max, Wwe., Helmholtzstrasse 53 , in the address book of the city of Düsseldorf, 1936
  5. ^ Monjau, Max, Wwe., Litzmannstrasse 22 , in the address book of the city of Düsseldorf, 1940
  6. ^ Leopoldstrasse 22: Monjau, Franz, painter; Monjou-Mertens, Mieke (Note: slightly changed name, typo?), Gymnastics teacher, 3rd floor , in the address book of the city of Düsseldorf, 1940, p. 295
  7. ^ Portrait of Johannes Wierus (Weyer), Franz Monjau, 1925
  8. ^ Three women in the garden, Franz Monjau, 1929
  9. ^ In the café, Franz Monjau, 1929
  10. ^ Carnival, Franz Monjau, 1929
personal data
SURNAME Monjau, Franz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH January 30, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne
DATE OF DEATH February 28, 1945
Place of death Ohrdruf Forced Labor Camp