Fritz Crzellitzer

Fritz Crzellitzer (born August 14, 1876 in Berlin ; † May 7, 1942 in Tel Aviv ) was a German architect .

origin

Fritz Crzellitzer was the son of the Breslau merchant Emil Crzellitzer (1838–1901) and Betty Weinberg (died 1882). Fritz had an older sister, Rose (born 1874). After Betty's death, his father married Adele Brutkiewitz (1862–1902), the mother of Fritz 'half-brothers Erich (born 1885) and Hans (born 1888).

Emil's father Simon Crzellitzer (1806–1878), who was initially a confectioner in Ohlau , moved to Breslau for lack of professional success. Simon's first wife Amalie Joachimsohn (1810–1836) died early, as did her son Jakob in 1834 as an infant and daughter Dorothea (1832–1837) of emaciation. His second wife Rosalie Friedländer (1811–1868) is the mother of Emil and Siegfried (1839–1908), the father of the ophthalmologist and genealogist Arthur Czellitzer (1872–1943). A sugar confectionery factory founded by Simon in Breslau was particularly known there for its "breast caramels" and at times employed up to 20 workers. Later, the company, which was continued by Siegfried, was technically overtaken by the competition using steam engines.

After years of searching for a permanent position as a sworn broker, Emil came to a large fortune. a. as a secret agent of the Prussian government in the purchase of shares in the course of Bismarck's plans to nationalize the railway , and as a trader on the Berlin stock exchange. Emil lived in the house at Sigismundstrasse 3 in 1883, one floor below the painter Adolf Menzel , and later owned the house at Matthäikirchstrasse 5.

Life

Fritz showed a talent for music, painting and sculpture early on. On the advice of his father, he studied structural engineering at the Technical University of Charlottenburg from 1894 to 1896 . In 1904 he married Martha Schoenflies (1877–1946), daughter of the wealthy cigar manufacturer Georg Schoenflies, who had moved his business from Landsberg an der Warthe to Berlin in 1878. Martha and Fritz's children were Franz (1905–1979), Robert (1907–1940) and Hedwig, called "Hete", (1909–1957). Martha strove to become an opera singer at times, and the three children were also musically and artistically inclined. Franz, who emigrated to Israel, was a well-known composer. Robert died in an air raid in France, leaving behind his wife Ruth Neufeld and two children. Hedwig worked as a fashion illustrator first in France, then in Italy, where she married the well-known radio editor Vittorio Cramer (born 1907) and had a daughter in 1940.

Fritz initially strove for a professional career in the civil service and after completing his studies and legal clerkship began an assessor as a government architect . However, he later settled in Berlin as a private architect. At the same time he worked as an expert appraiser for various mortgage banks.

Villa Stubenrauchstrasse 9 in Berlin-Zehlendorf, watercolor 1910

In 1906 he acquired a plot of land in Zehlendorf near Berlin and built a large villa for his family and a smaller one for his mother-in-law in the style of Hermann Muthesius . His house, located in a large garden, had a high pitched roof, a music hall on the ground floor and a studio on the upper floor. In 1908 he built the stables of Villa Thyssen near the Stienitzsee in Hennickendorf near Berlin. Crzellitzer designed a villa similar to his house in 1909 in Berlin-Lichterfelde for his befriended painter Moritz Posener , the father of the later architectural historian Julius Posener (1904–1996). Before entering school, Julius was raised privately with the Crzellitzer children and was friends with Franz and Robert even when they attended the same secondary school.

Australian Embassy in Berlin, 2008

In 1912–1913 he built a building complex on Berlin's Wallstrasse with its own branch canal to the Spree. Various companies were located in the building before the war, from 1945–46 briefly the Central Committee of the KPD , 1946–1992 the Dietz Verlag and, since 2003, the Australian Embassy . Crzellitzer also designed several villas on the Griebnitzsee .

Through the family connections of his wife Martha, he was commissioned in 1913 to build a people's welfare house in her hometown of Landsberg an der Warthe , which was donated by the Landsberg entrepreneur and social reformer Max Bahr (1848–1930). The building included a sports hall, a library with a reading room and club rooms for youth organizations. It was soon used as a hospital during the First World War and as a school from 1920. During the Second World War , the inner courtyard was the assembly point for the Landsberg Jews to be transported to concentration and extermination camps. The lower wing with the gym was destroyed in the Second World War and a new school building was later built on the site. The main wing of Crzellitzer's ensemble that has been preserved has been rebuilt and expanded and is used as the building for the “ Henryk Sucharski ” technical college for electrical engineering .

In Charlottenburg near Berlin, Crzellitzer designed a country house, completed around 1917, for the engineer and mathematician Hans Jacob Reissner . Crzellitzer took part in the First World War as a soldier. As a result of the increasing anti-Semitism in the 1920s, the orders fell and the activity as an expert came to the fore for him.

1928–1930 he built a public indoor swimming pool (Volksbad) again in Landsberg. The public bath was also financed by Max Bahr, who lived to see the inauguration of the bath. Even after the Second World War, the building was used as a bathing establishment and in 2008 it was converted into a gym for table tennis.

From 1930 onwards, Crzellitzer suffered increasingly from heart problems, which until 1938 led to several attacks of weakness and prevented him from going out for months. He also drafted the plans for the house of the pathologist Ludwig Pick , a cousin of Martha, completed in Berlin-Zehlendorf in 1936 , with a non-Jewish architect being put forward.

In the summer of 1939, Hedwig obtained his and Martha's departure to Italy. A few days later, she and all other immigrant Jews were expelled from Italy. After their residence permit had been extended several times because of Fritz's poor health, they traveled to Franz in Tel Aviv in March 1940, where Martha suffered febrile appendicitis on the ship. Fritz died there in 1942. Franz published his song compositions in 1970.

plant

buildings

• Landsberg on the Warta (Gorzów Wielkopolski)
  • People's Welfare House, Ulica Dabrowskiego, 1913–1914
  • Volksbad, Ulica Wladislawa Jagielly, 1928–1930
• Berlin-Zehlendorf (see also list of cultural monuments in Berlin-Zehlendorf )
  • smaller villa Stubenrauchstrasse 7, 1906–1907
  • larger villa Stubenrauchstrasse 9, 1906–1907
  • Villa Stubenrauchstrasse 12, 1928
  • House Pick, Kunzendorfstrasse 20, 1936
• Posener's house in Berlin-Lichterfelde, Baseler Strasse 79, 1909
• Wallstrasse 76–79 industrial complex in Berlin-Mitte, 1912–1913
• Marstall in Hennickendorf , Berliner Strasse, 1908
• Landhaus Reissner in Berlin-Charlottenburg, Ortelsburger Allee 5 (formerly No. 2), around 1917

Compositions

• Franz Crzellitzer (Ed.): Twenty-one songs. Middle register , for voice and piano. 1st edition. Tel Aviv 1970, Robert Forberg, Bonn 1975

literature

• Arthur Czellitzer: History of my family. Tilburg 1942, pp. 36–43, cjh.org (PDF; 114 MB) at the Leo Baeck Institute
• Julius Posener: Almost as old as the century . Birkhäuser, Basel 1993, p. 50 f.
• Myra Warhaftig : German Jewish Architects before and after 1933. The Lexicon. Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 2005, p. 110 ff.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Oskar Grüner (Ed.): Modern villas in master watercolors. Friedrich Wolfrum & Co., Vienna / Leipzig 1910 ( portfolio with 64 plates).
2. ↑ Julius Posener: Almost as old as the century. 1993, p. 61, p. 132.
3. ^ ^{A b} Günter Schlusche, Claudia Marcy: Report on the Architectural Tour , pages 1–4 in: Architectural Tours 2012 . ( Memento of the original from March 6, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 201 kB; 7 pages) Society for Research into the Life and Work of German-speaking Jewish Architects 
4. ↑ Horst Kalthoff: "I was a democrat and a pacifist". The life of the German-Jewish citizen Otto Hecht (1900–1973) and the fate of his relatives. Donat, 2005, p. 151. See also: Hans H. Simmer: Der Berliner Pathologe Ludwig Pick (1868–1944). Life and work of a Jewish German. Matthiesen, 2000. (= Treatises on the history of medicine and the natural sciences , Volume 94.)
5. ↑ Berliner Architekturwelt , 19th year 1916/1917, p. 90 ff., From it: 3 images in the photo archive Photo Marburg