Gertrud Zuelzer

Gertrud and Margarete Zuelzer (around 1920)

Gertrud Zuelzer (born November 26, 1873 in Haynau , Silesia , † June 19, 1968 in West Berlin ) was a German painter .

Life

Gertrud Zuezler was the daughter of the Jewish cloth manufacturer Julius Zuelzer (1838–1889) and of Henriette Zuelzer geb. Friedlaender (1852-1931). Since the mid-1890s, she trained as a painter in Berlin and Paris. Her teachers were Franz Lippisch, Gustave Courtois, Lucien Simon and Charles Cottet. In Paris she was particularly inspired by Paul Cézanne . After her return to Berlin, where she lived with her sister Margarete Zuelzer , she received four years of lessons from Arthur Kampf and became self-employed as a portrait and landscape painter. Her sister Anneliese (1872-1948) had been married to Albert Südekum , a member of the SPD Reichstag, since 1904 . His friend, the SPD politician Ludwig Frank , who fell in 1914 , portrayed her on the occasion of the Great Berlin Art Exhibition in 1915. On December 23, 1916, she converted from Jewish to Protestant. In 1918, as a volunteer war sister, she ran a soldiers' home on the Western Front.

Gertrud Zuelzer: Ludwig Frank (1915)

Her sister Margarete emigrated to the Netherlands in 1938. In September 1942 Gertrud was arrested while trying to illegally cross the Swiss border and transferred to Theresienstadt . Her friend Helene Marwitz born Pniower, widow of the legal scholar Bruno Marwitz , who died in 1939 , with whom she attempted to escape, was deported to Riga and murdered on October 29, 1942. Margarete Zuelzer provided her sister interned in Theresienstadt with clothes and drawing materials from Amsterdam. Gertrud later attributed her survival to these mailings. Some of her Theresienstadt drawings that she sold for bread have survived.

She never got over the death of her sister, who died on August 23, 1943 in the Westerbork transit camp .

After the camp was liberated by the Red Army , she returned to Berlin , seriously ill , where she was again active as an artist. She lived with her niece Rosemarie Bloch nee. Südekum (1906–2002) in Berlin-Zehlendorf . She was a niece of the Upper Silesian "coal baron" Fritz von Friedlaender-Fuld and cousin of the writer Emil Ludwig and the pediatrician Georg Ludwig Zuelzer .

plant

Gertrud Zuezler painted figurative pictures, portraits and landscapes. She exhibited at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition and in the Munich Glass Palace . Most recently she took part in an exhibition by the Charlottenburg Art Office in Wilmersdorf Town Hall in 1956 . Her works include the pictures of Indian student (National Gallery) and going to church (Charlottenburg Art Office).

literature

• Max Bloch: Gertrud and Margarete Zuelzer. Two sisters in the Holocaust. In: Ashkenaz. Volume 24, 2014, Issue 1, pp. 195-214.
• Franziska Bogdanov: Life will look different after this terrible time. The estate of Gertrud and Margarete Zuelzer in the Jewish Museum Berlin in: JMB Journal 13 (2015), pp. 40f.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Zuelzer, Gertrud . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. tape 5 : V-Z. Supplements: A-G . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1961, p. 217 .