Gustav Rüdenberg

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Gustav Rüdenberg (born February 15, 1868 in Vlotho ; died in 1941 or 1942 in the Riga ghetto ) was a German merchant , bookseller and mail order company, art collector and patron and victim of the Holocaust .

Life

Gustav Rüdenberg was born in Vlotho in 1868 as the son of the Jewish businessman Marcus Rüdenberg . He was the cousin of the bed spring manufacturer Max Rüdenberg and the Hanoverian electrical engineer Reinhold Rüdenberg .

During the founding years of the German Empire , Gustav Rüdenberg opened his company G. Rüdenberg jun. Mail order company for photography and optics, Hanover and Vienna .

In 1906 he married Elsbeth , nee Salmony .

Rüdenberg built up an extensive collection of works of art with paintings, graphics, bronzes and art books. In the middle of World War I , he was one of the founding members of the Kestner Society in 1916 .

After the National Socialists seized power , Gustav and Elsbeth Rüdenberg were forcibly penned into the building on the Jewish cemetery An der Strangriede at An der Strangriede 55, which had been converted into a so-called " Jewish house " and mass quarters as part of the Lauterbacher campaign in September 1941 . From there, the couple - together with many other Jewish fellow sufferers - were deported on December 15 of the same year to the Riga ghetto , where both perished.

More happenings

In the meantime, after a formal expropriation by the German Reich, the Rüdenbergs' art and book collection had been divided up between the then Kestner Museum and the Hanover City Library . Only a little later, most of the objects acquired by the city of Hanover in this way were lost forever in the course of the Second World War and the air raids on Hanover due to aerial bombs .

After the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany , between 1949 and 1952, part of the stolen property of the Rüdenbergs was restituted to their legal successor . Only a few preserved books could be returned to the descendants of the murdered.

The names of Gustav and Elsbeth Rüdenberg have been engraved on a plaque on the memorial for the murdered Jews of Hanover near the Hanover Opera House since 1994 .

Stumbling blocks for Gustav and Elsbeth Rüdenberg in front of today's building at Podbielskistraße 36 in Hanover's List district

In 2007, the Hanover City Archives presented the touring exhibition Expropriated for the first time . Destroyed. Compensated. The Gustav Rüdenberg art collection 1941–1956 . In this exhibits shown the patron, the badly damaged in the war since the Lower Saxony State Museum Hannover camped. In the summer of 2008 the exhibition was a guest at the then Hanover University of Applied Sciences (FHH, later HsH), Faculty III - Media, Information and Design. During both exhibitions, donations were collected for the laying of stumbling blocks in order to finally pay for the stumbling blocks with money from the city archive for Gustav and the FHH for Elsbeth Rüdenberg. When the artist Gunter Demnig relocated it to the last voluntary place of residence of the Rüdenbergs at Podbielskistraße 36 in the List district on March 22, 2010, Cornelia Regin from the city archive and Rolf Hüper from the FHH were also present, as well as representatives from the state capital and the Jewish community of Hanover.

As part of the provenance research , Cornelia Regin from the Hanover City Archives repeated her lecture on Gustav Rüdenberg's art collection in 2015 in the Lower Saxony State Museum.

See also

literature

  • Rüdiger Fleiter: City administration in the Third Reich. Persecution policy at the municipal level using the example of Hanover (= Hanoverian Studies , Vol. 10; also dissertation 2005 at the University of Hanover under the title The participation of the Hanoverian city administration in the Nazi persecution policy ). Hahnsche Buchhandlung und Verlag, Hannover 2006, ISBN 978-3-7752-4960-7 and ISBN 3-7752-4960-5 , pp. 210-213 ( table of contents and text of the volume).
  • Cornelia Regin: Acquisitions by the City of Hanover. The paintings from the Gustav Rüdenberg collection. In: Hannoversche Geschichtsblätter , New Series 61 (2007), pp. 167–174.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Peter Schulze : Rüdenberg, (1) Gustav. In: Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein (eds.) U. a .: City Lexicon Hanover . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2009, ISBN 978-3-89993-662-9 , p. 528.
  2. ↑ Compare the information under the GND number of the German National Library
  3. ↑ a b Martin Scholz (responsible): A stumbling block for the Rüdenberg couple , press release number 5/2010 from March 19, 2010 on the Hanover University of Applied Sciences, Faculty III - Media, Information and Design, last accessed on October 23, 2016
  4. ↑ Compare Margit Kautenburger: Lecture “Expropriated. Destroyed. Compensated. Die Kunstsammlung Gustav Rüdenberg 1941–1956 ” on the website of the Lower Saxony Provenance Research Network of the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture , Press and Public Relations Department, last accessed on October 23, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Rüdenberg, Gustav
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German merchant, bookseller and mail order company, art collector and patron and victim of the Holocaust
DATE OF BIRTH February 15, 1868
PLACE OF BIRTH Vlotho
DATE OF DEATH 1941 or 1942
Place of death Riga ghetto