Hansi Share

Hansi Share (born April 29, 1887 in Berlin ; † January 10, 1981 in Hollywood ) was an American doll maker of German descent who made dolls from composite material or hard plastic with rooted human hair from 1941 to 1952 . The wealthy art collector lived in Berlin before emigrating to Hollywood before 1940, where she set up her doll manufacture.

Life

Hansi Share was born on April 29, 1887 as Johanna Zender in Berlin. Nothing is known about her Jewish parents. Johanna, whose first name was Hansi, married the businessman Hermann Ploschitzki. Her husband had owned a department store in Potsdam since 1905 and later became a co-owner of the Lindemann department store, which merged with the Karstadt Group in 1929. The couple lived in a stately villa in Berlin-Dahlem , Messelstrasse 5-11. It is not known whether the marriage resulted in children. The husband died in 1932, leaving his wife with a fortune in the millions and a very valuable art collection. In 1936 the Reich Press School moved into the villa . The property was parceled out and a settlement of the “Officials Housing Association of Berlin” was built on. After Hermann Ploschitzki's death, Hansi Share married the painter and writer Julius Wilhelm Fehr (1890–1971), from whom she was divorced in 1941 at the latest.

In the late 1930s, Share decided to emigrate to California because of the increasing reprisals of the Nazi regime. She had her household and the art collection packed into nine furniture containers (“liftvans”) by the shipping company Schenker and transported to the Hamburg free port, from where they were to be shipped to the USA. However, it was never shipped because the Gestapo confiscated the containers. At the end of 1941, Share's assets and her art collection in Hamburg were auctioned well below their value and the proceeds were transferred to the Gestapo at the end of the war to the regional tax office.

Share emigrated to the USA in 1940 at the latest, but earlier. She was already listed as an American in the 1940 US census. The 52-year-old was married to the 41-year-old American Leon M. Share, who was of Russian descent, and lived with him in 1734 North Gardner Street in Hollywood . All that is known about him is that in 1949 he applied for a patent for a scented sachet designed as a princess doll. From 1941 on, Share built her "Monica Doll Studio", which lasted until 1952 (see below). She lived for almost thirty years before she died in Hollywood on January 10, 1981 at the old age of 93.

Monica Doll Studio

The lawyer and writer Ferdinand Kahn immigrated to the USA in 1939. He worked in Hedi Schoop's ceramics workshop in Hollywood , which became very well known in the 1940s with its “California Pottery”, and was the editor of the German exile magazine “ Aufbau ”. In Germany he had met Hansi Ploschitzki, who lived in exquisite circumstances, as "one of the most elegant and spoiled women in Berlin". Kahn lived on Hollywood Boulevard , not too far from the Shares residence on Gardner Street, so that he witnessed the creation and advancement of Share's doll studio. In 1945, one month after the end of the war, he published an article in "Aufbau" about the "path of an immigrant to success and fame": "Hansi Share and her" Million DollarBabeDoll "". In it, he described how Share set up her doll studio and made it famous in just five years.

Hansi Share had always displeased toy dolls with glued-on wigs, because they soon lost their head of hair and became bald. From 1941 onwards she pursued her goal of firmly rooting the dolls' hair with a determination and tenacity that one would not have expected of a woman from the upper middle class. "She invented a mass for the heads into which real hair could be embedded - one after the other - and created the doll's head, whose hair can be styled, burned, washed and undulated!" The dolls' heads were made of a cement-like composite material (later also hard plastic) with painted eyes, pouty lips and feathered brows and with faces that were modeled on famous Hollywood stars. The 30 to 60 centimeter tall dolls were delivered with fashionable dresses under the name Monica, later also Veronica, Joan, Rosalind and Marion.

Initially, Shares Studio consisted of a garage. Before the first doll left the studio after a year, Share hired two employees to help with the development work. When sales picked up, she expanded her studio into a small factory and invented a machine to pull the hair into the skull. The dolls were only marked on the original packaging, not on the doll itself, and were soon sold "in the most elegant houses" in the country with a paper tag labeled "Monica Doll Hollywood".

Looting and reparation

The seizure of Share's property and her art collection by the Gestapo and the subsequent auctioning in 1941 were covered by formal legal provisions of the Nazi regime, measures that, under the rule of law, amounted to plunder (see Action 3 , the cover name for the confiscation of Jewish assets). After the war, Share filed for a refund in 1949, which led to the identification of 32 "bargain hunters" who had profited from their property auctioning in 1941. They claimed not to have known that Jewish property was being squandered at junk prices, and that the objects that were auctioned were also destroyed or resold in the war. Share accepted the offer of the Oberfinanzdirektion to take over their claims as joint and several debtors, in the hope of simplifying and accelerating the repayment. This hope turned out to be a fallacy, however, because it was not until 1965, 17 years after the application was submitted, that Share was reimbursed nearly one million DM to compensate for the stolen property.

literature

• Ferdinand Kahn : Hansi Share and her "Million DollarBabeDoll". In: Structure , Volume 11, Number 23, June 8, 1945 page 16-17, online: .
• Angelika Kaltenbach: Monuments in Berlin. District Steglitz-Zehlendorf, district Dahlem. Petersberg 2011, page 53.
• Jürgen Lillteicher : The restitution of Jewish property in West Germany after the Second World War. A study of the experience of persecution, the rule of law and politics of the past 1945–1971. Dissertation. Freiburg im Breisgau 2002, pages 193–198, [3] .
• Jürgen Lillteicher : Robbery, Law and Restitution: The Restitution of Jewish Property in the Early Federal Republic. Göttingen 2007, page 257 ff.

Archives

• Badische Landesbibliothek , Karlsruhe: Letter from Hansi Ploschitzki to Karl Obser , Berlin, 1926, signature: K 2114, I, 124.

Footnotes

1. ↑ ancestry.com, Johanna Zender , entry on Johanna Ploschitzki in: Deutscher Reichsanzeiger , December 20, 1941.
2. ↑ #Kahn 1945.1 , #Lillteicher 2002 , page 193. - Ferdinand Kahn gave Harry as the husband's first name.
3. ↑ # Kaltenbach 2011 .
4. ↑ ancestry.com, Julius Wilhelm Fehr , entry on Johanna Ploschitzki in: Deutscher Reichsanzeiger , December 20, 1941.
5. ↑ #Lillteicher 2002 , page 193-194.
6. ↑ Abstract with illustration: US patent USD158620 p .
7. ↑ US Census 1940: [1] , [2] .
8. ↑ #Kahn 1945.1 .
9. ↑ #Kahn 1945.1 , Monica Doll Studio , Doll Reference .
10. ↑ #Lillteicher 2002 .