Helen Ernst

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Helen Ernst (born March 10, 1904 in Athens , Greece ; † March 26, 1948 in Schwerin ) was a German visual artist (draftsman). As a communist, she was involved in the resistance against National Socialism .

Life

Helen (actually Helene) Ernst was the illegitimate child of the imperial consulate secretary Otto Ernst and his domestic servant Bernhardine Ebermann. The father adopted the daughter, but abandoned the mother for reasons of class. The child grew up without her from then on.

After attending school in Zurich , Stuttgart and Berlin , she began studying at the Berlin Art Academy in 1921 and graduated in 1924 with the exam to become a drawing teacher. Around 1926 she did part-time studies at the Berlin Reimann School in the subjects of fashion drawing and costume design . In Berlin she worked as a drawing teacher for fashion, press illustrator, graphic artist and costume and fashion consultant. From 1928 to 1930 she worked as a freelancer in the costume workshops of the Reimann School under Erna Schmidt-Caroll . The global economic crisis and the acquaintance of her impoverished mother sparked Helen's political interest. In 1931 she became a member of the KPD and the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists . She got involved with the Red Aid and did a lot of drawings for the party newspaper Rote Fahne and for the Illustrierte Rote Post . On a trip to Switzerland and France, she made friends with the graphic artist couple Lea and Hans Grundig . Hans Grundig created an oil painting by Helen Ernst in 1934, which is in the collection of the Moritzburg State Gallery in Halle (Saale).

Helen Ernst lived temporarily in Ronco near Ascona of Fritz Jordi , Carl Meffert and Heinrich Vogeler founded artists' commune Fontana Martina and was a regular contributor of there published from October 1931 to November 1932 magazine of the same name. She created numerous linocuts for this magazine .

In other places she met Hans Baluschek , Joachim Ringelnatz and Ernst Jünger . Her artistic role model was Käthe Kollwitz .

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists on January 30, 1933, Helen Ernst was arrested as a communist and taken into so-called protective custody in the Barnimstrasse women's prison in Berlin . Their possessions, including all drawings that were considered “ degenerate ”, were either confiscated or destroyed. She was released in June 1933, denounced after participating in a leaflet campaign, arrested again and released a few weeks later. In 1934 she emigrated to the Netherlands . Here she worked as a drawing teacher, but continued to be very active against the Nazi regime , including through secret trips to Germany to join resistance fighters in the group around Karl Otto Paetel . Together with Eva Raedt-de Canter, she wrote the book Vrouwengevangenis in 1935 about her experiences in German prisons. She became a member of the artist group De Onafhankelijken and took part in a protest exhibition in Amsterdam against the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

In 1938 Helen Ernst became stateless . Her German citizenship was stripped of her because of "violation of the interests of Germanness abroad". With the occupation of the Netherlands in 1940 she was arrested and deported to Germany . She spent more than four years in the Ravensbrück concentration camp and later in the Barth subcamp in Western Pomerania , before being liberated by Red Army troops on May 1, 1945 . She recorded the years in the camp for posterity in several pencil drawings that were made at risk of death.

She went to Schwerin in the Soviet occupation zone and worked there for the State Committee for Victims of Fascism (OdF), whose director Paul Beckmann married in 1946. Former camp inmates accused Helen Ernst of spying in the concentration camp, whereupon her OdF status and her pension were revoked. It was only two years later, shortly before her death, that she was acquitted of the charge.

Helen Ernst died of tuberculosis as a long-term consequence of her years of imprisonment. She was buried at her own request in Groß Zicker on the island of Rügen . In 2007 a small street near Berlin's Ostbahnhof was named after her.

literature

  • The hidden museum e. V. (Ed.): Helen Ernst. 1904-1948; Berlin – Amsterdam – Ravensbrück; Stations of an anti-fascist artist. ; Exhibition catalog, Das Verborgene Museum , July 14 to August 28, 1994, Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam , September 17 to November 27, 1994, Traum-und-Raum-Verlag, Berlin, 1994, ISBN 3929346036 .
  • Hans Huebner: A fragile human child - Helen Ernst (1904–1948). Biography of an anti-fascist artist between Athens, Zurich, Berlin, Amsterdam, Ravensbrück and Schwerin . trafo, Berlin 2002. , ISBN 3-89626-147-9

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Swantje Kuhfuss-Wickenheiser: The Reimann School in Berlin and London 1902–1943. A Jewish company for international art and design education up to the destruction by the Hitler regime , Aachen 2009, ISBN 978-3-86858-475-2 , pp. 128–130, 524 f.
  2. Image index of art & architecture
  3. cf. Fontana Martina: complete facsimile print of Fritz Jordi u. Heinrich Vogeler 1931/32 in Ronco s./Ascona ed. Half-monthly publication. With e. Appendix by Dietger Pforte , Anabas-Verlag, Giessen 1976, ISBN 3-87038-037-3 .
  4. Helen-Ernst-Strasse. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert )