Max Baldner

Max "Bimbo" Baldner (* 1887 ; † before October 4, 1946 in Berlin ) was a German cellist , music teacher and persecuted by National Socialism .

Life

Baldner was married to Charlotte Baldner (1901–1996), daughter and heiress of the Berlin department store owner Leopold Lindemann (1862–1923). They had four children, the twins Monika and Thomas (* 1928) and the twins Angelika and Lutz (* 1931). Thomas later moved to the USA and Lutz to Argentina; Angelika and Monika stayed in Germany.

The Baldners lived in Berlin-Dahlem and from 1933 to 1936 also at the Klenderhof in Kampen on Sylt .

After the seizure of power by Hitler , a period of suffering began without same for them in 1936 with the expulsion took from the North Sea island began.

Since Baldner had refused to separate from his Jewish wife, he was expelled from the Reich Chamber of Culture and prohibited from any activity in the cultural field. A job that had already been promised to teach a training class at the Berlin State University of Music failed for the reasons mentioned. His wife received a so-called Jewish stamp in her passport , his children were expelled from the grammar school and most of the property was confiscated.

The Baldner family lived in their house in Berlin-Dahlem until the end of the war. To avoid the bombing war, she spent a long time in 1943 on the Lower Silesian estate of the resistance fighter Paul Graf Yorck von Wartenburg in Klein-Öls .

In November 1944 Baldner was deported by the Gestapo as a forced laborer to a labor camp in Leuna , where he had to do the most difficult and humiliating work behind barbed wire. There he became seriously ill and had to be discharged. Badly damaged in body and soul, he returned to Berlin.

After the war, Baldner's representative villa was requisitioned by the American occupying forces . Persecution by the National Socialists did not prevent the family from being evicted from their own home.

After being evicted, the Baldner family moved into an abandoned villa on Podbielskiallee, in the immediate vicinity of their house, which belonged to the Berlin merchant Ernst von Morgen and in whose air raid shelter they had already found shelter during the nights of bombing. Baldner died there in 1946 shortly before he was 59 years old.

Musical work

Baldner attended the Rheinische Musikschule in Cologne and studied at the Würzburg Conservatory with Ernst Kanblay . Under the patronage of the banker and philanthropist Franz von Mendelssohn the Younger , he lived in Mendelssohn's house with the musicians Artur Schnabel and Carl Flesch , who were studying musical works with Mendelssohn. They invited Baldner and his companion Richard Heber to play a quartet .

From 1912 to 1914 he was a member of the Magyar Trio . In 1916 he and Heber became part of Karl Klingler's string quartet at the invitation of Karl Klingler , where he played for ten years and gained international fame.

After the war he became a cello teacher at the Berlin University of Music and played in the Zernick Quartet .

The renowned cellist was particularly concerned with Ludwig van Beethoven's late string quartets and the work of Arnold Schönberg .

art

In 1934 Arno Breker made a bronze bust of Max Baldner.

literature

• Werner Breunig, Jürgen Wetzel (eds.): Five months in Berlin: Letters from Edgar N. Johnson from 1946 (= series of publications by the Berlin State Archives; Volume 18). de Gruyter Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-486-73566-6 , pp. 129–131 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
• Claus Jacobi : A castle in the mudflats. The Klenderhof and intolerance. In: Sven Simon (Ed.): Sylt. Adventure of an island . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1980, ISBN 3-455-08920-8 , S, 208-215.

Web links

• Letter of condolence from Prof. Dr. Kurt Hueck, Berlin, from October 8, 1946 to Charlotte Baldner

Individual evidence

1. ^ Culture in brief: the cellist Max Baldner has died. In: Die Neue Zeitung , October 4, 1946, p. 4.
2. ↑ Max Baldner's bronze bust by Arno Breker.