Reinhold Cassirer

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Reinhold Cassirer (born March 12, 1908 in Berlin ; † October 17, 2001 in Johannesburg ) was a German-South African gallery owner of Jewish origin and husband of the Nobel Prize laureate Nadine Gordimer .

Life

Reinhold Cassirer came from the Cassirer family . His father was the Berlin entrepreneur Hugo Cassirer , his mother Charlotte (Lotte) Cassirer, née Jacobi. His uncles were Ernst Cassirer , Bruno Cassirer and Paul Cassirer .

Cassirer studied political science and sociology at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg . There he became friends with Golo Mann . In June 1932, Cassirer came to his friend's aid when he and his friends were surrounded by students and beaten with sticks in the university. Cassirer punched the bleeding Golo man out of the ring.

In 1933 Cassirer was in Heidelberg with the dissertation The Relationship Between Capital and Labor in England. The Mond Turner Conference 1928–1930 for Dr. phil. PhD. His family's company was expropriated during the Nazi era and taken over by Siemens . Cassirer still managed to smuggle his father's art collection into the Netherlands. The reason for emigrating from Germany was the death of his stepfather Alfred Fürstenburg in 1935, who had been banned from working as a doctor and shot himself when he was about to be picked up by the SS .

Cassirer emigrated to South Africa with his first wife in 1935. He first worked for a mining company that was a customer of his father's company. In 1939 he volunteered to join the Union Defense Force . During the Second World War , he listened to and translated German radio messages for the British Army . After military service in South Africa, he received citizenship of the country.

In 1954 he met Nadine Gordimer and married her the same year as a second marriage. In 1954, at her insistence, he visited his native Berlin with her. It was her first trip to Europe. Cassirer never met any of his childhood friends; they had all emigrated. Gordimer wrote the story Face from Atlantis about her husband's family in 1956 , which she dedicated to "Reinhold Cassirer - my husband". On later visits to Germany, the couple met Günter Grass and the publisher Arnold Conradi, along with others

In South Africa, Cassirer was initially self-employed in the mining industry.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Cassirer and Gordimer supported the then illegal African National Congress . He often said: "I came from one fascist, racist country and look where I landed up!" "(I came from a fascist, racist country and see where I ended up) in 1969, on the proposal of the President of Sotheby’s , who knew about the Cassirer family's understanding of art, head of Sotheby's South Africa office; he held the office until 1979. In 1980, at the age of 70, he founded the Cassirer Fine Art gallery in Johannesburg. He sponsored artists such as William Kentridge and Gerard Sekoto . His gallery exhibited artists such as David Koloane , Sam Nhlengethwa, Deborah Bell and Karel Nel.

Cassirer died in 2001 at the age of 93. Nadine Gordimer overcame his death with difficulty and said: "He was the first to read my novels." In 2006 she was attacked by four young men in her home. She refused to give up the wedding ring from her marriage to Cassirer.

The grief over the death of her husband influenced Gordimer's literary work. She dedicated the short story volume Loot (2003), German booty and other stories (2003) to him. and the volume of short stories Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black , published in 2007 , which was published in German translation in 2008 under the title Beethoven was one sixteenth black .

In memory of her husband, Gordimer donated the Reinhold Cassirer Award, which is given to South African painters and draftsmen up to the age of 35. She said of him: “[...] to have met Reinhold Cassirer was inexpressible luck. We were so close in every relationship. [...] He kept me away from any disturbance. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ genealogy.metastudies.net ( Memento of the original from July 15, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / genealogy.metastudies.net
  2. ↑ Klaus W. Jonas, Holger R. Stunz: Golo Mann, life and work. Chronicle and bibliography (1929-2004) Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2004 ISBN 3-447-05053-5 , p. 36
  3. ↑ Man with a sense of possibility In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of January 17, 2004, p. 46 ( digitized version )
  4. ↑ a b c d Julia Encke: I am not brave . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung online from September 7, 2008
  5. ↑ a b c d Bag Factory announces The Reinhold Cassirer Award  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: The South African Art Times of April 4, 2011 (English)@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.arttimes.co.za  
  6. ↑ Speech by Nadine Gordimer at the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg on May 20, 1998 (English)
  7. ↑ Paul Hühnerfeld: Homesickness for Europe . In: Die Zeit of July 10, 1959
  8. ^ Marianne Macdonald: A writer's life: Nadine Gordimer In: The Daily Telegraph of June 4, 2003
  9. ↑ Ralf E. Krüger: Nadine Gordimer turns 80 In: n-tv online from November 20, 2003
  10. ↑ Gordimer's Sorrow for Attackers . In: BBC News online of November 3, 2006 (English)
  11. ^ Nobel Laureate Is Robbed in Home In: The New York Times online October 29, 2006
  12. ↑ Nadine Gordimer attacked and locked in the storage room . In: Spiegel Online from October 28, 2006
  13. ↑ Ursula March: In contact between the living and the dead In: Deutschlandfunk online from September 10, 2008
  14. ↑ Renate Schostack: main and concubines . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of November 7, 2003, p. 36 ( digitized version )
  15. ^ Maria Frisé: Liebesleid . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of November 21, 2008, p. 36 ( digitized version )
  16. ↑ The Reinhold Cassirer Award  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English)@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.bagfactoryart.org.za  
  17. ↑ Herlinde Koelbl : "I've been writing since I was nine years old" In: Zeitmagazin from May 19, 2011
personal data
SURNAME Cassirer, Reinhold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-South African gallery owner
DATE OF BIRTH March 12, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH October 17, 2001
Place of death Johannesburg