Ruth Cidor-Citroën

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Left Ruth Cidor-Citroën (1958)

Ruth Cidor-Citroën (born Franziska-Margarete Vallentin November 25, 1906 in Berlin ; died February 26, 2002 in Jerusalem ) was a German-Israeli artist.

Life

Margarete Vallentin grew up in a family that had close contacts with German revolutionaries, Russian exiles and European avant-garde artists. Her father was the actor and writer Franz Albert Vallentin (* 1881 in Lucerne , † 1917 in Dresden ). "The best and most loyal friends" of her parents were "the Liebknechts and Rosa Luxemburg, when they were not in prison or in hiding". Karl Liebknecht's children were her favorite playmates. About her uncle, the director Richard Vallentin, it was said in the Vossische Zeitung : “The brilliant Swiss Richard Vallentin, the real inventor of the new Reinhardt stages ”. His son Maxim Vallentin also went to the theater. Her mother Margarete Vallentin, b. Hoffmeister († February 1917 in Berlin) was a trained teacher; she wrote children's operas that were performed in schools and small theaters, and earned something for the family with children's books and playbooks with cut-out sheets.

Ruth had four siblings, the eldest was Judith, born in 1905 , married Auer , a year later the brother Lucas and in 1910 the twin siblings Andreas and Gabriele, who grew up in a children's home and later with foster parents. However, her parents died early, both in 1917, and she was placed in foster care. Together with her sister Judith, she attended the private Kollmorgensche Lyceum on Keithstrasse in Berlin; they were exempt from paying school fees. She lived with her sister Judith until shortly before her 13th birthday. At the end of 1919, when she was only thirteen, she received an apprenticeship in carpet weaving at the newly founded Bauhaus in Weimar . Vallentin-Citroen was involved with his own designs in the traveling exhibition of Bauhaus fabrics, which began in October 1930 at JB Neumann in Munich. At the age of 17 she left the Bauhaus and went to Berlin.

Ambassador Hanan Aharon Cidor (Netherlands, 1960)

In 1925 Ruth Vallentin lived with her sister Judith on Frobenstrasse in Berlin-Wedding. In October of this year, at the age of 18, she married the 19-year-old future Berlin fur trader Hans Citroen (1905–1985), younger brother of the Bauhaus member Paul Citroen , whose family came from the Netherlands. Later in Israel they changed their name to Cidor. After the transfer of power to the Nazis in 1933 had Hans Citroen on racial grounds his fur shop AB Citroen in Berlin sell , and the couple emigrated to the born in 1926 daughter Charlotte (called "Dolly", later renamed Tamar) to France where Hans Citroen became self-employed again in Paris. They lived not far away, in Ville-d'Avray . Their son Vincent was born here in 1934 and their second daughter Eliane in 1939. Ruth Vallentin received orders for the design of children's books from the Flammarion publishing house .

During the German occupation of France in 1940, the family fled to Vichy France , and several family members in Germany and the Netherlands were victims of the German persecution of Jews . Ruth Vallentin's sister Judith Auer, who printed leaflets with other activists in her basement, was beheaded as a resistance fighter in Berlin at the end of 1944. In the autumn of 1942, the Le Sappey family managed a dramatic escape across the snow-covered Alps to Switzerland, where they found accommodation in a refugee camp near Geneva . In 1952 they emigrated to Israel , Ruth Cidor continued to work as an artist there. Hanan Aharon Cidor worked for the Israeli Foreign Ministry and was Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands from 1957 to 1963.

Ruth's brother Andreas, known as an active communist, managed to escape to Russia with the help of underground left-wing organizations, where he obtained Russian citizenship. Still deported as an emigrant under Stalin , he died of exhaustion in a labor camp . Sister Gabriele emigrated to Jerusalem in March 1949.

In 1979, following an invitation from the Governing Mayor Dietrich Stobbe , the Cidors returned to Berlin. After her first encounter with post-war Germany in 1951 was still traumatic for her, she later judged this trip to be mostly positive, “successful and interesting”. Her husband died in early 1985. She left her home in the Beit HaKerem neighborhood in southwest Jerusalem and moved to a retirement home, where she began to write down her memories in 1997 at the age of 91. She died in Jerusalem in February 2002, two years after completing the book excerpt from her more extensive manuscript.

Fonts

  • From the Bauhaus to Jerusalem. Stages of a Jewish life in the 20th century . Afterword by Anja von Cysewski. Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 978-3-936411-39-3
  • Nine months in Le Sappey: Solidarity and help for German Jews in southern France . Preliminary biographical note Anja von Cysewski. In: Wolfgang Benz (ed.): Solidarity and help for Jews during the Nazi era. Volume 4:: Rescue in the Holocaust: Conditions and experiences of survival . Berlin: Metropol, 2001 ISBN 3-932482-80-8 , pp. 9-28

literature

  • Volkhard Knigge , Harry Stein (ed.): Franz Ehrlich . A Bauhaus member in the resistance and concentration camp. (Catalog for the exhibition of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation in cooperation with the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in the Neues Museum Weimar from August 2, 2009 to October 11, 2009.) Weimar 2009, ISBN 978-3-935598- 15-6 , p. 143
  • Sigrid Wortmann Weltge: Bauhaus textiles: art and artists in the weaving workshop . Translation from the American. Schaffhausen: Ed. Stemmle, 1993, short biography as Ruth Vallentin, p. 206

Web links

Commons : Ruth Cidor-Citroën  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ruth Cidor-Citroën: From the Bauhaus to Jerusalem . P. 11.
  2. ↑ a b c d Ruth & Günter Hortzschansky: Judith Auer (1905-1944) - May everything painful not have been in vain . Trafo-Verlag, Berlin, 2004, ISBN 3-89626-507-5 , pp. 13, 17-18, 33. Primary sources: information by Ruth Cidor and Gabriele Vallentin.
  3. ↑ Ruth Cidor-Citroën: From the Bauhaus to Jerusalem . Pp. 9, 13.
  4. ↑ Ruth Cidor-Citroën: From the Bauhaus to Jerusalem . P. 10, 14.
  5. ↑ Sigrid Wortmann Weltge: Bauhaus textiles , 1993, p 110f.
  6. ↑ Ruth Cidor-Citroën: From the Bauhaus to Jerusalem . Pp. 13, 42.
  7. ↑ Cidor, Hanan Aharon , at the German Art Archive (DKA)
  8. ↑ Cidor, Hanan Aharon , in: Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (ed.): Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Vol. 1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur 1980, p. 111
  9. ↑ Ruth Cidor-Citroën: From the Bauhaus to Jerusalem . P. 194.
  10. ↑ Cidor-Citroen, Ruth , Book announcement at Metropol
  11. ↑ Hanan Cidor , at mfa
  12. ↑ Ruth Cidor-Citroën: From the Bauhaus to Jerusalem . Pp. 89-91, 233.
  13. ↑ Anja von Cysewski: Afterword . In: Ruth Cidor-Citroën: From the Bauhaus to Jerusalem . Pp. 267-268.
personal data
SURNAME Cidor-Citroën, Ruth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Citroen 'Ruth; Vallentin, Franziska-Margarete (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Israeli artist
DATE OF BIRTH November 25, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 26, 2002
Place of death Jerusalem