Villa Merländer
The Villa Merländer located in Krefeld district Cracau , at the Friedrich-Ebert-Straße 42nd
history
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The Krefeld merchant Richard Merländer (1874–1942) had the Villa Merländer built in Krefeld for himself and his family in 1924/25 by the architect Friedrich Kühnen.
Merländer was a Jew; he was after the takeover of the Nazi regime harassed like most Jews in Germany and disenfranchised. In 1938 he had to give up his company; his property was confiscated. The Nazi regime imposed taxes and special levies on all Jews in the Reich, for example the so-called Jewish fine after the November pogrom of 1938 (more in the article Holocaust and here ). This finally forced Merländer (1941?) To sell his house. But he could not freely dispose of this money either. In 1941 he therefore had to move into a “ Jewish house ”; there he lived very cramped. In July 1942, Merländer, now 68 years old, was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and from there in September 1942 to the Treblinka extermination camp . He was murdered shortly after his arrival; likewise 3,000 other people on this transport.
After this sale (see also Aryanization ) the house was used as a hotel; it changed hands several times until 1967. In 1989 the city of Krefeld rented the villa in order to set up a documentation and meeting center there, which deals with the time of National Socialism in Krefeld.
In 1996 the city of Krefeld decided to relocate the offices and library of the NS documentation center to the city archive. The cultural office has been using Villa Merländer ever since.
Mural
During the renovation work, the previously lost wall paintings by the artist Heinrich Campendonk were rediscovered in one of the rooms. They had been suspected to be in the villa for a long time, but had only been known from a photo until then. The two murals "Cats" and "Harlequin" were painted on the fresh, dry plaster of the walls of the newly built house in 1925 and have survived the decades almost unscathed despite some damage. The paintings were under layers of paint and had suffered numerous renovations. The pictures were already painted over by the original owner Richard Merländer in the 1930s, because Campendonk's art was indexed by the Nazis as " degenerate art " and Merländer was a Jew. In 1997 and 1998 the two wall paintings were uncovered again by Cologne restorer Horst Hahn (and with the help of the Krefeld preservationist Klaus Pauwelen ) and made accessible to the public.
These are the only surviving murals by the expressionist Campendonk. Most of Campendonk's works have been destroyed or are considered lost.
The pictures can be viewed (as of mid-2013) every fourth Sunday of the month (except during holidays) from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.
sightseeing
The house can be visited at certain times.
Web links
- The Nazi memorial of the city of Krefeld in the Villa Merländer
- NS memorials and documentation centers in North Rhine-Westphalia - Villa Merländer NS documentation center
- Förderverein Villa Merländer eV
- Ingrid Schupetta: Richard Merländer, silk merchant from Krefeld - research on a stranger (PDF)
Footnotes
- ↑ krefeld.de
- ↑ krefeld.de
- ↑ The murals
- ↑ krefeld.de ( Memento of the original from October 5, 2012 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.
Coordinates: 51 ° 20 ′ 28.6 ″ N , 6 ° 34 ′ 48.6 ″ E