Villa Schlikker (Osnabrück)

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Villa Schlikker (2017)

The Villa Schlikker is a former industrialist's villa in Osnabrück , which, as part of the Museum of Cultural History with the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus and the Akzisehaus, belongs to the Osnabrück Museum Quarter (MQ4) on Heger-Tor-Wall / Lotter Strasse. The building, erected in 1900, was the seat of the local NSDAP party headquarters during the Nazi era and was referred to by the population as the “Brown House”. After the end of the Second World War it was used by the British occupying forces until it passed to the city of Osnabrück, which set it up as a natural and cultural history museum. By 2023 it is to be transformed into a historical and cultural place of learning in which the Osnabrück lawyer Hans Georg Calmeyer (1903–1972) will be remembered. During the German occupation of the Netherlands, he saved at least 2,866 Jews from deportation to extermination camps. In 1992 he was posthumously honored as “ Righteous Among the Nations ”, which made him known as “ Schindler from Osnabrück”. There was resistance in the Netherlands in 2020 against naming the building after a “high official of the Nazi regime in the Netherlands”.

history

Building owner Edo Floris Schlikker

The museum building bears the name of its client, the entrepreneur, banker and secret councilor Edo Floris Schlikker (September 7, 1839– August 26, 1926), son of the textile entrepreneur and banker Gerhard (us) Schlikker (1805–1898) and his wife Gesina Elsabena , née Rost (1807-1875). The Evangelical Reformed family came from Schüttorf and had become wealthy in the textile industry in the county of Bentheim . Schlikker completed his training in Amsterdam at Bank De Twentsche Bankverenigung GW Blydenstein & Cp. that his father co-founded. He was successful in banking in London, among others, and was involved in the Delbrück, Schickler & Co. bank in Berlin. He also owned goods , one near Diepholz , which he had cultivated. Together with his father and his five-year-old brother Hermann, he converted the textile industry in Schüttorf and the Grafschaft Bentheim into the textile industry, in which the cotton weaving, mechanically driven by steam engines, replaced the linen, which was mostly woven at home.

In 1872 he married his cousin Anna Sluytermann (1848–1925), daughter of a doctor from Sneek and his wife Bernhardine Johanne Schlikker. The only child from the marriage was Gerhard Schlikker (1874–1960). The doctor of law was a district judge, most recently in Moers , but had to give up his service due to a stomach ailment.

After his father's death in 1898, Edo Floris Schlikker planned to move from Schüttorf to the Osnabrück banking center around the turn of the century, so that it would be easier to manage the family assets from there. He had an Art Nouveau villa built in front of the Heger Tor . He commissioned the architect Otto Lüer , who had the representative building built in 1900/1901 and furnished with marble and paneling, the walls were hung with carpets. The family fortunes were largely lost in the First World War and the global economic crisis . After Schlikker's death in 1926 at the age of almost 87 - he was buried in Schüttorf - the villa passed to his son Gerhard.

The "Brown House" of the NSDAP

The following change of ownership is shown differently. In 1997, Hermann Criegee reported in the Emsland Regional History that Gerhard Schlikker had sold the villa to the city of Osnabrück, which used it as a museum, at an unspecified time. Although the city had tried to buy it from Gerhard Schlikker in the 1920s, it had failed because of the costs. According to the historian Eva Berger , Gerhard Schlikker handed over the building to the National Socialist Party before 1933 according to the records of the surgeon and city hospital director Heinrich Fründ (1880–1952) and the chronicle of the Schlikker family. Accordingly, as a token of gratitude, Schlikker had made a donation to Fründ in 1927, which was to be used for the hospital. From this the charge of tax evasion and embezzlement was constructed, which forced Fründ to resign; the hospital director saw his friendly attitude towards Jews as the reason for the forced submission.

The villa became the seat of the NSDAP district leadership in Osnabrück-Stadt. At that time the street was called "Braunauer Wall", the population called the party building "Brown House". It was officially named "Adolf Hitler House".

British headquarters, handover to the city

At the end of the Second World War, on April 4, 1945, British troops occupied the building. The British military government under Governor Geoffrey Day moved into the villa as a site headquarters. She ensured that exhibitions and events were soon organized in the makeshiftly prepared cultural history museum that attracted high numbers of visitors. In 1959 the building was handed over to the city.

Use as a museum

In 1963 the scientific collection moved from the Museum of Cultural History to the Villa Schlikker. It had an exhibition area of ​​325 square meters, which was not enough to present even more significant parts of the collections. From 1966 exhibitions were also held in the Dominican Church. Stock had to be stored outside. Because there was no lecture room, introductory lectures to exhibitions were held in the stairwell. In 1971 Horst Klassen became director of the now independent natural history museum. The year before, the city council's culture committee had already discussed initial plans for the new building of a natural science museum on Schölerberg . The new building was decided in 1978. The foundation stone was laid in 1981, but after the local elections a construction freeze was ordered due to the city's financial situation. Only at the end of 1985 did the museum move to the new building. Until then, it had always shown its exhibits in cramped conditions in the Villa Schlikker. The mineralogical-geological display collection was on the ground floor, the biological collection on the upper floor. On May 6, 1988, the new building was opened as a museum on Schölerberg - nature and environment, planetarium . Since 2004 the museum has been a "house for everyday culture".

Memorial site for Hans Georg Calmeyer

Hans Georg Calmeyer, posthumously awarded as "Righteous Among the Nations" in 1992

In 2017 the City Council of Osnabrück decided unanimously to redesign the building into a place of memory of Hans Georg Calmeyer. This was preceded by years of decision-making and authority processes. The Hans Calmeyer Initiative, founded in 1995, campaigned for a place of remembrance. The CDU parliamentary group under the parliamentary group chairman Fritz Brickwedde reached a unanimous council decision in 2014 to ask the administration to examine how the memory of Calmeyer should be integrated into the concept of the museum district. However, the city administration did not comply with the order due to “official indolence”, and inquiries in 2015 and 2016 also fizzled out.

Controversy over renaming

In 2017 the city appointed historians, the chairman of the Jewish community Michael Grünberg and two members of the youth parliament to an advisory board with eleven members, who were supposed to present a concept for the redesign. The often mentioned name of the Hans Calmeyer House for Villa Schlikker became the subject of a debate about the “ ambivalence ” of the person. The conflict arose when the deputy chairman of the Calmeyer initiative accused the historians of “having little or no knowledge of the complex Calmeyer subject”. While the city was talking of converting the museum into a “peace laboratory”, the Remarque Society pleaded “for a house with Calmeyer on it and inside”.

In the Netherlands, philosophy professor Johannes Max van Ophuijsen and journalist Hans Knoop initiated a petition to Chancellor Angela Merkel to prevent the museum from being renamed Calmeyers with the restructuring. 260 professors from several countries, universities and disciplines, lawyers, rabbis, artists and survivors of the Holocaust , including Holocaust survivor Femma Flejsman-Swaalep from Amsterdam, signed the petition, which was presented to the German Ambassador Dirk Brengelmann on May 28, 2020 . Calmeyer could have saved Femma Flejsman-Swaalep from deportation; she survived in the Auschwitz concentration camp . Knoop said it would be an international scandal "should whitewashing really take place". Calmeyer declared 500 people registered as Aryans to be “newly discovered Jews” during his time as an administrative officer in the Netherlands. They went with them to the transports (to the extermination camps). The petition was addressed to the Federal Chancellor because the city of Osnabrück has raised 1.7 million euros in funding for the renovation of the building from the federal government.

The daily reported in early June 2020 that the Israeli Yad Vashem memorial was reviewingthe decision to posthumously honor Calmeyer as Righteous Among the Nations . However, she did not feel compelled to do so.

The advisory board, headed by Alfons Kenkmann , announced in mid-July 2020 that it was planning a scientific symposium for 2021. According to this, Calmeyer's role in the network of the German occupation authorities should be reviewed. The decision to change the name of Villa Schlikker was postponed.

Award

In 2020, the hbs culture fund, run by the Lower Saxony Sparkasse Foundation, awarded the Museum Quarter, and thus Villa Schlikker as part of it, the museum prize, which is awarded every two years . According to the jury, the successful merger of the four houses under the theme of peace was recognized.

literature

  • Thorsten Heese: "... a local for art and antiquity." The institutionalization of collecting using the example of the history of museums in Osnabrück. (= Kulturgeschichtliches Museum Osnabrück, Museum und Kunstverein Osnabrück eV [ed.]): Osnabrücker Kulturdenkmäler Vol. 12. Rasch, Bramsche 2004, ISBN 3-89946-016-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Harff-Peter Schönherr: No light figure. In: Die Tageszeitung , Nord edition. June 2, 2020, p. 22.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Hermann Criegee: Schlikker, Floris. In: Studiengesellschaft für Emsländische Regionalgeschichte (Ed.): Emsländische Geschichte Volume 6. Haselünne 1997, ISBN 3-88319-208-2 , pp. 306-311.
  3. ^ Thorsten Rodiek : The cultural history museum Osnabrück and its collections. In: Ders .: Daniel Libeskind - Museum without an exit. The Felix Nussbaum House of the Osnabrück Cultural History Museum. Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, Tübingen / Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-8030-0181-1 , pp. 9-11.
  4. ↑ Thorsten Heese: Umbruch: 1918–1929. In: Ders .: "... a separate local for art and antiquity" . Rasch, Bramsche 2004. pp. 107-118.
  5. ↑ Eva Berger: When the people were led. Health policy under the swastika in Osnabrück. In: Thorsten Heese (Ed.): Topographies of Terror. National Socialism in Osnabrück. (= Kulturgeschichtliches Museum Osnabrück [Hrsg.]: Osnabrücker Kulturdenkmäler. Contributions to the art and cultural history of the city of Osnabrück ). 2nd corrected edition. Volume 16. Rasch, Bramsche 2015, ISBN 978-3-89946-240-1 , pp. 246–261, here pp. 253–254.
  6. ^ Volker Issmer : Papers from the environment of the NSDAP district leadership. Insights into everyday Nazi life in Osnabrück. In: Thorsten Heese (Ed.): Topographies of Terror. National Socialism in Osnabrück. (= Kulturgeschichtliches Museum Osnabrück [Hrsg.]: Osnabrücker Kulturdenkmäler. Contributions to the art and cultural history of the city of Osnabrück ). 2nd corrected edition. Volume 16. Rasch, Bramsche 2015, ISBN 978-3-89946-240-1 , pp. 58-75.
  7. ^ Thorsten Heese: Osnabrück Museum History. “Reconstruction”: 1945–1971. In: Ders .: "... a separate local for art and antiquity". The institutionalization of collecting using the example of Osnabrück museum history. Kulturgeschichtliches Museum Osnabrück, Museum and Art Association Osnabrück eV (publisher). Rasch, Bramsche 2004, ISBN 3-89946-016-2 , pp. 205-206.
  8. ↑ a b Petra Diestelmann: Topographies of Terror. In: Historical Commission for Lower Saxony and Bremen (Ed.): Lower Saxony Yearbook for State History . Jhg. 89 (2017). Wallstein, Göttingen 2017, ISBN 978-3-8353-3162-4 , pp. 292–294 (reviews).
  9. ^ Thorsten Heese: Osnabrück Museum History. From the natural science museum to the environmental museum. In: Ders .: "... a separate local for art and antiquity" . Rasch, Bramsche 2004. pp. 272-283.
  10. ↑ Sebastian Stricker: City builds a museum for the "Schindler from Osnabrück". In: New Osnabrück Newspaper . December 6, 2017, accessed March 11, 2020 .
  11. ↑ Sebastian Stricker: Will Villa Schlikker become a Hans Calmeyer house? In: New Osnabrück Newspaper. August 5, 2014, accessed March 11, 2020 .
  12. ↑ Sebastian Stricker: Hans Calmeyer House in Osnabrück in the distance. In: New Osnabrück Newspaper. September 8, 2015, accessed March 11, 2020 .
  13. ↑ Redesign of Villa Schlikker. Retrieved March 11, 2020 .
  14. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Dillmann: Not quite righteous? In: Jüdische Allgemeine . August 1, 2019, accessed March 11, 2020 .
  15. ↑ Sebastian Stricker: Osnabrück creates "Peace Laboratory": Name Calmeyer House off the table? In: New Osnabrück Newspaper. July 2, 2019, accessed March 11, 2020 .
  16. ↑ Sebastian Stricker: Osnabrück "Provincial Posse" about Germany's greatest savior of the Jews? In: New Osnabrück Newspaper. December 4, 2019, accessed June 2, 2020 .
  17. ↑ a b Harff-Peter Schönherr: More than a name. In: Die Tageszeitung , Nord edition. July 23, 2020, p. 22.
  18. ↑ Sebastian Stricker: Hans Calmeyer from Osnabrück remains “Righteous Among the Nations”. In: New Osnabrück Newspaper. June 11, 2020, accessed on July 13, 2020 (access restricted).
  19. ↑ Elmar Stephan: Osnabrück postpones decision on naming. In: Nordwest-Zeitung . July 14, 2020, accessed July 14, 2020 .
  20. ↑ Barbara Schütte: “Calmeyer House”: The symposium should bring clarity. In: NDR culture . July 14, 2020, accessed July 14, 2020 .
  21. ↑ Museumsquartier Osnabrück: Prize of the Sparkassenstiftung. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . August 3, 2020, accessed August 16, 2020 .

Coordinates: 52 ° 16 ′ 30.4 "  N , 8 ° 2 ′ 20.5"  E