Villa Simon

The Villa Simon is a building in Hanover located on Königsworther Platz in the Calenberger Neustadt district. It was built between 1858 and 1860 as the residence of Eduard Simon , a lawyer of Jewish origin. The villa , built in the neo-renaissance style , became one of the 15 Jewish houses in Hanover during the Second World War , in which Jewish families were ghettoized . The building survived the air raids on Hanover during the war undamaged. Today, facilities of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University of Hanover are housed here.

architecture

Sketch of Villa Simon by Georg Ludwig Friedrich Laves , street side, on the right viewing platform, winter garden and veranda

The Villa Simon is a two-storey plastered building in the arched style and in the neo-renaissance style based on a design by Christian Heinrich Tramm . The building's winter garden faces towards Königsworther Platz . Above it is a viewing platform with a view of Herrenhäuser Allee and towards Herrenhausen Palace . The villa building has been preserved almost unchanged and is a listed building . Inside there is nothing left of the former facility.

Building history

Eduard Simon owned a small summer house with a large garden on Königsworth Platz in front of the Clevertor near Hanover in the then still independent village of Königsworth . Instead of this summer house, Simon had a villa built in the neo-renaissance style by the architect Christian Heinrich Tramm from 1858 to 1860 . He lived there until his death in 1867.

In 1895 Joseph Berliner , the founder of Deutsche Grammophon , bought the villa for 153,000 Reichsmarks .

time of the nationalsocialism

Stumbling blocks for Martin and Betty Schlesinger in front of the Villa Simon

After the death of her mother Therese in August 1934, the daughter Klara Berliner took over the housekeeping of the villa, which she initially lived in alone after the death of Joseph Berliner in May 1938. In September 1938 she took in her cousin Irene Wild, in October 1938 the families of the former district judge Martin Schlesinger and the qualified engineer Leo Katz, and in the following month Sophie Chassée, née. de Leve, and her husband. In December 1938, Klara Berliner took her aunt Ella Berliner, b. Stiel, and in March 1939 Carla Sara Wild entered the house. As a result of the “ Law on Tenancies with Jews ” passed on April 30, 1939 , after June 1, 1939, the city's housing office forced a number of other Jewish families and individuals to be detained.

In 1941 the owner intended to sell the house. The city of Hanover offered 95,000 Reichsmarks, which was the unit value. The market value in peacetime was about twice as high. After the sale, Klara Berliner moved to a Jewish retirement home in Hanover. In 1943 she was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto , where she died six months later. After the sale, the city sent the Jewish residents to another Jewish home in Hanover as part of the “Operation Lauterbacher ”. 23 of the former residents were deported to the Riga ghetto in 1941.

Among them were Martin Schlesinger (* 1900) and his wife Betty (* 1902). She had sent her two children to Liverpool , UK, on one of the last Kindertransportes on August 22, 1939 . In 2009 Gunter Demnig laid stumbling blocks in front of the villa for the couple in the presence of their 79-year-old son .

After the villa became the property of the city of Hanover in 1941, it served as a facility for Langemarck studies . This underlined the influence of the NSDAP on the university.

The building survived the Second World War undamaged despite the numerous bomb attacks. After the war it was in a neglected state. The inventory of the villa, which was of an upper-class character, disappeared in an unknown way. Among them was a Lorraine cabinet from 1770, which an art dealer sold to the August Kestner Museum , where it is still located today.

post war period

City plaque at the Villa Simon in memory of the family of the entrepreneur and chairman of the synagogue community , Joseph Berliner , including his daughter Klara and his brother Emil Berliner .

Although the ownership structure was not clear in the post-war period , the villa was still used. In 1945 a thermometer factory moved in , which left some rooms to the university. It housed students and student institutions. In 1947 there was a KPD office in the building for six months , which the party had rented from the university. From 1947, the villa was mainly used by the University's Department of Geography, which moved out in 1966.

In parallel to further use, the city of Hanover was already entitled to return the building in 1945. A former Reichsbank inspector of Jewish origin who met Klara Berliner after his deportation to the Theresienstadt ghetto presented a will . In it he was named as the heir to the house.

The ownership structure was not finally clarified until 1950, when members of the Berliner family registered their inheritance claims in the USA. They challenged the will and had it invalidated. The Berliner family received the house back from the city of Hanover in 1952. In the same year she sold the villa to the state of Lower Saxony , which left it to the University of Hanover. In a compensation proceeding carried out in 1956, the state of Lower Saxony, as the building owner, paid damages to the Berliner family for loss of use .

At the end of the 1950s, the sculptor Kurt Lehmann moved into the villa as a professor at the University of Hanover with his institute for modeling. From 1958, Professor Kurt Sohns also had his institute headquarters there. As a draftsman and painter, he taught architecture students. Today it is the seat of the Research Department and EU University Office, Technology Transfer of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University of Hanover .

Horse-drawn carriages in front of Villa Simon (far left), view of Königsworther Platz
Front view to the street
Side view with winter garden
Garden back

literature

Herbert Obenaus : Brühlstrasse 27: The Villa Simon. In: The University of Hanover. Their buildings, their gardens, their planning history . Edited on behalf of the President of the University of Hanover by Sid Auffarth and Wolfgang Pietsch. Petersberg: Imhof 2003, pp. 239–246, ISBN 3-935590-90-3 .
Memorial book - Victims of the persecution of Jews under the National Socialist tyranny 1933–1945 , Federal Archives , Koblenz 2nd edition 2006.
Hugo Thielen , Helmut Knocke : Brühlstraße 27. In: Hannover Art and Culture Lexicon , p. 96
Peter Schulze : Contributions to the history of the Jews in Hanover , in the series Hannoversche Studies , Volume 6, Hahn, Hanover 1998, ISBN 3-7752-4956-7 , pp. 149–155
Peter Schulze: Villa Simon. In: Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein (eds.) U. a .: City Lexicon Hanover . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2009, ISBN 978-3-89993-662-9 , p. 645.
Johannes Schwartz: The Nazi persecution story of the Jewish factory owner's daughter Klara Berliner from Hanover and the attempts at “reparation”. In: Hannoversche Geschichtsblätter , New Series 72 (2018), pp. 261–286

Web links

Commons : Villa Simon (Hannover) - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

↑ Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein (Ed.): Stadtlexikon Hannover: From the beginnings to the present , ( ISBN 978-3-89993-662-9 ) Schlütersche Verlagsgesellschaft , Hannover 2009, p. 644
↑ Contact-Mail , German-English newsletter of the Friends of the Hannover-Ahlem Memorial, No: 3 from January 1, 2010 (pdf; 1.7 MB)

52.37741 9.723582Coordinates: 52 ° 22 '38.7 " N , 9 ° 43' 24.9" E

[1] Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein (Ed.): Stadtlexikon Hannover: From the beginnings to the present , ( ISBN 978-3-89993-662-9 ) Schlütersche Verlagsgesellschaft , Hannover 2009, p. 644

[2] Contact-Mail , German-English newsletter of the Friends of the Hannover-Ahlem Memorial, No: 3 from January 1, 2010 (pdf; 1.7 MB)