Walter Herzberg

Walter Herzberg (born July 7, 1898 in Königsberg (Prussia) ; murdered April 3, 1943 in Auschwitz ) was a Jewish German graphic artist and cartoonist and a victim of the Holocaust .

life and work

Origin and education

Walter Herzberg was born in 1898 to Jewish parents, the then editor-in-chief of the Hartungschen Zeitung , Gustav Herzberg (1868 in Cologne - 1913 in Königsberg), and his wife Rose Landsberg (1874-1943) in Königsberg. After Gustav Herzberg's early death in 1913, Rose Herzberg moved back to Berlin with her two children Ilse and Walter , where she and her husband had come from in 1895 and where the rest of the family still lived. Walter Herzberg passed the war-restricted “Notabitur” there in 1916 and began studying art in Alfred Thon's drawing class at the Berlin Academy of Arts , but volunteered for the military in the same year. After training recruits in Allenstein in 1916/1917 , Herzberg came to the front as an infantryman in France and, with a few interruptions, was in action until shortly before the end of the war. Under the impression of the First World War and his experiences at the front, Herzberg developed a pacifist attitude and a critical attitude towards everything military, which is reflected in his later caricatures.

Cover drawing of the special edition of Gottfried Keller's Spiegel, das Kitten , illustrated by Herzberg , Berlin 1921

Walter Herzberg: Ex-libris for his brother-in-law Rudolf Loew, Klausenburg, around 1922

Herzberg married his childhood friend Edith Wunderlich (1896–1943) in Berlin in 1919. In 1920 their son Klaus Herzberg (name changed to Daniel Dishon after 1938) was born. Probably with the mediation of Alfred Thon, the 22-year-old Herzberg produced eight pen drawings for the illustrated edition of Gottfried Keller's novella Spiegel, das Kitten , published in 1921 by Berlin's Axel Juncker Verlag . In order to avoid the food shortage and inflation rampant in Germany in the first post-war years , Walter Herzberg, who was unemployed and penniless at the time, moved with his family to his sister in Cluj for two years, and from there continued his art studies sporadically before moving to Obernigk in 1923 moved to a brother of his wife near Breslau . There he tried as a temporary employee of a bank to finance the continuation of his studies at the Art Academy in Breslau .

A reader designed by Alfred Thon and published by Ferdinand Hirt in Breslau in 1923 includes four woodcut illustrations by Walter Herzberg. The time in Breslau from 1923–1925 was the most important station in his artistic training: Herzberg was accepted into Otto Mueller 's painting class , from whom he received the decisive suggestions, which the few etchings from this period already show.

Probably for financial reasons and in order to create a livelihood for his family, Herzberg decided in 1925 to open an antiques and arts and crafts business in Baden-Baden . The project failed and after two years he came back to Berlin, where his wife and son lived again in the meantime.

Berlin years as a cartoonist

On October 14, 1927, Herzberg's first cartoon appeared for the prominent satirical weekly supplement Ulk in the Berliner Tageblatt . This marked the beginning of regular work for this newspaper, whose weekly supplement illustrated Herzberg's drawings with increasing frequency until 1931, most recently almost weekly and often also the title page. Herzberg's caricatures, which also appeared occasionally in the Lustige Blätter (1927/1928) or in the Neue Revue (1930/1931), were partly cheerful satirises and ironies of the cultural phenomena of the twenties : the sound film, the stage with expressive dance or of aspects of the literary business. For the most part, the roughly two hundred drawings made for the joke between 1927 and 1931 reflected pointedly and critically the economic and social impoverishment of the people, the questionable behavior of party politics in the Weimar Republic in Herzberg's eyes and, above all, the endangerment of democracy through the political radicalization of the National Socialists . Their lack of spirit and demagoguery were highlighted by Herzberg as well as the connections between Adolf Hitler and the financially powerful forces in the Weimar state. While Herzberg's reputation as a cartoonist of Ulk grew, the relatively few 'free' works that he created alongside his professional activity as a cartoonist - especially etchings , woodcuts and linocuts - hardly received any attention.

Escape, persecution, deportation and death

The National Socialist "movement" in the late 1920s and early 1930s prompted Herzberg to create increasingly precise political caricatures. In addition to the work on the democratically and liberally oriented, but ultimately as "moderate" Ulk , drawings were made for the clearly left-wing, satirically sharper weekly newspaper Die Ente , which appeared in the years 1931–1933 and in which Herzberg published three drawings in early 1933.

Not only this politically unambiguous work for a weekly that the National Socialists regarded as communist, but the threat of “racial” persecution due to his Jewish origins persuaded Herzberg to leave Germany in the year the National Socialists came to power . He fled via Switzerland to France , which at the time granted refugees from Germany residence permits but not the right to take up work there. His stay in Paris was characterized by poverty, a lack of work opportunities and the prospect of having his family join him and ended with the decision, which was fateful for Herzberg, to return to Berlin in autumn 1935. An existence based on artistic activity in National Socialist Germany was out of the question and Herzberg began to work in the wholesale company owned by an uncle on his mother's side until it was " Aryanized " in 1936.

After the Herzbergs had succeeded in obtaining an entry permit for their son to Palestine in 1938 , Edith and Walter Herzberg tried to implement their own emigration plans, but they no longer succeeded. Presumably for the school year 1938/39 Walter Herzberg became a drawing teacher at the newly established VI. Private elementary school of the Jewish community (Choriner Str. 74), later at III., Which is attached to the Rykestrasse synagogue . Private primary school of the Jewish community (Rykestr. 53) and taught there or in alternative quarters until the forced closure on June 30, 1942. Edith and Walter Herzberg were forced to give up their previous apartment (Uhlandstr. 110) in 1939, initially for economic reasons At the beginning of 1940, together with relatives, they moved several times to smaller apartments in so-called Jewish houses .

As a result of the stricter measures against Jews in Germany since the beginning of the war, which within a very short time led to complete disenfranchisement and social isolation, ultimately to deportations to the extermination camps , Walter Herzberg was appointed as a “steward” or assistant to the Jewish religious association in autumn 1942 on the instructions of the Gestapo Berlins obligated. His messenger activity consisted of handing the residents of the Jewish houses recorded in lists and files by the Gestapo with the written deportation orders, stating that they should be in the assembly camps in the city area on the same or the next day; This also affected their own relatives, uncles and aunts, with whom the Herzbergs lived until the end and who were deported to Theresienstadt on January 29, 1943 . Herzberg's mother, Rose Landsberg, was deported to Theresienstadt on September 23, 1942, where she died on September 27, 1943. Walter Herzberg served as a steward for the Jewish community until mid-February 1943, which initially seemed to save him from his own deportation. When the deportations of the Jews still living in Berlin had already begun and all the Jewish forced laborers in the armaments factories were recorded in the so-called factory action by February 27, 1943 in order to be deported, Herzberg was transferred for the last time. For a few weeks he had to work as a bookbinder in the "Jewish library" consisting of stolen Jewish book stocks, part of the "central library" in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), Office VII, Eisenacherstr. 12, before he and his wife Edith were picked up from their apartment (Bleibtreustr. 33) by the Gestapo and SS on March 8, 1943 and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on March 12, 1943 in the 36th so-called "Osttransport".

Of the 964 Jews who arrived in Auschwitz on March 13th in this RSHA transport from Berlin, only 218 men and 147 women were registered as "fit for work" prisoners and assigned to the camp after the selection at the "Alte Rampe". Walter Herzberg was given prisoner number 107,842 and was assigned to the affiliated concentration camp Auschwitz III (Monowitz) . His name and prisoner number then appear in a directory of prisoners who were "treated" in the "prisoner infirmary" (HKB) Monowitz, with the note from the HKB selection: "released from the HKB: March 31, 1943" and on the same day Day on the "transfer report" from the HKB to the main camp Auschwitz , signed by the SS-Sanitätsdiensgrad (SDG) in Monowitz, Gerhard Neubert . There Herzberg was probably killed in Block 20 of the HKB ("Infection Block") by Josef Klehr by phenol injection . The “mortuary book” or “death book” of HKB block 28, where the killed sick were initially taken, finally noted the date of Walter Herzberg's death on April 3, 1943 next to the now unnamed prisoner number. His wife Edith was no longer registered as a prisoner in the Auschwitz-Birkenau women's camp and was probably murdered immediately upon arrival.

All of Walter Herzberg's original drawings and caricatures were burned in a private depot in 1944 as a result of an air raid. Only a few of the other graphic works have been passed down privately by the family.

reception

The for Edith and Walter Herzberg 2006 in Berlin, Motzstr. 51, laid stumbling blocks

For the 100th birthday of Walter Herzberg in 1998, the district office of Berlin-Neukölln organized a work exhibition, for which a catalog of works, supplemented by biographical and art-historical contributions, etc. a. by the editor, Herzberg's son Daniel Dishon (1920–2009) and his nephew, the graphic artist Hans Loew (1919–2016) . In the meeting Old Synagogue , Wuppertal , the exhibition was shown in 1999 again, when in an accompanying program to the legendary Roman café was reminded of the writers and artists of Berlin, also Herzberg wrong in that.

In 2006, a stumbling stone was relocated for Edith and Walter Herzberg at Motzstrasse 51 (previously no. 60) in the Schöneberg district of Berlin .

Walter Herzberg's artistic estate has been in the Jewish Museum Berlin since July 2015 .

literature

• Gottfried Keller: Mirror the kitten. A fairy tale. With drawings by Walter Herzberg. Axel Juncker Verlag, Berlin 1921.
• Klaus Haese, Wolfgang U. Schütte: Ms. Republic goes bankrupt. German caricature of the twenties. Neuer Malik Verlag, Kiel 1989, ISBN 3-361-00251-6 . (Here for and with examples from W. Herzberg, p. 36 f.)
• Barbara Schieb (Ed.): Walter Herzberg. Artist, caricaturist, humanist 1898–1943. Dölling and Galitz Verlag, Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-933374-14-6 .
• Central Institute for Social Science Research of the Free University of Berlin (Ed.): Berlin Memorial Book of the Jewish Victims of National Socialism. Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-89468-178-0 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ R. Heuer (ed.): German reading book for the second school year. Edition B. Ferdinand Hirt, Breslau 1923, pp. 38, 67, 80; see. also: German reading book for the second school year. Edition A. Ferdinand Hirt, Breslau 1924 (last 1931), p. 73.
2. ↑ See the illustrations of the early etchings (around 1927) in: Barbara Schieb (Ed.): Walter Herzberg. Artist, caricaturist, humanist 1898–1943. Hamburg 1998, p. 27 f.
3. ↑ Ulk. Illustrated weekly paper for humor and satire (1914–1930). - Complete digitization of the years 1927–1930 (Heidelberg University Library)
4. ↑ See, for example, Herzberg's title page Zwei Machtthaber ( Thomas Mann and Max Schmeling ) in number 48, November 29, 1929. Digitized
5. ↑ See, for example, Herzberg's caricature Germany is going well in number 3, January 18, 1929. Digitized
6. ↑ Cf. u. a. for example Herzberg's title page National Socialist election successes in number 27, July 4th 1930. Digitized
7. ↑ See illustrations and basic explanations of the traditional graphic works of Herzberg by Hans Loew: Walter Herzberg - A life dedicated to the line. In: Barbara Schieb (Ed.): Walter Herzberg. Artist, caricaturist, humanist 1898–1943. Hamburg 1998, pp. 23–31.
8. ^ Willi Holzer: Jewish schools in Berlin. Using the example of the private primary school of the Jewish community Rykestrasse. Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1992.
9. ↑ Cf. in the online project Statistics of the Holocaust , here digitized transport list with Walter Herzberg and Edith Herzberg
10. ^ Danuta Czech: Calendar of the events in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp 1939–1945. Reinbek near Hamburg 1989, p. 440.
11. ↑ This information is the result of a research commissioned in October 2010 by the International Tracing Service (ITS) , Bad Arolsen.
12. ↑ Barbara Schieb (Ed.): Walter Herzberg. Artist, caricaturist, humanist 1898–1943. Dölling and Galitz Verlag, Hamburg 1998.

Web links

• Joke. Illustrated weekly paper for humor and satire (1914–1930) - digital (Heidelberg University Library)
• Etchings by Walter Herzberg in the holdings of the Jewish Museum Berlin