We know that the hand of Professor Friedl Dicker-Brandeis was behind the cheerful and colorful drawings made by the children of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, 60 kilometers from Prague. His pedagogical strategy and his formula to distract children from the oppressive reality of the ghetto, the prelude to the Nazi death camps. What we didn’t really know was who was behind the teacher: a Jewess born in Vienna in 1898, a multidisciplinary Bauhaus artist, avant-garde painter, experimental educator, interior designer for aristocratic salons, charismatic passport forger, poster artist devoted to anti-fascist dedicated to ideology and feminism. His profound artistic biography has always been overshadowed by the personal tragedy of his murder in Auschwitz.
Up to three exhibitions were organized in Austria this year to shed light on his figure. Focusing on her years associated with the Bauhaus, Wien Museum MUSA reconstructs her shared studio with architect Franz Singer in Vienna in the 1920s. Both were educated at the Bauhaus school in Weimar (Germany) and imported their sophisticated ideas and practices of design and architecture. The museum displays an original bestiary of axonometric drawings, models, furniture, photographs and collages. “Its assembly required an almost archaeological work. The studio’s most important projects were destroyed under National Socialism, but its archive miraculously survived,” explains Andreas Nierhaus, curator of the Wien Museum.
The plans show the work of Hans Heller’s private tennis club – whose apartment was also furnished – or the home of Countess Hildegard von Auersperg. The photos show the functional design of rooms as different as the salon of the haute couture company LoreKrisser & Co. or a kindergarten taught according to the Montessori method. Both worked for an open-minded clientele, mainly Jewish intellectuals and artists, who wanted to inhabit a modern space in contrast to the traditional Viennese style.
Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, in a “collage” from 1930, in a picture of the exhibition on this artist in the Museum Wien.Wien Museum (Wien Museum)
In the 1930s the couple separated (professionally and sentimentally, he was married, it was a stormy relationship, not very functional, very little Bauhaus) and Dicker-Brandeis came into contact with the Communist Party. She applied creativity to activism: she was arrested for forging comrade passports and sentenced to three months in prison, where she embroidered her prison uniform (when Franz Singer was summoned to testify at the trial, he tried to exonerate her with a scathing statement about her relationship defined: “Friedl is unable to draw a straight line”).
After his release, he continued to design propaganda posters for the party. The black and white photo collages denounce the living conditions of the working class and warn of the threat posed by the Nazis. The crises of capitalism as the trigger of totalitarianism. In one of the eight saved negatives on glass plates, the section of Hitler stands out. In another, she exposes the emasculating role of women in industrial society. They were large-format Dada photomontages that he had to destroy before he went into exile.
The turmoil of Austrofascism prompted her to emigrate to Czechoslovakia, where she married her cousin Pavel Brandeis. In Prague he switched classes with avant-garde art. In Vienna she had started teaching kindergarten teachers, teaching them art as therapy, and now her students included children from families who had fled Nazi Germany. He put it into practice with his own monsters: Against the traumatic background of his arrest, he drew a series of expressionist self-portraits, including scenes from his interrogation.
Drawing by Hana Lustigová (1931–44), in the Theresienstadt area. Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898–1944) initiated a painting program for country children JEWISH MUSEUM PRAGUE (Jewish Museum in Prague)
He painted the painting Fox Learns Spanish, a surrealist allegory of the Spanish Civil War, which was on view at the autumn exhibition at the Heiligenkreuzer Hof in Vienna. Its curator Cosima Rainer, publisher of a canonical index of artists in the imprint of the University of Applied Arts, says: “How is it possible that Dicker-Brandeis has not had this recognition before? His role in developing experimental forms of expression is unique in the interwar period. He has done everything. Paradoxically, this versatility was a resistance to justify it.” The first exhibition dedicated to his artistic production was shown earlier this year at the Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz (Austria).
Dicker-Brandeis found weightlessness in art and gravity in politics. Over time it was the other way around. When she was deported to Theresienstadt (Czech Republic), she turned to educating children’s creative instincts. It was his salvation. There she watched in horror as a Red Cross delegation inspected the ghetto in June 1944 to reassure the world that no atrocities were being committed. The German voiceover from the mockumentary filmed for the mission describes the Jewish paradise on earth: “Who wouldn’t want to live here?”
Shortly thereafter, in October, she volunteered for the transport to Auschwitz to join her husband, who had been deported days earlier. He didn’t know what to expect. His niece, whom he had until then cared for like his daughter, he rudely sent her off the platform to prevent her from boarding the train, leaving a few suitcases containing nearly five thousand children’s drawings and collages in a safe place. The transport was made by Dr. Mengele, who, like cattle, chose a shipment for his medical experiments. Her husband survived the Holocaust, but she died in the gas chamber at the age of 46.
The exhibition “Atelier Bauhaus, Vienna” is on view at the Wien Museum MUSA (Vienna, Austria) until March 26, 2023.
All the culture that suits you awaits you here.
Subscribe to
Babelia
The literary novelties analyzed by our best critics in our weekly bulletin
GET IT
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits