Museum Montanelli

Carl Rabus (1898-1983)

In 1934, in order to escape from restrictive measures, Rabus fled from Munich to Vienna where he was able to remain together with his Jewish girlfriend Erna Adler. Shortly before the occupation of Austria by National Socialist Germany, Erna Adler emigrated to Belgium, soon followed by Rabus. In 1940 Carl Rabus was arrested for being an “alien close to the enemy” and interned in the St. Cyprien camp on the Mediterranean, which lay in the unoccupied southern part of France. Apart from St. Cyprien, the French maintained the camps Les Milles and Gurs, under the administration of the Vichy regime; in these camps thousands of German refugees were interned. Rabus documented the unbearable conditions in the camp, the hopelessness and the lack of prospects for the imprisoned people in about one hundred drawings which he subsequently converted into woodcuts, and further created the “Passion” cycle, which is also on display in the exhibition. Later, when he was allowed to return from St. Cyprien to Brussels, he lived under Gestapo surveillance from autumn 1941 on. He was still under this supervision in 1943 when he painted the painting “Self in a Mirror Shard”. In 1944 he was sent to a Vienna prison accused of “racial defilement”, since he continued to stand by his Jewish girlfriend.

Oscar Zügel (1892-1968)

In 1914 Zügel started an apprenticeship at the Stuttgart Art College. He had to curtail his studies on being called up for military service, resuming his training from 1919 until 1922. Afterwards he worked as a freelance artist in Stuttgart. After 1933 Oscar Zügelʼs paintings suffered an almost unbelievable fate. In 1934 the painting “Propaganda Minister” (1933) was confiscated from Zügelʼs studio in Stuttgart together with the five-part series “Raped Art” for being “degenerate”. They were to be burned in the courtyard of the Stuttgart State Gallery. Oscar Zügel was part of the critical intelligentsia of Stuttgart and, after receiving a warning that he would meet the same fate as an assassinated Jewish friend, Zügel took the advice of his French friends and went into exile in 1934 in Tossa de Mar in Spain. There he met artists, writers and philosophers and  befriended André Masson and Marc Chagall. The Franco-Hitler Alliance caused Zügel to leave his Spanish exile and, after a short stay in Germany, he emigrated to Argentina in 1937. However, in 1950 Zügel returned to Europe since the Peronists had started taking reprisals against his family. He found his house in Tossa de Mar had been looted, but Spanish fishermen had rescued and hidden some of his most important paintings for him. In 1951, after a meeting with the director of the Stuttgart State Gallery, Zügel came across the caretaker there who told him that there were three crates of his paintings down in the engine room, which had been overlooked during the burnings. These were the paintings confiscated in 1934, the “Propaganda Minister” among them.

Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945)

Her first marriage to the doctor Berthold Lasker, sealed in 1894, ended nine years later in divorce. In 1899 her son Paul came into the world. The artist never divulged the name of Paul’s father. Her first collection of poems came out in 1902 under the title Styx. In 1903 she married Georg Levin, for whom she thought up the pseudonym Herwarth Walden as well as the name of the magazine he published “ Der Sturm”. After another nine years this marriage also ended in divorce. At this time Else Lasker-Schüler was going around dressed in oriental costumes under the name Tino of Bagdad; subsequently, however, she cooked up a new existence for herself as Prince Yussuf of Thebes. On 19th April 1933 the artist fled to Switzerland. Here though she was forbidden to work and was followed by the aliens‘ police. Permission to remain as an “asylum seeker” was twice given after lengthy procedures, however, on the third ocasion it was denied. In Germany her books were burned while her drawings, now displayed at the Museum Montanelli, were removed from the National Gallery in Berlin. Nevertheless Else Lasker-Schüler remined faithful to the symbiosis of German and Jewish elements and today is counted among Germany‘s most distinguished poetesses. She died on 22nd January 1945 in Jerusalem. On 5th April 1913 during her stay in Prague Else Lasker-Schüler was invited to read for the “Club of German Women Artists”.

Prager Tageszeitung Bohemia / The Poetess and the Policeman:
“Today at around twelve o’clock at night a minor incident attracted the attention of passing pedestrians. In Old Town Square some kind of bizarrely attired woman suddenly lashed out impulsively at a police officer, gazing up heavenwards with a staring expression and making rhythmic body movements while singing incoherently. […] That lady, who was wearing a black dress and an onyx necklace around her neck which was wrapped in her black curly hair, was Else Lasker-Schüler. The poetess‘s companions […] allegedly advised the policeman that this was a highly exotic visitor from Thebes (Else Lasker-Schüler always speaks of herself in her poems as the Prince of Thebes), who was performing her oriental prayers here. ‘I don’t give a damn!’ the policeman reputedly retorted, ‘Nobody is allowed to sing here,’ whereupon he energetically set about making repeated requests that the artist, manifestly elevated above such earthly concerns, stop singing. This startled her so much she recoiled and, shouting the word ‘prince‘ at the irritated policeman to his face, summarily departed the square […]”

in: Hartmut Binder, “Else Lasker-Schüler in Prag“ [Else Lasker-Schüler in Prague], in: Wirkendes Wort 3 (1994), pp. 405-438

biographies of other artists (CZ+DE+EN)