House of the Wannsee Conference
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Today, the painter Max Liebermann (1847-1935) is probably the most famous early resident of the Alsen colony. His transition from a naturalistic to an impressionistic style of painting in the 1890s made him the centre of the debate on modern painting in Germany. As a co-founder and president of the ‘Secession‘ - an exhibition centre of modern painters opposing the restrictive cultural policy of the Wilhelmine era – he achieved a social breakthrough in the appreciation of modern painting.
As a convinced democrat and president of the Prussian Academy of Arts (1920-1932) he became an internationally respected representative of the liberal cultural policy of the first German republic. His sense of humour and ready wit made him popular with the Berlin public. There was not a week without some new anecdotes and bon mots of Liebermann being published in the papers. At the same time he was the target of German nationalist art criticism and political propaganda for decades, since he was Jewish and he represented the supposedly ‘ungermanic‘ modern painting and the hated republic. |
Liebermann’s numerous Wannsee-paintings do not only depict his own garden and the mansions of his neighbours and friends, but they are also a record of the whole region in its heyday as a popular destination for day-trippers from Berlin. It only takes a five minutes‘ walk from the Liebermann summer residence to the ‘House of the Wannsee Conference‘ memorial. Both mansions were designed by the same architect and there are more than just purely formal aspects that connect them. With their respective history they are both a symbol of the pinnacle and the violent end of German-Jewish living and working together.
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Self-portrait, 1932 |
Liebermann stood by his identity as a Berliner, a Prussian and a German Jew without wavering: ‘I often discussed the Jewish question with professor Einstein. All my life I first asked: ‘What kind of person is he?‘ I never asked if a person was Jewish, Christian or heathen. I was born as a Jew and I will die as a Jew.‘
In 1927, on the occasion of his 80th birthday, honours were heaped on the elderly representative of a liberal concept of art. He was decorated with the Ordre pour le Mérite, the shield of the German Eagle and – after much, partly anti-semitic controversy in the Berlin city parliament – he was given the freedom of his hometown. The fact that President von Hindenburg, an icon of the German nationalist movement, had a portrait painted by Max Liebermann, led to furious attacks: ‘The other day a pro-Hitler paper called it a scandal, that President von Hindenburg was painted by a Jew. I can only laugh at this and probably Hindenburg will do the same. I am just a painter; what does painting have to do with Judaism?‘
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Six years later Max Liebermann also became a victim of persecution. In May 1933, he resigned from the office of honorary president and left the Acadamy of Arts before being forced to leave it. He was not much talked about anymore: the Berlin high society avoided Liebermann, the ‘Jew‘, and his villa, which had once been so popular as a meeting-place. Liebermann retired bitterly, but he took up the office of honorary president of the ‘Kulturbund der deutschen Juden‘ (‘Cultural Association of German Jews‘), a self-help organisation of Jewish artists who were excluded from the ‘Reichskulturkammer‘ (‘Cultural Chamber of the Reich‘). |
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Max Liebermann’s last self-portrait shows him tired and resigned. In a letter to the mayor of Tel Aviv Meir Ditzengoff of 28th June 1933 he expressed his feelings as follows: ‘The abolition of equality haunts us like a terrible nightmare, especially those Jews like me who believed in the dream of assimilation.‘
Max Liebermann died on 8th February 1935 in his parental home at Pariser Platz and was buried three days later in the Jewish cemetery in Schönhauser Allee. There were only a few mourners for the once so admired representative of modern German painting, among them Käthe Kollwitz and Ferdinand Sauerbruch, his neighbour and doctor at Wannsee.
► Summer Residence and Garden in Wannsee
► The Liebermann family at the Alsen colony
► Homepage of the Max-Liebermann Society in Berlin ◄
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Update: August 31, 2004
