GLR November-December 2023

ESSAY An Artist Who Survived the Holocaust E MILY L.Q UINT F REEMAN

I T TOOK MANY YEARS before I was willing to visit the city that declared itself in 1943 to be judenfrei (free of Jews): the city of Berlin, the capital of Nazi Ger many. For me as a Jewish lesbian, Nazi atrocities must never be forgotten. But at some point I was invited to spend a fun weekend in Berlin to experience LGBT Pride, and the city was going all out to celebrate its historically persecuted yet resilient queer population. Among the Berlin Pride festivities that year (2013), there was going to be a special exhibition of 20th-century gay German artists, including Gertrude Sandmann (1893–1981). A few years earlier, London had hosted a major retrospective of avant-garde German artists during the Weimar Republic period, which spanned the years from the end of World War I to 1933. I adored one drawing of two nude women by Gertrude Sandmann. I had never heard of her, but learned from the brief caption that she was an important Berlin artist, a Holocaust survivor, a lesbian, and trailblazer of LGBT rights. By traveling to Berlin, I would discover considerably more, and so I set my reservations aside. It was only a short plane trip from Lon bombs on the city for two hours. Gertrude Sandmann crouched under a desk in her hiding place away from the windows, held her breath, and hoped that the bombs would not find her. At the same time, every attack by the Allies was bringing her closer to the liberation she so desperately longed for. According to official records, in 1943 Gertrude Sandmann no longer existed. The other Jews had either fled or been mur dered. But Gertrude Sandmann, who was of Jewish descent, was still alive in Berlin. Her brave non-Jewish lover and their friends had hidden Sandmann illegally. “Will they find me, or won’t they?” Sandmann kept asking herself until the war ended. At the Berlin exhibit, each artist was introduced by a black and-white self-portrait. I smiled up at a photo taken in 1960 of a white-haired woman in a painter’s smock standing confidently before her easel in a studio overflowing with drawings. Before her was an almost completed portrait of a woman wearing a hat. She reviewed it with a critical eye and presumably made a few final strokes. The artist was Gertrude Sandmann. Despite being banned from her profession during the Nazi Emily L Quint Freeman is the author of the memoir Failure to Appear: Resistance, Identity and Loss (Blue Beacon Books). don to Berlin, a reminder of how quickly fighter planes and bombers could reach across the small checkerboard of Europe. On the night of November 22, 1943, the most devastating air raid since the beginning of the war began over Berlin. Six hundred British and Canadian airplanes dropped thousands of explosive and incendiary

years, Sandmann produced well over a thousand works over her sixty-year career. The Nazis destroyed much of her œuvre as an example of “degenerate art.” She drew with chalk or charcoal and painted with watercolors and pastels. Form was the princi pal element for her, color an afterthought. She worked with omissions that were meant to stir the imagination, the viewer’s capacity to see. Her drawings made visible the unassuming beauty of everyday life that she discovered in a sleeping woman or a burst chestnut. Her artwork was the product of her joy in seeing, not a means of social criticism as it was for some artists (such as her friend Käthe Kollwitz). Her drawings are predom inantly of women. Several nudes showing pairs of women have been preserved from the period around 1925. It is truly re markable how Sandmann was able to grasp their essence and create an erotic atmosphere with such sparing use of materials and a few powerful strokes. Gertrude grew up in Tiergarten, a well-to-do district of Berlin, in an assimilated Jewish family. Her father was a businessperson as well as a civil deputy. In 1913, Gertrude studied at the art school of the Berlin Association of Women Artists (women were not allowed in the na tional academy until after World War I). Other members of this still existing associa tion included Kollwitz and Paula Modersohn Becker. Throughout her career, Sandmann was very vocal about the professional dis crimination of women artists. Sandmann joined GEDOK , the German-Austrian Society for Women Artists and Friends of the Arts, founded in 1926, and became a member after it was revived in the 1960s. Gertrude Sandmann discovered rather early on that she felt “closer to women than to men.” At the beginning of World War I, she had a secret relationship with a girlfriend and fellow stu dent. To satisfy the demands of her family and retain their fi nancial support, she married a physician in 1915, but the marriage, in name only, ended in divorce after only a brief time. She wrote: “It is necessary or at least favorable for a woman

According to o ffi cial records, Gertrude Sandmann no longer existed in 1943. Other Jews had fled or been murdered, but she was s ti ll alive in Berlin.

From

Trans Hirstory in 99Objects Edited by David Evans Frantz, Christina Linden, Chris E. Vargas Through the contributions of artists, writers, poets, activists, and scholars, this book re fl ects on historical erasure and imagines trans futures. Cloth $40.00

November–December 2023

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