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Foreword
I am delighted that the German Embassy London is once again working in partnership with the Ben Uri Gallery & Museum in London to mark and commemorate the 85th anniversary of the November Pogroms and the first Kindertransports to the United Kingdom with the digital exhibition Painting with an Accent: German-Jewish Émigré Stories.
“As much as I have an accent in my language, I have an accent in my painting”. This statement by Harry Weinberger vividly captures the feelings of émigré artists who carry both their old and new homes within them. Born in Berlin to a Jewish industrialist family, he only just managed to board the last Kindertransport with his sister to reach the safety of British shores. His journey and story stand for many Jewish émigré lives cruelly uprooted by the Nazi persecution. By exploring the legacy and heritage of Jewish émigré artists in this exhibition, we would like to pay tribute to the many German-Jewish émigrés who fled the Nazi regime and Nazi-occupied territories in Europe to find liberty and a new home in Britain. We would also like to honour the thousands of children and all the other refugees who were forced to flee their homes under traumatic circumstances on the Kindertransport or via other routes and leave their loved ones behind, most of whom perished in the Holocaust.
The anniversaries of the beginning of the Kindertransports and the November Pogroms serve as a call to action and an important reminder to us all that we – like the people behind the Kindertransport rescue operation – must prevent antisemitism, racism and populism from taking root again. Germany of all countries has a historic responsibility and defending our liberal values and protecting our democracy as well as the rule of law are at the heart of Germany’s political identity.
In this spirit, this exhibition will also shine a light on the legacy of these German-Jewish émigré stories for the next generations. Their voices and creativity must keep alive the message that we all need to remember the horrors of the Holocaust, especially now that the voices of the survivor generation are slowly fading away.
I would like to express my deep gratitude to the Ben Uri Gallery & Museum, especially its director Sarah MacDougall and its chairman David Glasser, for the opportunity to jointly tell and remember the stories of these German-Jewish émigré artists.
Miguel Berger
Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to the United Kingdom
Five years on from the exhibition Finchleystrasse: German Artists in Exile in Great Britain and Beyond, 1933-45 (2017), marking the 80th anniversary of the Kindertransport, the digital exhibition Painting with an Accent: German-Jewish Émigré Stories, once more in collaboration with the German Embassy London, marks the 85th anniversary of this important event. It presents the work of ten artists from German-Jewish émigré backgrounds – seven first-generation and three second-generation – whose personal lives, careers and artworks were either interrupted, impacted and/or lastingly influenced by their experience of Nazi persecution in Germany and subsequent resettlement in Britain.
Two older artists, Hans Feibusch and Martin Bloch, open the exhibition. Both left Germany as adults, prior to the Kindertransport, but through teaching and example became important influencers upon the younger refugee generation in Britain. At the exhibition’s heart are five artists, who came to Britain as children or adolescents, either directly on the Kindertransport, or under similar schemes: Heinz Koppel and Harry Weinberger, cousins, were both taught in London by Bloch; Susan Einzig and Eva Frankfurther, shared strikingly similar backgrounds but pursued divergent artistic paths, and Peter Midgley (né Fleischman), an orphan, who adopted the name of a welcoming English family, received a thorough art education from older refugee artists during internment (1940-41). All but Frankfurther went on to become influential art teachers themselves. Traces of their German inheritance – painting, as Harry Weinberger put it, with ‘an accent’, can be found in all their works, but they also responded to the succeeding decades and art movements with which they engaged in postwar Britain.
From the second-generation come three contemporary artists engaging directly with their tumultuous family histories: Julie Held, whose expressionistic paint handling implies a direct legacy and whose painting engages three generations of her own family; Barbara Loftus, whose ongoing series of large-scale peopled interiors meticulously recreates her grandparents’ apartment in Berlin and the story of their persecution and exile; and Carry Gorney, whose Burnt Histories series relates the stories of individual family members. Together, they remind us how closely life and art are intertwined and the continuing importance of history and legacy.
I would like to thank all the artists and their estates for their kind cooperation and the Ambassador Miguel Berger and Dr. Susanne Frane at the German Embassy London for their support in realising this online exhibition and catalogue.
Sarah MacDougall Director, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum
