Max Liebermann
Berlin Jew and Prussian
And even if I have felt like a German throughout my whole life, my belonging to Judaism was no less strongly alive in me.
To Meir Dizengoff on 12 August 1931
As part of the project “Max Liebermann and Jewish Life in Berlin,” this online exhibition sheds light on Liebermann’s relationship to his Jewish identity.
Max Liebermann (1847-1935) was born into an upper-middle-class entrepreneurial family that equally identified as Jews and Prussians. In his resume as a high school graduate in 1866, Max Liebermann wrote:
“I, Max Liebermann, was born on 20 July 1847, in Berlin. My father Louis Liebermann raised me faithfully in the faith of the fathers, in the Jewish religion.”
Liebermann’s grandfather Joseph (1783-1860) came to Berlin from Märkisch Friedland (today: Mirosławiec, Poland) in 1812 in the context of the “Edict concerning the civil status of the Jews in the Prussian state” to take advantage of the advancing equal rights for Jews in Prussia as a textile entrepreneur. Liebermann’s father Louis (1819-1894) successfully continued the business.
Martha (1857-1943), Liebermann’s future wife, was similarly socialized as her husband. She also came from a Jewish merchant family that had emigrated from Märkisch Friedland.
Liebermann and his family attended the “Old Synagogue” on Heidereutergasse (Berlin-Mitte, near Alexanderplatz). Grandfather Joseph Liebermann was long associated with the community and donated a Torah curtain “Parochet” to it.
The Old Synagogue, inaugurated as Berlin’s first synagogue in 1714, was destroyed by air raids during World War II. The New Synagogue on Oranienburger Straße was built later when the Old Synagogue became too small for the rapidly growing community. Liebermann’s granddaughter Maria (1917-1997) was baptized Catholic in 1917 in St. Hedwig’s Cathedral at Gendarmenmarkt. Her father Kurt Riezler (1882-1955) was Catholic.
In keeping with his social class and time, the painter maintained a self-confident and secular approach to his Jewish identity throughout his life. According to him, “Religion is a private matter” and he felt “otherwise as a German” as he wrote to the poet Richard Dehmel on 22 June 1908.
Christmas with the Liebermanns
Like many German-Jewish families, the Liebermanns also celebrated Christmas as an interdenominational family festival. On 21 December 1908, Max Liebermann wrote to his friend and art historian Alfred Lichtwark:
“[…] I celebrate all festivals, Christian, Jewish, Mohammedan […].”
The family celebrated secularly with festive meals, a Christmas tree, and gifts for each other. Every Christmas, the painter received a Königsberg marzipan cake from Otto Hermann Claass, a Königsberg merchant.
In Christmas 1909, he gave his wife a fountain figure of an otter by the sculptor August Gaul, the cast of which stands again today in the garden of the villa on Wannsee. In 1915, his daughter received the novel by the Jewish author Georg Borchardt “On Secure and Insecure Life.” Liebermann wrote to the author personally:
“P. S. I will put one copy of your essays under the Christmas tree (which must not be missing in any good Jewish family) for my daughter.”
Liebermann's Jewish Network
Max Liebermann had a broad network that he maintained through personal contacts and extensive correspondence. This included many visual artists, but also other personalities from the cultural context such as writers and poets, actors, critics, museum directors and curators, or art dealers. Especially in this cultural environment, the proportion of people of Jewish faith was disproportionately high.
Many collectors also belonged to Liebermann’s circle of acquaintances, such as Carl and Felicie Bernstein, who brought the first French Impressionists to Berlin. Think of the painter Jozef Israëls, with whom Liebermann was closely associated, or Eugen Spiro, Ernst Oppler, and Julie Wolfthorn, all members of the Berlin Secession, as well as Max Friedländer, the director of the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett and the Gemäldegalerie, the art critics Max Osborn and Julius Elias, who was also a writer and art collector. Also worth mentioning are the art dealers and publishers and co-founders of the Berlin Secession, Paul and Bruno Cassirer.
Liebermann’s network also extended through family and friendly contacts within the Jewish Berlin bourgeoisie. Here, for example, Emil and Walther Rathenau, his cousin and great-cousin, should be mentioned.
Liebermann's Commitment
Liebermann repeatedly advocated for the concerns of Jews and Jewish cultural institutions. In 1906, he became a member of the Berlin Action Committee for the “Introduction of Cottage Industry and Arts and Crafts in Palestine,” took on the honorary chairmanship of the newly founded Jewish Museum Association in Berlin in 1929, and from summer 1933 was honorary president of the “Cultural Federation of German Jews,” in which Jewish artists excluded by the Nazi Reich Chamber of Culture organized.
In 1905, he participated in organizing an exhibition aimed at financially supporting the victims of the anti-Semitic pogroms in Tsarist Russia and wrote on 7 December to the art historian and museum director Wilhelm Bode*, who significantly shaped the Berlin museum landscape:
“Dear Privy Councillor! In favor of the victims of the Russian Jewish massacres, an exhibition of works by Christian and Jewish artists is being prepared. The organizers of this exhibition take the liberty of asking you to join the committee and confidently expect that you will gladly seize this opportunity to help alleviate the unprecedented misery and document your abhorrence of these atrocities.”
Liebermann never saw himself as a Zionist, yet he found appreciative words about the Zionist movement, as the art critic Adolph Donath reported in 1902 in “Die Welt – Central Organ of the Zionist Movement”:
“Max Liebermann devotes great interest to Zionism. ‘It is something incredibly ideal. Whether the idea is implemented or not, the moral effect is already very great. When one considers that the bond between Jews, who are scattered all over the world, has been torn for millennia, and that today it is being restored and then increasingly tightened, one must pay attention to the Zionist movement. The idea is fascinating. […] The cultural progress associated with Zionism today cannot yet be measured. It will certainly not be insignificant!'”
Toward the end of his life, in view of the Nazi persecution policy, Liebermann changed his attitude toward the establishment of a Jewish state.
To Meir Dizengoff, the first mayor of Tel Aviv, he wrote on 12 August 1931:
“Even if I am not a Zionist – for I am from an earlier generation – I nevertheless follow the ideal goals he pursues with great interest.”
And to the poet Chaim N. Bialik, he wrote on 28 June 1933:
“You, Mr. Bialik, may remember the conversations we had when I was allowed to etch you, in which I tried to explain why I had stood aloof from Zionism. Today I think differently: as difficult as it was for me, I have awakened from the dream I have dreamed all my long life. Unfortunately, one cannot transplant such an old tree – I will be 86 years old next month.”
In January 1934, Max and Martha paid for the passage of children from the Jewish orphanage Beit Ahawah on Auguststraße in Berlin-Mitte to Haifa, Palestine.
Jewish Motifs in Paintings
Liebermann’s work contains only a few motifs with a reference to Judaism. In addition to Liebermann’s secular reference to religion, one reason is probably that his choice of motif was his undoing in the so-called Jesus scandal:
In 1879, as a young artist, Liebermann participated in the international art exhibition at the Munich Glass Palace with the painting “The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple.” His exhibited work became the subject of an anti-Semitic scandal over its subject matter and his person.
The Gospel of Luke describes how Mary and Joseph traveled to Jerusalem with their twelve-year-old son for the Passover festival. The young Jesus got lost and was found only after three days in the temple, where he was in lively discussion with the scholars: “And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers” (Luke 2:47).
Influenced by the spirit of Orientalism in the 19th century, which saw an approximation to the “Orient” and a more realistic portrayal of Jesus within his historical Jewish contexts, Liebermann’s painting was based on studies in Sephardic synagogues in Amsterdam and Venice.
In his depiction, the figures are identifiable as Jewish by their clothing and hair. At the center of the original depiction stands the barefoot young Jesus, wearing a short, irregular garment and having hair cut short except for the sideburns. Surrounding him are the scholars: The standing ones are dressed in long coats with standing collars, a decorated belt called a “gartel,” fur-trimmed “spodek” hats, and are recognizable as Jews by their side curls “peyot” and full beards. The seated scribes wear the prayer shawl “tallit” draped over their shoulders.
This portrayal of the “precocious Jewish boy” was perceived by the audience and press as a deliberate insult to Christian religious sentiment, with accusations that Liebermann had clearly crossed the line into blasphemy. Even the Christian art journal was outraged, saying, “that a Jew dares to hurl such mockery of their Savior into the faces of his Christian fellow citizens.” The reactions to Liebermann’s painting were so strong that even the Bavarian parliament discussed the case in a two-day debate.
Eventually, Liebermann overpainted his child Jesus, now depicting him in a clean, light garment and sandals, with shoulder-length blond hair and restrained gestures.
For over thirty years, he avoided religious themes in his works.
The Liebermanns in the Nazi Era
After World War I, Jews in the Weimar Republic experienced a resurgence of anti-Semitism. Even before the Nazis came to power, Liebermann was repeatedly the focus of nationalist propaganda. Unwaveringly, he adhered to his identity as a Berliner, Prussian, and Jew:
“I often spoke with Professor Einstein about the Jewish question. I have always approached it my whole life by first asking: What kind of person is this? Never whether someone was Jewish, Christian, or pagan. I was born a Jew and will die a Jew.”
In 1927, the city council decided to bestow honorary citizenship on Liebermann. This honor for a Jewish fellow citizen had been highly controversial internally. In the same year, Liebermann portrayed President Paul von Hindenburg, which led to hostility in the Nazi press. Liebermann did not leave this uncommented:
“Recently, a Hitler newspaper wrote that it was outrageous that a Jew painted President Hindenburg. I can only laugh at such things, and I am convinced that Hindenburg laughs at it too. After all, I am just a painter; what does painting have to do with Judaism?”
With the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933, anti-Semitism was declared a state objective. Liebermann’s daughter Käthe and son-in-law Kurt Rietzler experienced this through the state’s questioning of their so-called mixed marriage. As a consequence, in early April 1933, Kurt Rietzler was forced to resign from his honorary professorship at the Faculty of Philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main during a so-called protective custody by the SA.
After the Academy of Arts announced that it would no longer exhibit works by Jewish artists and Liebermann’s dismissal was imminent following the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, specifically the so-called “Aryan Paragraph” of 7 April 1933, Liebermann preempted the Nazis by resigning from his honorary presidency of the Prussian Academy of Arts on 7 May 1933, and declared his departure.
Liebermann spent his last years withdrawn, deeply shaken by the political and cultural upheaval, and isolated by the official representatives from culture and society.
On June 28, 1933, he reported to Meir Dizengoff and Chaim Bialik about the shock he and his fellow Jewish citizens had to experience:
“The abolition of equality weighs on all of us like a terrible nightmare, especially those Jews who, like me, had given themselves to the dream of assimilation.”
On 8 February 1935, the painter died in his house on Pariser Platz. Years earlier, Liebermann had agreed with the artist Arno Breker that he would take his death mask. In 1936, a cast of that mask was displayed as part of the Liebermann Memorial Exhibition at the then Jewish Museum on Oranienburger Straße.
Later, Breker was included in the list of “Gottbegnadeten” [Divinely Favored] and became an established artist in the Nazi state, creating sculptures and reliefs for Adolf Hitler’s New Reich Chancellery, among other things.
Liebermann was buried on 11 February 1935, at the Jewish Cemetery on Schönhauser Allee. The funeral society of about 100 people consisted of relatives, friends, and Berlin artists. No official representative attended the funeral. The Jewish photographer Abraham Pisarek photographed the burial. He left the following account:
“On 8 February 1935, I learned in the editorial office of the Jewish community newspaper that my revered old master had died. The Gestapo had banned the public from the funeral to prevent anything resembling a demonstration. […] I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to take pictures of the funeral, especially not… I climbed up one of the stones and photographed, pressing the camera into the ivy, as the coffin was carried out.”
The widow Martha, together with Liebermann’s biographer Erich Hancke, marked all unsigned paintings and drawings with an estate stamp. Later that same year, she left the house on Pariser Platz and moved to an apartment on Graf-Spee-Straße in the Tiergarten district (today: Hiroshimastraße). The gift of the house on Pariser Platz to her non-Jewish son-in-law was not recognized by the Nazis and was confiscated in 1938. She also had to sell the villa on Wannsee to the Reichspost in 1940, with the sale value being paid into a so-called security account, which she was not allowed to access.
The fate of Martha Liebermann
Käthe, the daughter, fled to New York with her family a few days after the so-called Kristallnacht on 9 and 10 November 1938, where her husband was able to take up a professorship. Martha could not be persuaded to leave, as she felt obliged to remain in her hometown by her husband’s grave and his works.
From 1941, she then tried to emigrate and received entry permits for both countries through the support of friends in Switzerland and Sweden. The Nazi authorities demanded excessive money as the so-called Reich Flight Tax as well as unscrupulous conditions in the transfer of money. Because of this and a stroke that made Martha bedridden, the possibility of escape failed.
To avoid deportation to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, the 86-year-old took an overdose of the sleeping pill Veronal on 5 March 1943, and was taken to the Jewish Hospital in Berlin-Wedding, where she died on 10 March. She was buried, accompanied by seven funeral attendees, in the Jewish cemetery in Weißensee. In 1954, she was finally transferred to the Jewish cemetery in Schönhauser Allee and buried next to her husband.
In 2005, a “Stolperstein” (stumbling stone) was set for Martha at Pariser Platz.
Farewell letter to the friend Erich Alenfeld
Berlin, 4 March 1943
“Thursday,
Dear, esteemed Mr. Alenfeld,
I am completely confused! The bank didn’t even pay the small amount, without a friendly visit I would be without money! – In addition, I am scared on all sides because of the transport! I long for you, Dr. Landsberger was supposed to come!
Please, please reply
Your grateful Martha L.”
Handwritten note by Erich Alenfeld:
“picked up 5.III.43/morning! Took poison!”
Provenance Research
In the first decades of the 20th century, Liebermann was one of Germany’s most successful and most collected artists. His works were purchased by museums all over Europe, regularly offered on the art market, and collected by the educated, progressive bourgeoisie of the Weimar Republic, which was strongly influenced by Judaism. According to an estimate, 75 percent of Liebermann’s collectors before 1933 were of Jewish origin.
After 1933, Liebermann was considered ostracized, some of his works were classified as “degenerate” and frequently changed locations: Museums parted with works by Jewish artists during this time. The possessions of persecuted people and opponents of the Nazi regime, including their art collections, were confiscated. Many had to sell their works to ensure their survival, others tried to save their art abroad.
Thus, many object biographies of Liebermann’s works are still fragmentary and characterized by a patchy source situation, which repeatedly brings them into the focus of provenance research and makes them the subject of restitutions.
The villa at Wannsee was restituted to Käthe Rietzler in 1951. Her granddaughter Maria White subsequently sold the villa to the state of Berlin.
Some important paintings from Liebermann’s art collection could be brought to safety in 1933 by Walter Feilchenfeldt, the managing director of Galerie Cassirer, in Kunsthaus Zurich; these include works by Degas, Cézanne, Daumier, Monet, and Renoir. Other paintings Käthe Rietzler was able to take with her to New York, also with Feilchenfeldt’s support.
Notes
Cover image: Max Liebermann in front of the plaster model of his bust by Edmund Möller (1885-1958). Undated, around 1932. The photo is attributed to the Argusfot agency, but the author is unknown. A possible photographer is Willi Ruge. The original photo is in the ullstein bild archive. Research on the photo was conducted as part of the exhibition “Meeting Liebermann” in the Liebermann Villa.
All quotes come from the nine-volume letter edition compiled, commented on, and published by Ernst Volker Braun. Published in 2021 by the German Science Publishing House.
*Due to his numerous anti-Semitic statements, Wilhelm von Bode is considered a controversial historical figure. The museum named after him today critically examines the namesake. Statements by Liebermann about Bode’s anti-Semitism are not documented.
Editing
Idea, concept, and design: Judith Rinklebe
Editing: Judith Rinklebe, Viktoria Bernadette Krieger, Evelyn Wöldicke, and Antonia Fuchs.
This online exhibition is part of the mediation project “Max Liebermann and Jewish Life in Berlin” and will be made possible in 2024/2025 through funding by the Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Anti-Semitism.