Friedl Dicker-Brandeis

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Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (July 30, 1898 - October 9, 1944), was a Viennese artist. She was a student of Johannes Itten at his private school in Vienna, and later followed Itten to study and teach at the Weimar Bauhaus. She was involved in the textile design, printmaking, bookbinding, and typography workshops there from 1919-1923. After leaving the Bauhaus, she worked as an artist and textile designer in Berlin, Prague, and Hronov. She married Pavel Brandeis in 1936.

"I remember thinking in school how I would grow up and would protect my students from unpleasant impressions, from uncertainty, from scrappy learning," Friedl Dicker-Brandeis wrote to a friend in 1940. "Today only one thing seems important — to rouse the desire towards creative work, to make it a habit, and to teach how to overcome difficulties that are insignificant in comparison with the goal to which you are striving." [1]

Dicker-Brandeis and her husband were deported to the Terezín "model ghetto" in December 1942. During her time at Terezín, she gave art lessons and lectures. She helped to organize secret education classes for the children of Terezín. She saw drawing and art as a way for the children to understand their emotions and their environment. In this capacity she was giving art therapy.

At Terezin she persisted in pursuing her goal — "to rouse the desire towards creative work." [2]

In September 1944, Brandeis was transported to Auschwitz; Dicker-Brandeis volunteered for the next transport to join him. But before she was taken away, she managed to fill two suitcases with 4,500 drawings and hide them in a secret place. She died in Birkenau on October 9, 1944. Her husband died as well.

After the war, the children's drawings were recovered and given to the Jewish Museum in Prague. Nearly all their authors were killed in the Holocaust. They are now on display in the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague, as a reminder that the war was brutally indiscriminate.

In 2002 a Friedl Dicker-Brandeis's exhibit series entitled "Friedl and the Children of Terezin: An Exhibition of Art and Hope" has taken place in Japan from April-October. Tokyo Fuji Art Museum founder Daisaku Ikeda, who was instrumental in bringing the exhibit to Japan, comments, "The various artworks left behind by this great woman and the children of Terezin are their legacy to the present, to all of us today. They demand that we continue in our quest for a society that truly treasures human life, transcending all differences of race, religion, politics and ideology. It remains my heartfelt hope that this exhibit may provide a moment of introspection for its viewers, a moment for us to reaffirm the importance of our rights as human beings and the value of life itself."


[edit] Literature

  • Susan Goldman Rubin: Fireflies in the Dark: The Story of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and the Children of Terezin , Holiday House Inc New York, 2000, ISBN 9780823416813 (13), ISBN 082341681X (10)
  • Elena Makarova: Friedl, Dicker-Brandeis, Vienna 1898- Auschwitz 19 (Paperback), Publisher: Tallfellow Press; 1st ed edition (December 31, 1999), ISBN 0967606195 (10), ISBN 978-0967606194 (13)

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Keeping Creativity Alive, Even in Hell By JULIE SALAMON
  2. ^ taken from the above mentioned article of Julie Salamon

[edit] External links

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