a woman of valor-freidl dicker-brandeis, art teacher in theresienstaddt concentration camp
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By David Pariser, Art Education, July, 2008TRANSCRIPT
National Art Education Association
A Woman of Valor: Freidl Dicker-Brandeis, Art Teacher in Theresienstadt ConcentrationCampAuthor(s): DAVID PARISERSource: Art Education, Vol. 61, No. 4 (July 2008), pp. 6-12Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20694738 .
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A Woman
Freidl Dicker-Brandeis, Art Teacher in
Theresienstadt Concentration Camp
In 1945, a holocaust survivor named
Willy Groag brought two suitcases full of drawings to the Jewish Museum in
Prague (Cook, 2004). These drawings were the work ofTheresienstadt concentration
camp children under the tutelage of a remark able art teacher: Freidl Dicker-Brandeis. She was their teacher and, once she decided to
follow her husband Pavel to Auschwitz, she
packed as many of the drawings and paintings as she could into two suitcases?and hid them.
The drawings, paintings and collages are a
testimony to the children's resilience and to the
extraordinary courage, dedication, and
pedagogical ability of their teachers.
The camp was a setting well calculated to make teachers reflect
soberly on the ultimate value of what they were doing. To judge by the record they left behind, Dicker-Brandeis and her colleagues had no doubt about the essential usefulness of their work with the
children. This alone makes the story of her last teaching assign ment inspirational for all art teachers. From those who survived, there emerges a picture of Dicker-Brandeis as an intense,
nurturing, and reflective teacher. Her aims as a teacher are
summed up in her own words, cited by Makarova (2000), "The
drawing classes are not meant to make artists out of all the
children. They are to free and broaden such sources of energy as
creativity and independence, to awaken the imagination, to
strengthen the children's powers of observation and appreciation of
reality" (p. 31). In effect, she had two clear aims: One was to
present the children with appropriate experiences in the visual arts,
and the other was to help the children to escape their terrible
surroundings, however briefly on the wings of imagination and
craft. In both respects, Dicker-Brandeis objectives are fundamen
tally the same as those of contemporary art teachers who find
themselves in less immediate danger, even though events in the
world continue to illustrate that old Latin tag "Homo hominem
lupus" (Man is a wolf to man). Although rhetorical and theoretical
frameworks may have changed since the 1940s, the task facing art
teachers is still the same: to inform, enlighten, train, and encourage visual exploration in the service of personal vision. All this must be
done with a bare minimum of materials and logistical support.
Before looking at works by children that illustrate aspects of her
teaching approach, I present a brief overview of her life. Freidl
Dicker-Brandeis (Goldman, 2000; Makarova, 2000; Wenig, 2003) was born in Vienna in 1898, and as a child she began to study art.
While in Vienna, she studied photography and took classes with
the noted art educator Franz Cizek. Between 1916 and 1919 she
was part of Johannes Ittens private school. Itten was then in the
process of creating his Basic Course in the visual arts, which later
became the centerpiece of the Bauhaus curriculum in Weimar.
When Itten moved to Weimar, Dicker-Brandeis moved also, and
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of Valor
BY DAVID PARISER
Figure 1. Portrait photograph of Freidl Dicker-Brandeis, By permission
of the Jewish Museum, Prague.
began to attend courses at the Bauhaus. She studied bookbinding, textiles, typography, and lithography. An outstanding student, she
was invited to teach Iltens Basic Course to the incoming students. It
was at the Bauhaus that she absorbed the fundamental Bauhaus
approach to form and color?a species of "constructivism" that had
a clear impact on her art work and on her design projects.
In 1923, she moved to Vienna. By 1931 she had added Communism to her ideological arsenal and she was active in the
growing anti-fascist movement. In a surviving political collage, she
incorporated a poem by Berthold Brecht in which he warns an
unborn child about the exploitation that awaits him in the world. In
1936 she ended a difficult long-term relationship with the designer Franz Singer and married Pavel Brandeis. Up to this point she was
active as an artist and commercial designer. In 1938 she began to
teach art privately to Jewish children in Hronov, a town northeast of
Prague. In 1942, as Nazi repression mounted, she obtained a visa for
Palestine, but as Pavel did not have a visa, they remained in Hronov
and from there they were sent to Terezin, where she taught art in the
camp. In 1944 she followed Pavel to Auschwitz, where she perished. Pavel survived.
Where did Dicker-Brandeis get the courage of her convictions?
She was an artist, a constructivist, a Communist. So perhaps her
strength came from a combination of belief in art as spiritual
expression (a Bauhaus notion) and her ideological faith. She was not
blindly optimistic, but said, "If you have only one day, then you have to live it. And while we are here, we have to do the best that we
can"(Wenig, 2003). Doing her best was easy for her when it came to
art, as it had long been her passion. It made no difference if she were
in a crowded camp or a middle-class sitting room, she had to engage with the world via imagery, and to show others how to do the same.
The key decisions in her life seem to have been based mostly on
emotion rather than ideology. So, her decision not to emigrate to
Palestine was based on her desire to stay with Pavel. Teaching art in
Theresienstadt was an inevitable and natural way for her to spend her time, given her commitment to art. To follow Pavel to Auschwitz
was also an emotional step?one motivated by love, not fear.
The drawings, paintings and collages are a testimony to the children's resilience
and to the extraordinary courage,
dedication, and pedagogical ability
of their teachers.
JULY 2008 / ART EDUCATION 7
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Theresienstadt, the Arts as a Fig Leaf for Genocide
Dicker-Brandeis and her husband were in a camp that was a part of the Nazis final solution to the
"Jewish problem" An unusual "cultural" ghetto (Blatter & Milton, 1981) was established in the
Czechoslovakian town of Terezin. The town was
originally a fortress built in 1780 by the Hapsburg emperor Joseph II in honor of his mother, Maria
Theresa. It was located in the scenic mountains of
Bohemia, not far from Prague. In 1941 Terezin was
renamed Theresienstadt by the victorious Germans
and became the high profile face of the "final solution"
By the end of 1945, some 33,456 men, women, and
children had died or had been executed in this old town (Potok, 1993). During the same period, 88,202 people passed through Theresienstadt and were swallowed up in the death camps.
The arts were cultivated in this ghetto for their value
as theater props intended to fool well-meaning
organizations like the Red Cross. As Potok (1993) observed, the Nazis went to some lengths to conceal
their apocalyptic goal. And well-meaning visitors such
as Red Cross delegations were often fooled into
believing (Dutlinger, 2001) that the camp was a safe haven from War.
The fact that the Nazis encouraged high art at
the camp (Blatter & Milton, 1981) reminds us that
acquaintance with the arts does not ennoble, nor
does it engender moral stamina. Hughes (1993) observed that it is one of the oldest conceits among the
"culturati" that the production or appreciation of the
arts is a sure sign of moral rectitude. If that were true,
says Hughes, art collectors, artists, and critics would all
be saints, and as is well known, they are not.
The 4,000 plus drawings and paintings hidden
in the camp, that now constitute an important
archive at the Jewish Museum in Prague, afford us a glimpse of life in the camp, and a sense of the teaching approach used by Dicker-Brandeis
and her fellow teachers.
Dicker-Brandeis at Work: Children's Art from Theresienstadt
The 4,000 plus drawings and paintings hidden in the
camp, that now constitute an important archive at the
Jewish Museum in Prague, afford us a glimpse of life in the camp, and a sense of the teaching approach used
by Dicker-Brandeis and her fellow teachers. The
artwork can be organized under several headings: sketches of everyday life, portraits, studies and
still-lifes, formal exercises dealing with the visual
elements, and imaginative and narrative illustrations.
The observational studies are chilling for what they show. Some drawings document the wretched housing conditions, disease, and overcrowding. Others are
naive witness to brutal public hangings and humiliation.
We can get a sense of Dicker-Brandeis' teaching
approach from the records of a lecture on art education
that she gave teachers in the camp (Makarova, 2000,
pp. 106-115). Dicker-Brandeis urged her fellow
teachers to heed three points:
1. Cooperative group work is preferable to
competitive work. Here she was clearly influenced
by her socialist leanings. Competition was
anathema.
2. Children's work should not be seen as imperfect adult work, but should be valued for its own
qualities. In taking this stand, Brandeis echoes the
attitudes of modernist artists such as Klee, who
looked to child art as the source of a distinctive aesthetic (Fineberg, 1997).
3. Children can learn from, and should be
encouraged to copy from the work of great artists. In this respect, Dicker-Brandeis differed
greatly with what was an influential Romantic
stream in art education: Cizek (1927) and, later,
Lowenfeld (1957) taught that allowing children to
copy from adult work, or any other source, was a
crime against the visual innocence of the child.
Even though she was not an art therapist, Dicker
Brandeis believed that visual art can have therapeutic value. Makarova (2000) presented Dicker-Brandeis*
clinical analysis of children's drawings. She sought clues about their inner lives and psychic organiza tion from what they said about the images that they
made. In this respect, Dicker-Brandeis was using what
still remains a powerful clinical technique (Lewis,
1986). The noted art therapist Edith Kramer studied with Dicker-Brandeis in Prague between 1934 and
1938. Kramer said that what Brandeis did in Terezin
was not "art therapy" but rather art education "with
some therapeutic elements"(Makarova, 2000, p. 138).
Despite few resources and little professional training as a therapist, she sought to strengthen and heal the
traumatized children.
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Her teaching approach included a selective "laissez-faire" component. She counseled teachers, "In any case, children develop their abilities in very different ways. In imposing on children the road that
they must travel, we cut them off from their creative
potential, and we cut ourselves off from knowing the
nature of these potentialities" (Makarova, 2000, p. 115).
According to those who took her classes (Makarova, 2000), Dicker-Brandeis presented students with color exercises and experiments with texture and line. She
had the children study still-life, work from observa tion, and draw from imagination. She dictated stories
as the basis for some of her lessons. In one typical lesson, children listened to the story as it proceeded and had to draw only those objects that she mentioned
more than once. An artist herself, she did not use the
materials at her disposal for her own work but saved
everything for the children to use. The ingenuity that she showed in finding materials is best illustrated by the way in which she used scrap office materials to
supplement the children's collage supplies. A number of children's collages survive, among them this one by Sona Spitzova (see Figure 2) showing a guard with a baton in a tower, monitoring a crowd. The materials
are scraps of office papers, and file folders thrown out
by the bureaucrats who were tools in the fatal machine that ran the camp. There is even a suggestion of
foreground and background. (The figure of a woman in the foreground is proportionately larger than the other figures?thereby creating the impression of
depth.)
The Drawings Claire Golomb (1992) devoted a chapter to child
art from Terezin. She asserted that there is nothing extraordinary about the work these children left behind. The images are typical in terms of the children's age-related technical and compositional
accomplishments. They are also typical in terms of the children's thematic choices. Golomb referred to the emotional impact of the drawings. There is a
powerful tension between the simplicity of the means at the children's disposal, and the fathomless horrors that we know surrounded them. But to my mind, an
"aesthetic'' assessment seems inappropriate. Howe's
(1981) comment on adult artworks from the Holocaust is apt: "There are values that supersede the aesthetic
ones and situations in which it is unseemly to continue
going through the paces of aesthetic judgment... Like the poems and memoirs written in the camps, these
works testify to the will of the doomed ... human
beings who stretch out their hands to those of us they could not know as anything but an unseen future"
(p. 11).
Drawings and the Construction of Ethnic Racial Identity
Wenig (2003) mentioned that Dicker-Brandeis
encouraged the children to make portraits and made
sure that all the children signed them, as a way of
validating their identities. Indeed, among the 4,000 drawings there are many self-portraits and portraits some of fellow child prisoners?such as a memory sketch by 11-year-old Georg Eisler of his friend, a boy
who disappeared from Terezin. Eisler also made a
drawing of Moses (see Makarova, 2000 p. 129). Eisler's written comment on the Moses portrait is strangely uninformative?he says that he had no idea why he made the drawing?that it just "happened." But is it
surprising that this displaced Jewish boy, threatened
explicitly for his ethnicity, should sketch an image of the Jewish liberator? The portraits that Dicker-Brandeis
encouraged the children to make were a good antidote
to that other badge of Jewish identity forced on all camp inmates?the Star of David.
Figure 2. Sona Spitzova, 11-13 years. Guard with a stick.
Collage of office paper and ledger pages. By permission of the Jewish Museum, Prague. Inventory # 125499.
JULY 2008 / ART EDUCATION 9
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Images of the Environment A poignant aspect of the artworks
from Terezin is that some children
document the picturesque environ
ment of the camp. For example, a
drawing by Petr Weidman, who was
13 years old, shows Terezin in a
bucolic setting (see Figure 3). There are rolling hills, castles perched on
high bluffs, and a lake with a sailboat in the distance. As Simon Schama
(1996) stated of another death camp, Treblinka: "In our mind s eye, we are
accustomed to think of the Holocaust as having no landscape? or at best one emptied of features
and color, shrouded in night and
fog, blanketed by perpetual winter, collapsed into shades of dun and gray: the gray of smoke, of ash, of
pulverised bones, of quick-lime. It is
shocking then, to realize that
Treblinka, too, belongs to a
brilliantly vivid countryside..."
(p. 26). A more appropriate image of the death camp is conjured up by a
water color and ink painting, The
Courtyard, by Pavel Sonnenschein
(see Figure 4). This is a skilled work. It captures the brooding and
oppressive atmosphere of the
town, and is more congruent with
the nature of the place.
Above:
Figure 3. Petr Weidman, 13 years old, view of Terezin,
crayon drawing. By permission of the Jewish Museum, Prague.
Inventory # 121991.
Right: Figure 4. Pavel Sonnenschein,
11 years. Watercolor and ink, The Courtyard. By permission of the Jewish Museum, Prague.
Inventory # 125515.
3
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Images Based on Imagination As we have seen, Dicker-Brand?is encouraged
pictures that showed aspects of everyday life in Theresienstadt. She also believed in indulging fantasy, to create evocative images. The last image to be discussed
here is representative of such an imaginative flight.
A fanciful pencil drawing by Karel Sattler (10-11 years old) (see Figure 5) shows an intrepid world traveler on his two-humped camel, with his suitcase
packed. To judge by the stickers on the valise he has been to?or will go to?Oslo, London, Paris, and
Prague. Karels difficulties with organizing the camel
caravan in the distance indicate a common solution to
the problem of placing vertical figures on a sloping baseline. Karel oriented the pack train of other camels
on a distant sand dune to the edge of that dune itself, rather than to the vertical axis of the page. This is a "local solution
' to the problem of orienting figures to a
non-horizontal baseline (Wilson & Wilson, 1985), which is typical of neophyte graphists who are
struggling with a more naturalistic way of rendering
pictorial space. In fact, this distinctive arrangement
suggests that, in this instance, Karel did not receive any technical instruction from Dicker-Brandeis and was
left alone to grapple with a drawing problem common to all beginners (Wilson & Wilson, 1998).
There were adult artists who paid with their lives
for smuggling out images that spoke openly of the
brutality in the camp, but Dicker-Brandeis saw her
job as a balancing act?encouraging the children
to escape via their imaginations, and acquainting
them with the duty to observe.
Conclusion Freidl Dicker-Brandeis' ordeal and triumph as a
teacher is of special interest to art educators today, for
she was concerned with the formal, as well as narrative
aspects of the image. She also subscribed to the notion of children as "closer to nature." Some contemporary art educators may characterize these views as obtuse
and elitist, for after all it is common knowledge that formalism is a bastion of aesthetic privilege, and that the Romantic view of the child as a "natural innocent"
patronizes children and ignores the "socially constructed" features of childhood. Above all,
3
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She believed in the
importance of
giving the children
the technical and
formal tools with
which to make
their own images. There were no
nuances, there was
no self-doubt.
Dicker-Brandeis did little to instill that touchstone of
contemporary artistic excellence?the quest for social
justice. The closest she came to developing a "critique" of the situation was when she encouraged the children
to document their grim and threatening surroundings
including the gallows and the crowded, dehumanized
and threatening environment. There were adult artists
who paid with their lives for smuggling out images that spoke openly of the brutality in the camp, but
Dicker-Brandeis saw her job as a balancing act?
encouraging the children to escape via their imagina tions, and acquainting them with the duty to observe.
Dicker-Brandeis story epitomizes resourcefulness,
commitment, and a belief in the visual arts as a means
for personal expression, healthy escape, and as a
medium in which to solve problems. We note that
Dicker-Brandeis' beliefs are out of step with some
dominant conceptions of the arts and art education
today, for she respected and recognized the hierar
chical in art, encouraging the children to copy from
"old master" paintings. Above all, her approach lacked
the self-mockery and irony that characterizes the
postmodern moment. She believed in the importance of giving the children the technical and formal tools
with which to make their own images. There were no
nuances, there was no self-doubt. Above all, she was an
optimist?for her gesture in hiding the children's
artwork shows her faith in the future, when a child's
drawing would carry more weight than a fascist
jackboot.
David Pariser is Professor, Department of Art
Education, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]
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WEBSITES Freidl Dicker-Brandeis. (2001). Life in art and teaching. http://www.sharat:co.il/lel/friedl/time/timel.html Retrieved 06/17/ 2006 from Sharat Communications data base.
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ENDNOTE This manuscript is a revised version of a paper presented at the National Art Education Association Convention, Chicago, March 2006.
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