Narrating Cultural Heritage: The Artist Gertrude Sandmann

Reading time about 8 minutes

Am Karlsbad 11 in Berlin-Tiergarten is now home to an office complex made of steel-grey stone and reflective glass. The CA Immo Group, which owns the building, advertises its proximity to the Gleisdreieck underground station and the Landwehr Canal, the numerous shopping facilities and the view of the greenery.

This view of the greenery is a tiny park with a playground and a dozen trees. Some of them are old, part of the Tiergarten, which gives the neighbourhood its name and once completely covered it as the Großer Tiergarten.

The former hunting grounds were transformed into an English landscape park in the middle of the 19th century. In addition to shady footpaths and pubs, there are also exclusive villas and upper-class residential buildings. Gertrude Sandmann, born on 16 October 1893, grew up in a house designed by Martin Gropius (the great-uncle of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius).

Gertrude's family is wealthy; her father, David Sandmann, owns a plantation in East Africa - the family thus benefits directly from colonialism. David Sandmann is also a liquor manufacturer, commercial judge, citizen deputy and amateur scientist (in this capacity he writes a treatise on ‘Das Kautschuk Problem’).

David Sandmann dies unexpectedly in 1917 after a short illness. The obituaries in the Berlin newspapers bear witness to how well the family is anchored in Berlin society.

Gertrude Sandmann developed a passion and talent for drawing at an early age. After graduating from high school in 1913, she began training at the Verein Berliner Künstlerinnen. The reason why she did not study at the Academy of Arts was because the Academy refused to allow any women to study at that time. The Verein Berliner Künstlerinnen was founded in 1867 as a direct response to these sexist rules - and it still exists today. Gertrude also studied with Otto Kopp in Munich from 1917 to 1921 and then (back in Berlin) took private lessons from none other than Käthe Kollwitz.

In the mid-1920s, Gertrude finally worked as a freelance artist in Paris. She earned money with illustrations for magazines. As a female artist, it was much more difficult for her to establish herself in the scene than for many of her male colleagues. Together with other female artists, she therefore organised herself into the Gemeinschaft der Künstlerinnen und Kunstfreunde (GEDOK for short).

Many of Gertrude Sandmann's works were later destroyed during the war and there is no catalogue of her works. The 1920s were, it seems, a productive time and she exhibited her works several times in Berlin. Sandmann concentrated on drawings in her work. According to historian Claudia Schoppen, she focussed on form and worked with omissions: ‘Gertrude Sandmann's pictures are first and foremost the result of her pleasure in seeing.’ Moreover, Gertrude Sandmann mainly draws women. Claudia Schoppen quotes the artist as saying that, as a woman, they are simply closer to her than men. 

In the 1910s, Gertrude is in a relationship with her former school friend Lilly zu Klampen. In the 1970s, she remembers how important the queer clubs in Berlin during the Weimar Republic were for her - to meet like-minded women, to free herself from the isolation imposed by society and to find a home away from her biological parents.

At the same time, she emphasises that the time was by no means as free as is often assumed in retrospect. Gertrude Sandmann was only able to lead an openly lesbian life after the Second World War. She also criticises the glorifying nostalgia for the supposedly roaring twenties, ‘because people don't think about the misery of the war invalids and survivors, about inflation and unemployment, which also hit women hard, but only about the great artistic achievements of the time, only about the effervescent joie de vivre, the reaction to years of psychological pressure from the war, only about the relaxation of sex taboos.’

Gertrude has been dating Hedwig Koslowski, known as Jonny, an applied artist, since 1927.  Together with a handful of Berlin friends, she would save her life. In March 1933, the NSDAP wins the Reichstag elections, shortly afterwards the Reichstag building is set on fire, giving the party a pretext to undermine democratic institutions, Hindenburg appoints Hitler as Reich Chancellor and the Weimar Republic is history.

Gertrude Sandmann is Jewish and realises early on that she is in danger in the new Germany. She did not grow up particularly religious, nor was she a member of Berlin's Jewish community (she had left in 1926), but nevertheless emigrated to Switzerland. However, she was not granted a residence and work permit there and had to return to Berlin in 1934. The restrictive asylum regulations of European countries (and the USA) cost countless people their lives and the more humane asylum policy of the post-war period is a direct result of this.

In April 1935, Gertrude Sandmann received a letter from Eugen Hönig, the president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts. He rejects her alleged application to be admitted to the Reich Chamber ‘because you are non-Aryan and as such do not possess the reliability and suitability required for the creation of German cultural assets.’

The fact that Gertrude Sandmann never submitted an application was irrelevant. The exclusion leads to a professional ban. Even though Gertrude Sandmann continued to draw in secret, she now had practically no income. Only her deceased father's estate enabled her to keep her head above water financially. At the same time, she had to hand over her jewellery and valuables and, like all other Jews, was forced to contribute to the fines for the Reichspogromnacht of 9 November 1938.

The house at Am Karlsbad 11 is transferred to her sister Vera Mastrangelo, who lives in Italy and has Italian citizenship through her marriage - this means that the property is not expropriated and Gertrude and her mother Ella can continue to live there. In the summer of 1939, Gertrude Sandmann manages to obtain one of the rare visas for Great Britain through the help of an art dealer friend. However, she does not have the heart to leave her mother, who is already seriously ill, to her fate in Berlin. The Second World War began in September 1939 and Gertrude's mother died a month later - the visa was no longer valid at this point and emigration to another country was almost impossible.

Two years later, in October 1941, Jews were banned from leaving the country. While their emigration had only recently been forced, deportations and industrialised mass murder were now being prepared. Emigration was no longer an option for Gertrude Sandmann. It was only because of her poor health that she was not conscripted into forced labour. However, she was threatened with deportation in November 1942. Gertrude's aunt and uncle were deported to Theresienstadt in the summer of the same year, where they were later murdered.

Gertrude Sandmann decided to go into hiding on 21 November 1942. She faked her suicide by leaving a farewell letter to the Gestapo, which also meant that she had to leave her belongings and valuable food stamps behind. Many older Jewish women were actually driven to suicide by the impending deportations. Through her partner Hedwig Koslowski, Gertrude is given shelter by the Grossmann family in Berlin-Treptow. There she hid in a small room, had to avoid any noise and hold out in the flat during air raids instead of being in relative safety in the air-raid shelter - the risk of being discovered and denounced by neighbours was too high. At one point, she is almost discovered by the air-raid warden and has to hide in a desk.
 

The constant uncertainty, the perseverance, the boredom are just as hard on Gertrude Sandmann as the lack of food. Throughout her life, she was haunted by nightmares and sudden knocking or ringing  at the door triggered anxiety and panic.

Even in hiding, Gertrude Sandmann continued to draw. Some of these ‘memory drawings’ survived the war. They are often made on old paper, forms or statements; Gertrude uses them to train her memory and her fingers. The drawings show people, objects and plants.

In the summer of 1944, the situation for the Grossmann family had become untenable. The Allies are carrying out more and more air raids and Gertrude is worried about putting the family in danger. Hedwig Koslowski is on the spot again. She hides Gertrude in a summerhouse in Berlin-Biesdorf and takes turns with a friend to provide her with food. To avoid being discovered, Gertrude is not allowed to light a fire or switch on a light.

Only autogenic training and reciting poetry keep Gertrude from losing her mind, as she later recalls. When winter sets in, Gertrude can no longer stay in the unheated summerhouse. Hedwig then hides her in her own flat in Schöneberg. There, the couple finally experience their liberation.