A portrait of two artists fleeing Nazi Germany
When he is physically attacked in May 1933 by the painter Hanns Hubertus Count von Merveldt, the German-Jewish artist Felix Nussbaum is forced to leave Rome’s Villa Massimo. The Nazi persecution of Jews makes it impossible for him and his wife, the painter Felka Platek, to return to Germany. After brief stays in the Italian Riviera, Paris and Ostend, the couple finally find a home in Brussels. Fatefully, they ignore the pleas of a friend that they flee to Palestine and, although the threat from the German occupiers grows daily, they decide to stay in the city, hiding in an attic. Their life hangs in the balance.
Hans Joachim Schädlich’s Felix and Felka underlines his status as the master of a condensed style at once sublimely artful and starkly powerful. Never has the story of an artist’s life governed by the constraints of racist persecution been told in such a compact form. With his unforgettable descriptions of mere moments in time, Schädlich makes tangible a searing and existential fear by showing his subjects through the lens of interpersonal relationships corrupted by the Nazis. By describing the two artists in their own private milieu, this narrative develops a far-reaching power that extends beyond a harrowing tale about two individuals and their fate.
