Dr. Rosa Schapire

In the small Galician town of Brody, north-east of Lviv in present-day Ukraine, where only a ruin remains, stood the Great Synagogue in the late summer of 1874. In that year, when Rosa Schapire was born, more than two thirds of those living in the small town in the heart of Galicia were of the Mosaic faith. Due to its predominantly Jewish population and character, Brody was considered the most "Jewish" town in the Habsburg monarchy at the time. The synagogue was the center of religious life for most Jews. It was here that Rabbi Israel ben Elieser (1698-1760), also known as "Baal Shem Tow" ("Master of the Good Name"), once proclaimed his ideas - those of orthodox Hasidism, of which he was the founder. But even for assimilated families like Rosa Schapire's, the synagogue was an important cultural center. 

In 1893, Rosa Schapire and her family had already left the small town for the port metropolis of Hamburg. Remaining in the strictly orthodox Hasidic environment of the Brody synagogue, in which women's lives were reduced to traditional role clichés, would have been almost inconceivable for a personality like hers anyway. Rosa Schapire would embody the radically different for the rest of her life. She will remain unmarried, even childless, and will do what was unconventional for women at the time, namely attend university and even do a doctorate. 

Even as a young girl, the daughter of a merchant was interested in contemporary modern art, as far as this was possible in Brody. Like her four sisters, she grew up multilingual - her family spoke German, Polish, French and probably some Russian. Not least for this reason, the young Rosa Schapire evidently felt drawn to internationalism even in the Galician province. She would later describe this inclination in a letter to her art patron and friend Agnes Holthusen as "determined by birth, upbringing and destiny" (quoted from Presler, p. 56). The cosmopolitan city of Hamburg, to which she had moved with her family in 1893, was an ideal place to live.

In Hamburg, Rosa Schapire initially began training as an office clerk at the municipal electricity company. Parallel to this professional activity, she began to get involved in women's political issues. As early as 1897, she published her first verifiable work in the "Sozialistische Monatshefte", published by the social democratic journalist Joseph Bloch. The essay had the simple title: "A word on women's emancipation". In it, Rosa Schapire distanced herself from the bourgeois women's movement, which merely demanded the "opening up of ever new professions for women, the separation of property in marriage and the extension of mothers' rights". She contrasted these demands, apostrophized as bourgeois, with the situation of women from the proletarian milieu and came to the conclusion: "The solution to the women's question is only possible in a society in which man has the profession and not the profession the man. [...] Only in a socialist state, unrestrained by any internal or external prejudices, with only her own moral standards as a barrier, will it be possible for a woman to become a free person, to give herself to the man of her choice in free love and to make the leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom" (Schapire: Ein Wort zur Frauenemanzipation, p. 517.) Such an explosive socio-political position at the time made the young woman suspicious and even led to her being observed by the political police at times.

At the time, Rosa Schapire had heard cultural lectures that inspired her to study art history, for example from the director of the Hamburg Kunsthalle, Alfred Lichtwark, or Justus Brinckmann, the director of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe. It was not possible to study in Hamburg, as there was no university here at the time. So after training as an office clerk, Rosa Schapire went to study at the universities of Zurich, Leipzig, Bern and Heidelberg, which she financed with translations and language lessons. In 1904, the renowned Heidelberg art historian Henry Thode supervised her dissertation. Although she had already publicly espoused unconventional views on art, she chose a rather innocuous topic. She wrote her doctoral thesis on Johann Ludwig Ernst Morgenstern, who was an architectural painter in Frankfurt at the turn of the 19th century. The still young discipline of art history had previously been the domain of men, so now there was a doctoral candidate. 

When Rosa Schapire returned to Hamburg in 1905, she no longer lived with her parents, but initially moved into an apartment in Schmilinskystraße. On March 22, 1908, she met Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, one of the most important representatives of Expressionism, for the first time. The painter and graphic artist, ten years her junior, was to become a key figure in her life. Only from an exchange of letters between the two - decades later - will posterity learn that Rosa Schapire lived in Schmilinskystrasse at the time. However, even her biographers were unable to determine the specific house number. A short time later, Rosa Schapire moved to the Barmbeck district, to an apartment where she would live until her emigration in August 1939.

Through the mediation of the Hamburg collector and patron Gustav Schiefler, she met Karl Schmidt-Rottluff in March 1908, which we know today had far-reaching consequences. Through the expressionist painter, she got to know other members of the artists' group "Die Brücke", which had been founded three years earlier, in the course of 1908: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Emil Nolde. Even though Rosa Schapire still had to earn her living largely with art and language courses at the Hamburg adult education center, with guided tours through exhibitions and with literary translations (Balzac, Zola, Mauclair), she was now also a renowned art reviewer. As such, Dr. Schapire could be useful to the artists. Even before this encounter, she had noticed that there were, as she put it, open-minded art connoisseurs in the "city of good, pious beefsteak eaters and full coffers" (quoted from Schulze, p. 89). Collectors who did not follow the mainstream, but turned to works of the avant-garde, such as the lawyer Gustav Schiefler. Contrary to the conservative zeitgeist of the late German Empire, Rosa Schapire was also enthusiastic about the expressive forms of Expressionism. She now visited the Brücke artists in their Dresden studio and also in Dangast, a small village west of Bremerhaven, where the four artists painted outdoors in the immediate vicinity of the North Sea. She would eventually join the artists' group as a passive member.

As a woman, Rosa Schapire was an exception in the Expressionist milieu in that her female counterparts usually acted as models or took on the role of muse or wife (sometimes in combination). However, she was close to artists and later also female artists such as Anita Rée, Gretchen Wohlwill, Alma del Banco and Dorothea Maetzel-Johannsen out of purely professional interest. She used her reputation to broker their works to galleries, museums and collectors and to promote them in exhibition reviews. Even after the dissolution of "Die Brücke" in 1913, she continued to support its former members. And they thanked her by portraying her patron and sending her sketches of current paintings with illustrated personal greetings. By the time she emigrated from National Socialist Germany in 1939, a collection of more than six hundred works had been created.

The special relationship with Karl Schmidt-Rottluff lasted a lifetime, despite his occasional anti-Semitic gaffes. In 1919, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff married the photographer Emy Frisch and lived with her in Berlin, where he had already moved in 1911. Encounters with Rosa Schapire now took place mainly at his vacation spots, such as Hohwacht on the Baltic coast of Schleswig-Holstein or Jershöft, a fishing village in Pomerania. There was even a brief creative collaboration between the two. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff had taken over the design of the expressionist magazine "Die rote Erde", for which Rosa Schapire became the editor at the suggestion of the painter and poet Karl Lorenz. In 1920/21, together with her art historian colleague Wilhelm Niemeyer, she also did the same for the art magazine "Kündung". During this time, Schmidt-Rottluff also transformed a room in her third-floor apartment in Osterbeckstraße into an expressionist Gesamtkunstwerk. Schmidt-Rottluff had painted the walls with green distemper and designed an arched window as a cactus window. All the furniture had also been built and colored according to his designs by the carpenter and interior designer Jack Goldschmidt.

The relationship between Rosa Schapire and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was characterized by deep friendship and mutual admiration. Above all, however, it was a relationship of equals, as can be seen in the characterization of Rosa Schapire by her biographer Susanne Wittek: "As a single, economically independent intellectual, she was a pioneer of a new female self-image." (Hamburgische Wissenschaftliche Stiftung: Three questions for Susanne Wittek)

After the dissolution of the "Brücke" in 1913, Rosa Schapire looked for female comrades-in-arms to counter the male-dominated art world with a feminist position. She found them in the women's rights activist and patron Ida Dehmel and the writer Magdalena Pauli, whose husband Gustav had been appointed the new director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1914. In 1916, in the midst of the Second World War, the three women, together with influential women in society, founded the "Women's Association for the Promotion of German Fine Art", which was soon active in various German cities. Rosa Schapire had evidently abandoned her once radical dissociation from the bourgeois women's movement in favor of closing ranks with women from wealthy families. Most of her new comrades-in-arms not only saw themselves as patrons of modern art, but also belonged to one of the numerous women's clubs in which feminist issues were discussed. For Rosa Schapire, this opened up opportunities for lectures in which she endeavored to present a specifically female form of art consumption for discussion. Since the beginning of the war, Rosa Schapire had been involved in the "Frauenkünstlerhilfe" and the "Künstlerinnenkriegshilfe". By 1920, she had published eight articles in relevant art journals. During this time, Rosa Schapire was a popular speaker in Hamburg salons as a protagonist of feminist art history.

This also included the classicist villa at Agnesstraße 1 with a view of the Outer Alster. It was inhabited by Leo Alport and his wife Valerie, née Mankiewicz. Both came from Jewish families in Poznan, where they once married and from where they came to the Spree together. Leo Alport was chairman of the supervisory board of the Beiersdorf company (Nivea cream), which belonged to his brother-in-law Oskar Troplowitz. He also owned the prestigious building in which the Alports lived. Like Rosa Schapire, Valerie Alport had studied art history before the First World War, albeit in Paris. After the war, she had begun to build up a collection with a focus on expressionist art. This is how she came into contact with Rosa Schapire. As Valerie Alport regularly hosted cultural lectures as well as concerts at the Troplowitz Villa, Rosa Schapire began giving lectures here and at other cultural salons and art clubs in the early 1920s, which contributed significantly to her income.

During the National Socialist era, Rosa Schapire combined several characteristics in her person that made her increasingly suspect to the Nazis. She was initially regarded as a protagonist of modernism, the artistic movement that the National Socialists labeled "degenerate" and persecuted. She was also a mentor to the now ostracized Schmidt-Rottluff and, finally, her Jewish background in particular led to her gradual ostracism and ultimately persecution.

At first, Hamburg's mayor Carl Vincent Krogmann had decreed that Dr. Schapire could enter the Kunsthalle at any time, even as a Jew. But for him, a Nazi functionary loyal to the Nazi party, this could not be maintained in the long term. She saw the "request" from the head of the Kupferstichkabinett, Wolf Stubbe, to refrain from visiting the library in future because of the large number of National Socialists among the staff, for what it was: a ban from the building. However, as Rosa Schapire was not employed anywhere and therefore could not be arbitrarily removed from an office, she was initially able to continue her lectures in public. For example, in the house of the Jewish banker Max Werner, who lived in the Hamburg villa district of Winterhude. However, for fear of being denounced, more and more non-Jewish audiences stayed away, which noticeably reduced Rosa Schapire's income. She had always emphasized that although she was Jewish by birth, she was otherwise non-denominational. Nonetheless, she was increasingly pushed out of the public eye due to National Socialist racist policies. From 1935, my only remaining activity was in Hamburg's Jewish Cultural Association. This organization was initially still able to hold its events in the prestigious Coventgarten in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße. They soon moved to the Curiohaus in Rothenbaumchaussee before the Jewish cultural institution found a home at Hartungstraße 9-11 in January 1938. This was where the Jewish theater maker Ida Ehre would found the Hamburger Kammerspiele after the war, which is still located here today. Until the pogrom night in November 1938, the community's own temple in Oberstraße was also still available for cultural events. Rosa Schapire hosted weekly meetings in her apartment under the organizational umbrella of the Jewish Cultural Association, but these were almost exclusively attended by Jewish people.

When the "Degenerate Art" exhibition was shown in Munich in 1937 with a great deal of propaganda, Rosa Schapire's name was included on the list of "critics of the system era" (Nazi jargon) presented there. She was placed under house arrest in Hamburg and from then on could only publish under a pseudonym. All of this prompted her to look for a place of exile. Before she was able to board a ship bound for England in August 1938, almost all of her belongings were stored in the port of Hamburg: in addition to her household effects, these included parts of the furniture designed by Schmidt-Rottluff, three portfolios of prints by Nolde, Kirchner, Heckel, Pechstein and others, as well as 500 books. She had only managed to save her Schmidt-Rottluff collection and the artist's postcards from Germany. However, what was stored in crates in the port of Hamburg was confiscated two years later by the Gestapo as "Jewish property" and publicly auctioned off at an official auction in Hamburg on October 30 and 31, 1941.

On August 18, 1939, Rosa Schapire reached England after a sea voyage lasting several days. The cash she brought with her amounted to 10 German Reichsmarks. Thanks to connections that the committed feminist had in London, she initially found accommodation at the Ladies' International Club in Princes Square. Although the emigrant no longer had to fear immediate Nazi persecution, London was soon no longer a safe place. Barely two weeks after her arrival, Nazi Germany unleashed the Second World War with the invasion of Poland. On September 3, 1939, the United Kingdom and France declared that they would meet their alliance obligations towards Poland, which was tantamount to a declaration of war on Germany. Until April 1940, Great Britain remained militarily passive. The British government was aware that the metropolis of London (the most populous city in the world at the time with a population of over 8 million) would be a prime target for German air raids. Public life came to a standstill, theaters and opera houses were closed, as were museums and galleries. Millions of gas masks were distributed to the population. 

Rosa Schapire was still able to correspond by letter with her friend Karl Schmidt-Rottluff until the beginning of 1940, but then this contact with her homeland was also interrupted for many years. This was the atmosphere that the emigrant was confronted with in the place where she had sought protection from the persecution of the National Socialists. Her biographer Susanne Wittek states: "There are hardly any sources from the first period in exile from which her state of mind can be inferred." (Wittek, p.70) Rosa Schapire had only intended to use London as a transit point on her way to the USA. At least that is what the "questionnaire for the shipment of removal goods", which she had filled in while still in Germany, indicates. However, this was out of the question for the time being. In March 1940, the German air force attacked the center of London and bombs also fell on the Bayswater district, where Rosa Schapire lived. She eventually moved into a small apartment in Leinster Square in this district, where she would live until after the end of the war.

For three years, from 1947 to 1950, Rosa Schapire lived in a furnished room at 20 Barkston Gardens in the museum district of Kensington. In the remaining four years of her life, she moved four more times. Three more times within Kensington before she rented a room in a Victorian building on Nevern Place in the neighboring Earls Court in the year before her death. She did not have the means to move to the United States as originally planned, but a return to Hamburg was out of the question for Rosa Schapire for emotional reasons alone. After all, her family had been deported from there to the extermination camps and murdered. Although her best friends lived in Germany, she could not, as she wrote in a letter to Agnes Holthusen, an old friend from her Frauenbund days, "decide [...] to go there even for a visit". It was Holthusen who had tracked down Karl Schmidt-Rottluff in his native town of Chemnitz and re-established contact between the two. An extensive correspondence with Schmidt-Rottluff began. Rosa Schapire's letters tell us about her personal and financial situation in London after the end of the war. 

For a few more years, she was able to make a regular living by traveling around the country on research trips as a permanent member of the long-term project "The Buildings of England". The elaborate project was led by the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, who, like her, had once emigrated from Germany. Rosa Schapire also translated from Polish, and occasionally from French, on behalf of various magazines for small fees. For a major Henry Moore exhibition in Düsseldorf and Hamburg, she translated the introduction to the catalog from English into German. From 1950, she wrote about important events in German art and literature in the magazines "Eidos" and "Connoisseur". Schapire researcher Burcu Dogramaci points out that Rosa Schapire apparently deliberately acted as a cultural mediator between the former wartime enemies Great Britain and Germany. Rosa Schapire and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who soon returned to Berlin, never met again.

&nbspFrom London, Rosa Schapire filed an application for restitution with the authorities in post-war Germany. It concerned the household items and works of art that she had been forced to leave behind in the port of Hamburg before her "departure" and which had finally been released by the Gestapo for an auction. Despite her indication of financial hardship, a decision was not made until the late 1950s, half a decade after her death. Rosa Schapire died on February 1, 1954 in London's Tate Gallery, the museum to which she had donated her Schmidt-Rottluff collection in gratitude for the hospitality she had received in London.