Fine Art

Gret Palucca was born Margarethe Paluka in Munich on January 8, 1902. Her non-Jewish father Max Paluka was a pharmacist and married Rosa, née Merfeld, who was of Jewish-Hungarian descent. After her parents' failed attempt to gain a foothold in San Francis, California, Gret Palucca returned to Germany with her mother and brother Hans in 1909 and came to Dresden. Her artistic talent became apparent early on and she took ballet lessons with Heinrich Krümler in 1914 before becoming a pupil of Mary Wigman, one of the founders of expressive dance.

Stanislaus Bender (1882-1975) came from Łódź, where he trained as a lithographer. He went to Paris and Munich to study art and settled in Munich in 1914 with his wife Jadwiga, née Freistadt, and daughter Marylka Bender. Jadwiga died of the Spanish flu in 1919. Stanislaus Bender worked as a commercial artist with his own studio, where Marylka also worked. Artistically, he explored his Jewish-Polish origins and painted genre scenes from the so-called shtetl. 

• The Stuttgart Jüdische Kunstgemeinschaft was founded in 1933 as a department of the Jüdisches Lehrhaus in Stuttgart by the musicologist Karl Adler . His brother-in-law Leopold Marx, a writer, and Otto Hirsch, a lawyer, were also involved in its founding.
• It only existed for five years from 1933 to 1938, before the November pogroms put an end to Jewish cultural work in Stuttgart.

A barracks camp for around 800 female forced laborers at WMI was located at this site in 1944/45. An unadorned plaque on the former wall indicates this.

The donor of the fountain was Karl Waitzfelder, a son of Levi Waitzfelder, a banker and hop wholesaler originally active in Nördlingen since 1861, who moved his business to Maximilian Strasse in Munich around 1885. Along with his brother, Kommerzienrat Theodor Waitzfelder, Karl Waitzfelder was co-owner of the Munich banking house Levi Waitzfelder.

Next to the Libeskind building and the old building, two garden areas were constructed to create an atmosphere in which visitors* should also feel comfortable outside the exhibition rooms.