A Woman of Valor-Freidl Dicker-Brandeis, Art Teacher in Theresienstaddt Concentration Camp.

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

6 ART EDUCATION / JULY 2008



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



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.




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.




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




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




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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York: The Routledge Press.

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Cook, W. (2004). Escape artists, www.newstatesman.com/200404260036. Retrieved 4/15/07 from the New statesman database.

Dutlinger, A. (Editor) (2001). Art, music and education as strategies for survival: Theresienstadt 1941-45. New York: Herodias.

Fineberg, J. (1997). The innocent eye: children's art and the modern artist. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Goldman, S. (2000). Fireflies in the dark: the story ofFreidl Dicker-Brandeis and the children ofTerezin. London: Holiday House.

Golomb, C. (1992). The child's creation of a pictorial world. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Green, G (1978). The artists ofTerezin. New York: Hawthorne Books.

Howe, I. (1981) Preface to Art of the holocaust. Blatter & Milton, New York: The Routledge Press.

Hughes R. (1993). The culture of complaint. The fraying of America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lewis, L. (1986). Perceptions of parents among women with eating disorders: Implications for the experience of the self.

Phd. thesis in Human Development, The University of Chicago. Lowenfeld, V. (1957). Creative and mental growth (3rd edition). New York: MacMillan.

Makarova, E. (2000). Freidl Dicker-Brandeis Vienne 1898-Auschwitz 1944. Los Angeles: Tallfellow/Every Picture Press.

Parik, A. (1988). Freidl Dicker-Brandeis. Judaica Bohemiae, XXIV(2) pps. 69-81.

Potok, C. (1993). Foreword. / never saw another butterfly. H. Volavkova, (Ed.). New York: Shocken Books, pp. xi-xxi.

Schaefer-Simmern, H. (1970). The unfolding of artistic activity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schama, S. (1996). Landscape and memory. New York: Vintage Books.

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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.

Jewish Museum Press Release, June 08 2004. www.Jewishmuseum.org/site/pages/press.php?id=401PHPSA Retrieved 06/05/2006 from the Jewish Museum database:

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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.




A Woman of Valor-Freidl Dicker-Brandeis, Art Teacher in Theresienstaddt Concentration Camp.

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