PROLOGUE • The so-called Final Solution to the Jewish Question indiscriminately also impacted children. Twenty-five percent of the six million Jews murdered in the Shoah were children. The actual dimensions of this tragic number, which roughly corresponds to the current Jewish population in Europe, and its impact on postwar European social developments ultimately is impossible to grasp as we cannot know what future contributions these victims would have made. The greatest hopes were naturally placed on the children, yet they were also the most vulnerable. Only a few thousand of them survived the Shoah, many as orphans dispossessed of hearth and home, dreams, and their own childhood. Friedl's Cabinet is dedicated to the memory of those who were murdered, as well as those who survived, and the legacy they left for the present. >>>
THE CABINET • Friedl’s Cabinet brings together the cabinet of drawings and the teacher’s cabinet. The microcosm formed of pictures, stories, and ephemera will be historically the first and only permanent exhibition of the world’s largest collection of children’s drawings from the period of the Shoah. The collection of authentic drawings from children imprisoned in the Terezín ghetto during World War II originated in the art classes organized and taught by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898-1944), one of the most progressive female artists and art educators of the interwar period in Central Europe, whose remarkable story was unjustly forgotten by postwar art history. Starting in the spring of 1943, she taught art in select Terezín children’s dormitories, and continued to do so until she was deported to Auschwitz on October 6, 1944. >>>
CREATIVE & THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS • Although Friedl's teaching method was firmly anchored in the pedagogy of her own teachers – Franz Cizek (1865-1946), founder of the children’s art classes at the Vienna School of Applied Art, as well as Johannes Itten (1888-1967), Paul Klee (1879-1940), Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), and other artists under whom she studied at the State Bauhaus in Weimar in the most radical years of the school’s existence between 1919 and 1923 – she devised her approach to art education through her own teaching experience which was also the main driving force behind her interest taken in philosophy, art history, aesthetics, psychosomatic medicine, anthropology, and other related, for the most part yet emerging, transdisciplinary fields. >>>
THE COLLECTION'S ORIGINS • Even though it was strictly forbidden to provide any formal education to Jewish children, the drawing classes, considered nothing more than a mere form of entertainment, were tolerated by the Nazis and quickly became the linchpin for the education program organized by the Youth Care Department (Jugendfürsorge) of the Jewish Council of Elders. Prior to her deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Friedl filled two suitcases with drawings from her seventeen months of sedulous work with children and had them hid in girl’s dormitory L 410. After the war, which she and the majority of her students did not survive, this unique collection was rescued by two of Friedl’s collaborators, Rosa Engländer (1897-1984) and Willy Groag (1914-2001), who brought it to the Prague Jewish Community. Still in 1945, the drawings were transferred to the Jewish Museum in Prague, where they have been housed since, being widely exhibited, published, and even included in films and theater productions. >>>
THE LEGACY • Despite the tragic circumstances, the Terezín pedagogical experiment has never ceased to fascinate with its comprehensiveness, coherence, and above all its potential utility in the ambit of contemporary education systems, which on the one hand must confront a fatal reduction of creative subjects while on the other must find ways to meet the increasingly complex needs of children traumatized by life in a world of social insecurities, war and armed conflicts, refugee flows, migration, and a host of other collateral problems. The entire collection is accessible online at collections.jewishmuseum.cz >>>
Credits:
© 2017 Jewish Museum in Prague / Marek Topic Architects