1.

In the last years of his life my father wrote a memoir. Born in 1916 in Munich to Bohemian parents—his father Jewish, his mother not—he had spent his boyhood at a Bavarian boarding school, until the Nazis made it impossible for him to stay on in Germany. At that point he fled to Czechoslovakia, then to England and finally to New Zealand, where I was born and raised. For reasons I don’t quite understand, I didn’t immediately look at the fifty or so typescript pages he produced for family consumption only. But, in 2019, after my partner and I had bought an apartment in Berlin and I’d applied for German citizenship, I fished out his reminiscences and read them, newly curious about the life into which he had been born.

The memoirs were more engaging than I’d expected. Though he had been dead for fifteen years, my father’s bleak, anachronistic worldview—a mix of old haute European class consciousness, bitterness, and civic-mindedness—became vivid again. One section left an especially strong impression on me. He devoted several pages to his time in Prague with his aunt, Gertrud Kauders, about whom I knew little. Forced to flee the Nazis in 1935, he had spent the better part of three years living with her in her Old Town apartment. (He had tried to join the Czechoslovakian army, but it was disbanded after Germany invaded the Sudetenland; by the time the Nazis had taken over the whole country, he was already in England.)

His account of Gertrud is gloomy and dismissive, presenting her as a lonely, aging, “meek” woman living on her own. She was unworldly partly, he says, because she had been “brought up by French and English governesses and never went to school.” Until she was thirty she could not get to sleep unless her childhood nanny, Annele, was in the room with her. By the time he lived with her she had few visitors. One was the aristocrat Moko von Hanau, who had helped my father acquire Czech citizenship after fleeing Germany. Another was an artist so poor that she came to see Gertrud, so my father supposed, mainly because she could not afford to turn on the heat at her own place. A third, Gertrud Spirk, an intimate friend for decades, had been the gentile girlfriend of the Jewish Czech novelist Franz Werfel during World War I, until he deserted her for Alma Mahler.

My father hints at more. Although Gertrud was, for a while, courted by a retired Austrian general (for her money apparently), he records that she was never interested in men, implying that she was not heterosexual. Nor did he perceive that she took interest in her own Jewishness. She neither attended synagogue nor engaged with Prague’s Jewish community; none of her close friends seem to have been Jews.

As late as 1939, in the interval between the Munich Agreement and the Nazis’ taking possession of Czechoslovakia by force, Gertrud’s brother, Hans—my grandfather—travelled to Prague from the Swiss town of Ascona, where he and his wife had taken refuge in their summer home, to persuade Gertrud to return with them to safety. She refused. My father believed that she said no because she thought of herself as German rather than Jewish. She and Hans, he also notes, were both close to a cousin whose husband, Franz Lucksch, was a prominent member of the far-right, pro-German, Nazi-linked Sudetendeutsche Partei, who could, it might have seemed, offer them protection.

As one of the few surviving letters from her reveals, she changed her mind about staying in Prague late in 1941. Hans and other friends immediately approached the Czech government on her behalf, but it was too late. On May 12, 1942, she was rounded up and transported to Theresienstadt, a camp just outside the city. After the war’s end, Gertrud Spirk wrote to Hans telling him that she had been able to send money, real coffee, and tea to Gertrud daily there, although by that time Gertrud was, Spirk remarks, “completely broken.” She only spent five days at Theresienstadt, and was then moved to Lublin, a Polish transit center, on transport Ay 859. Nobody knows the fate of the women put on that train, but it seems likely she was sent from Lublin to Sobibór, where she would have been gassed by carbon monoxide immediately on arrival, on or around May 19. 

My father always presented Gertrud’s refusal to leave Prague in 1939 as a kind of stupidity. Embittered by Europe’s rejection of him, he saw little but naivety in her incapacity to recognize that, despite being secular, bourgeois, and well-connected, she too would be targeted and killed as a Jew. This hardly meant, however, that he himself identified with his Jewishness. He took no pride in it, expressed no loyalty to it. He even partly blamed the Jews for their fate, following Hannah Arendt in believing that the Jews who had collaborated with the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto and the kapos who ran the concentration camps had helped facilitate the extermination of their own people. When I was a child he sometimes inveighed against the Ostjüden who had refused to assimilate to Western European ways and so, as he thought, fanned the flames of antisemitism in the region. He also held that bourgeois, secular Jews like Gertrud and Hans, committed to art, literature, music, and ideas, had been neither tough nor practical enough to effectively resist the Nazis.

He especially resented that his parents had tried to make him follow their path by insisting he study classics rather than the sciences at Salem, the boarding school where he spent most of his childhood. Housed in a castle near Lake Constance, the institution had been established in 1920 by Prince Max von Baden, a former Chancellor of the German Empire, and Kurt Hahn, later the founder of the outdoors program Outward Bound, who cultivated a Plato-inspired pedagogy that emphasized public service, noblesse oblige, discipline, self-reliance, physical toughness, and leadership. The school formed my father to the bone. He often spoke about how good its hardships had been for his character (he described waking up to a mouse frozen dead in a glass of water next to his bed) and regaled us with stories about his sporting achievements and his school mates (as a school prefect, he said, he’d once caned Prince Philip for losing a hockey ball).

He chose to go to New Zealand because, as he used to say, it was as far away from Europe as you could get. On the boat there, wanting to pass without notice, he changed his name from Cornelius Kauders—a common Jewish surname—to Peter During, after his non-Jewish mother. (He may have forgotten that the notorious social theorist and antisemite Eugene Dühring was also a distant blood relative.) Arriving penniless in New Zealand, working first as a farm laborer, he liberated himself from his parents’ devotion to Bildung. Despite his German accent, he tried to pass as an ordinary bloke. He married a local medical student who would become a well-known public health doctor and then entered public service as an agricultural scientist himself. By the time he retired, he was a recognized expert on soils and fertilizers.

*

As I read his memoir, I found myself kicking against its pricks. Were his parents really as he disdainfully described them? Was his aunt? How could that be? Hoping to find out more, I typed Gertrud’s name into Google. To my surprise, a crop of Czech tabloid news stories, then about a year old, flashed up. They told a remarkable tale.

The first story, in Nas REGION, reported that as workers were demolishing a run-down house on Prague’s outskirts, some thirty works of art collapsed on them from a concealed space in a ceiling, many having been torn from their frames. Apparently no one had had any idea that they were there. The paper interviewed the house’s owner, Jakub Sedlacek, who identified the art as that of Gertrud Kauders, a Jewish artist and an exact contemporary, it was soon pointed out, of Franz Kafka. Some works were signed by her.

Sedlacek remembered having heard of Gertrud as a friend of Natalie Jahudkova’s, the Russian artist who had built the house around 1941 and from whom the Sedlaceks had inherited it. He came to the reasonable conclusion that, to protect the art, the two friends had hidden it as the Nazis closed in. Why Jahudkova did not tell anyone about the hidden works remains a mystery. We know that her husband became a senior official in communist Czechoslovakia’s secret police; perhaps the family wanted nothing to do with anything underhand, or perhaps the secret simply slipped from her mind. Either way, after Jahudkova died in 1977, the art was forgotten.

A second story in the tabloid Blesk offered more information. The journalist interviewed Ivo Habán, an art historian specializing in early twentieth-century painting by German-speaking Czech artists, who had discussed Gertrud in his dissertation a few years earlier. Although none of her work was available at the time, Habán argued that she must have been a good artist because she had shown in prestigious and competitive exhibitions. He quoted one critic who had seen Gertrud’s work at a 1926 group show organized by the German-speaking Prague artists’ association Concordia, and who described it as “perhaps the most successful thing from the whole exhibition.” So Gertrud had not just been an artist but an artist of some accomplishment and note.

I was flabbergasted. My father had lived with Gertrud during the period when she was working hardest on her art. As it turned out, she had repeatedly painted his portrait. After the war he had inherited her jewelry, which had been buried under the Goethe Statue in Vienna by Moko von Hanau and a family business partner who, in 1945, duly retrieved it and returned it to the family. But neither in his memoirs nor in conversations with his family had my father so much as mentioned that Gertrud was a serious artist.¹

Sedlacek told the news reporters that he wished to donate Gertrud’s works to the Prague Jewish Museum if heirs failed to turn up. She had never married or had children; my siblings and I were those heirs. Straightaway I started looking for a means of contacting him. Matters proceeded slowly. It took about a year before we were able to reach him through a friend of my sister’s, the Prague-based photographer Amos Chapple, and his partner, the reporter Dana Vaskova, and to arrange for the two of them to inspect and photograph Gertrud’s works. None of the family were present at this first glimpse of the salvaged find. Then a second surprise. Amos and Dana were told that, in the time since the first thirty or so paintings had fallen out of the walls and ceilings, more works had been found in the house’s attic. Many more. It wasn’t a handful of pictures that Gertrud had hidden away, but almost seven hundred.

This trove represented a whole life’s work, probably the entire contents of her studio. There were oils on canvas, some of which had once been stretched and framed; watercolors and gouaches; lithographs and drawings in ink. There were designs for family birthday cards and ex libris stamps together with hundreds of pencil or crayon sketches and drawings, some dating back to her time as a student. Stored in darkness for almost eighty years, most were in surprisingly good condition. As Misha Sidenberg, the Prague Jewish Museum’s chief curator, remarked when she inspected the collection, to find an entire studio preserved like this was all but unprecedented.

My siblings and I decided that each of us would keep a few works but that the bulk of the collection would go to museums. Today the Jewish Museum in New York, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Te Papa (New Zealand’s National Museum), the Prague National Gallery, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna hold, or will soon hold, works by Gertrud Kauders. Over three hundred pieces, almost all works on paper, have stayed with the Prague Jewish Museum, where we thought they best belonged and which has pledged to preserve them. New York’s Jewish Museum now displays a wall of her work in their redesigned permanent galleries.

A certain justice seems to be at work here. My father believed that it was Gertrud’s unworldly disavowal of her Jewishness that led her to stay in Prague—but given what we now know, it seems just as likely that she stayed on because of her art. Perhaps in 1939 she wished not to abandon her life’s work but had not yet found a way to preserve it. If my father did not see it like that, it was most likely for the same reason that he never told his children that Gertrud was a dedicated, productive artist. He had little respect for Gertrud or her art. He wanted no part of her world.

When my partner and I finally had about forty of her paintings restored and hung in our Berlin apartment they formed a backdrop to our life. We chose our pieces carefully so that we had examples of all the genres in which she worked. I was especially fascinated by her self-portraits. With them looking down at us, it was if we were in her presence. I was haunted by her and the world from which she came.

2.

Written records of the Kauders’ lives are slim. Hans was born in 1880 and Gertrud in 1883 to a prominent German-speaking Jewish Prague family. Their father was a successful lawyer and part-owner of the Prague Porcelain Factory. Gustav von Benda, their Vienna-based uncle on their mother’s side, was an industrialist and major collector of Renaissance fine and decorative art, whose 1932 bequest to the Kunsthistorisches Museum remains one of the largest that institution has ever received. Each child was given sufficient capital by their father at the age of twenty-one to live without requiring further support, supposedly for the rest of their days.

Hans trained as a lawyer both in Prague and at the Sorbonne but never practiced. In 1916 he married Elizabeth Dühring, a Bavarian photography student with a mixed Catholic and Lutheran family background. Having settled in Munich, the young couple plunged into the Schwabing scene, a seedbed for the European avant-garde. Hans became loosely attached to the George-Kreis, the cultish circle around the charismatic symbolist poet Stefan George, and sometimes wrote for the intellectual press, including a pathbreaking 1918 article for the art dealer Paul Westheim’s journal Das Kunstblatt on contemporary German art’s turn toward Christian mysticism. After much of his inheritance evaporated in Germany’s postwar hyperinflation crisis, he worked as a travel writer and translator from English, French, and Italian.

Gertrud, meanwhile, wanted to be an artist. In her twenties she studied with Max Feldbauer, a leader of the Munich Secession, a group that broke with the conservative and conformist artistic establishment. A well-known teacher, especially of young women, Feldbauer was a highly regarded artist whose later reputation was tarnished by the fact that the Nazis came to favor him. Gertrud went on to study in Paris, probably at the Académie Julian, one of the schools then open to female students, which Käthe Kollwitz, a family acquaintance, had also attended.

Sometime after she returned to Prague, perhaps at the outbreak of war, she continued her studies at the Ukrainian Academy, an art school popular among international students, and took classes with Otakar Nejedlý. It was there that she met Natalie Jahudkova. Traces of Gertrud’s various teachers, as well as of the Post-Impressionist paintings she must have come across in Paris, can be seen in her work; we have pieces by her, for example, in the styles of Picasso and Modigliani. But she achieved her own touch and vision.

Like many artists of the time, she worked across genres: portraits, still lifes, landscapes, cityscapes, seascapes, industrial scenes, illustrations. Much of her oeuvre records everyday life. She sketched the Jardin de Luxembourg during her stay in Paris and painted the countryside in the places where she holidayed—the French Alps, Venice, picturesque Austrian towns. Especially later in life, she often painted flowers—cheap and easy to assemble. But she was primarily interested in people, or rather in women. She made many portraits of family and friends, often of her maid, Annele.

For the most part her work abjures saturated colors and stark contrasts, instead favoring subtle harmonies and making frequent use of sfumato. Lines are sinuous rather than geometrical. She kept her compositions simple, limiting the depth of field and the number of represented objects. Many people, seeing her oeuvre for the first time, prefer her works on paper—watercolors and pencil drawings—to her oils. These are media that do not push towards grand statement. But if her work is, in some sense, modest in ambition, it also reveals a distinctive and perceptive eye and talent. A curator once told me that it even evinced a touch of genius.

Not many of Gertrud’s works are signed or dated, making it difficult to know how her skills and interests progressed. And yet a certain development does seem to run through her career. The first dated work that we have comes from 1902, when she was nineteen: a rather dutiful oil portrait of a boy in a German Secessionist style. There is also a suite of wonderful, bold and loose, art-school oil-on-canvas nude exercises, both male and female. One such exercise, now on display at the Jewish Museum in New York, shows a pert, short-haired woman standing and looking quizzically at the students sketching her. We also have confident early studies of the view from her parents’ Prague apartment, right next to the famous Powder Tower. One ink-and-watercolor from 1918, held by the Prague Jewish Museum, focuses on well-dressed passengers getting on and off a red-striped tram in the street in front of the apartment.

After around 1923 her work loosens up: the use of color becomes subtler and more experimental, the palette more various, the touch more fluid. She still captures the world around her: holiday views and hotel rooms, parks, a newspaper on a desk below a vase of flowers. It is in this period that some works venture into the avant-garde, presenting deformed and abstracted figures against nonrepresentational washes of color. Sometimes, recalling Cézanne, darker lines organize the work, not least in the pictures of branches and trees she loved to draw. In the late Thirties, after hyperinflation and other financial shocks had reduced her financial resources, she seems to have tried to make a career as a modernist portrait painter, it seems only of women. She succeeded in having works shown in prestigious shows—in one of which, a German Sudetenland Women in Art exhibition, the catalog indicates that her pieces were among the most expensive on offer. But we cannot find a confirmed sale. It may be that across her life she never sold a single work.

*

Gertrud’s art presents a world of women; there are very few portraits of men other than family members. But it is rarely a world at ease with itself. Only one of her group scenes shows women connecting to one another in a mood that appears relaxed or intimate. In this watercolor, two women sit at a table intent on a shared task—seemingly opening a parcel—while one touches the other’s elbow. Most of her works, including in pencil, show women alone, huddled, introspective, anxious. A watercolor now in our Berlin apartment depicts a hunched woman in a café, wearing a stylish beret and a heavy necklace. Having just finished a meal, she peers suspiciously at the artist as if to say, “What the hell do you want of me?” She belongs to Jean Rhys’s world of urban female abjection.

But in her family Gertrud was surrounded by men. There are affectionate portrait sketches of her father and brother as well as of her handsome right-wing relation Franz Luksch’s son, also Franz. There are also many portraits of my father when he was young—most from while he was living with her, though there is also a lovely grey, red, and green watercolor of him as a child in a smock, delicate and good-looking. There are only a couple of images of her mother, whom, according to my father’s memoir, she did not like. One of these sketches, now held by the D.C. Holocaust Museum, a watercolor on paper dated 1920, shows her mother stiffly looking away from her daughter, keeping her place in the book she’s reading with a bejeweled finger as if hurrying Gertrud up.

Above all Gertrud painted self-portraits. They feel experimental, as if she was figuring out who she was in the act of representing herself. The Prague Jewish Gallery holds a watercolor self-portrait of her looking conventionally neat, self-possessed and competent, wearing a striking striped cardigan quite out of place with the drawing materials in her lap: the artist as bourgeois lady. That museum also chose a late oil showing an older woman holding a red flower in one hand and a brush in the other: a portrait of the dedicated artist in her prime. New York’s Jewish Museum chose, among many others, an unfinished, somewhat damaged canvas of her staring out at the world as if in fear: the artist as victim to come.

I have a large, beautiful pencil sketch of a very different person: Gertrud as romantic dreamer, standing by her easel. And a delicate watercolor of her as a fragile elderly woman, again brush in hand: Gertrud as wounded, sensitive artist. I also inherited two modernist, cropped oils that seem to date from around the same time, probably the mid-Thirties. One is an exercise in memory: Gertrud, then middle-aged, depicts herself as an attractive young woman, in purples, pinks, and greens. In the other she is wary and aged, again holding her painting equipment, this time as if the task enslaved her.

In perhaps the most absorbing of her many self-portraits, a lightly colored crayon work now in the Prague Jewish Museum, she presents herself naked, without any vanity. Eyes shut, she is lying on what is probably her own bed, her face mask-like, knees lifted, her spindly pubic hair the work’s central focus. She has become a vulnerable human being who is also a mere body. Whatever else the drawing is, it isn’t meek. Or perhaps what it presents is meek passivity and self-erasure pushed to the point at which it transforms into bold self-exposure.

*

The labor of organizing and negotiating the recovery of Gertrud’s art returned me to the secular German Jewish world that my father had rejected. It was a world with which, when I was growing up, he had identified me. A daydreaming, bookish child, I represented for him the cultivated, bohemian sphere which, as he saw it, had not protected him from—and may even have had a part in animating—the forces that destroyed his European prospects. Now, living among Gertrud’s art, that world was reemerging for me.

That world of Gertrud’s was difficult and insecure, especially for women and queer people (if Gertrud indeed was queer). It had its own possibilities and accommodations: Gertrud came of age at a time and in a place where a “meek” woman from a rich family, free of communal or familial responsibilities, could be professionally trained and devote her whole life to making art mainly in private, selling little or nothing, and do so without either inviting recrimination or feeling a failure. But it was also a moment when, across central Europe, rampant antisemitism fastened on Jews, even those in flight from their ethnicity. Committing oneself to European high culture—to art, music, literature, and ideas—was one way to respond to this situation of marginality, of being persecuted for a Jewishness with which one hardly identified oneself. That seems to be one reason why secular Jewish intellectual and cultural life flourished in the interwar period, from Freud and Kafka and Wittgenstein to Melanie Klein, Walter Benjamin, Else Lasker-Schüler, Erich Auerbach, and hundreds of others.

After 1945 Jews in the US and Western Europe came to take pride in their identity as Jews, and that identity became increasingly—and at times exclusively—tied to the persisting horror of the Holocaust and the building of Israel. Gertrud’s art helps return us to another, earlier moment: it shows us what objects, places, and people could look like in her secular, nonidentitarian, fragile world. That is why I am pleased that her work will now be found mainly in Jewish museums. It provides an entry point into an epoch in Jewish history that was at once modest and modern, local and cosmopolitan, anxious and open.