Honoring Ruth Baumgarte in Berlin-Karlshorst

The artist Ruth Baumgarte (1923-2013) is honored with a memorial stele in Berlin-Karlshorst for her system-critical artistic processing of racially, religiously and politically motivated crimes during National Socialism. This will be erected at the place where Ruth Baumgarte lived together with her mother during her training and studies at the Hochschule für bildende Künste from 1939 to 1945 until the invasion of the Soviet troops and the last battles at Rheingoldstraße 32 in Berlin-Karlshorst. Even within her relatives and friends, Ruth Baumgarte experienced political and racial persecution and the resulting reprisals. Her perception was thus also sharpened for the Sinti and Roma families living in Berlin-Karlshorst, whom she also depicted in her works fleeing the genocide, contrary to political directives. In the presence of the district mayor Michael Grunst and chairman of the Art Foundation Ruth Baumgarte, Alexander Baumgarte, the official unveiling of the memorial stele by Manfred Becker of the Memorial Commission and Dr. Catrin Gocksch, head of the Department of Art and Culture will take place in public.

Location - At the entrance to Rheinsteinpark, Rheingoldstraße 32, 10318 Berlin-Karlshorst

The painter, draftswoman and illustrator Ruth Baumgarte, who became internationally known through her Africa cycle, received her training from 1939 to 1940 at the Private Art School of the West with Emmy Stalmann in Berlin-Charlottenburg. The later famous author Hans Scholz (1911-1988) was also her teacher there. A long friendship developed between the two artists. During this time, which was marked by National Socialism, both sought symbiotic but different ways of coping with what they had experienced, both in conversation and artistically. Hans Scholz dealt with the historical events in the novel Am grünen Strand der Spree (1955), filmed in 1960, in a multi-layered portrait of the war and National Socialism in Berlin.

A Humanist on the Side of the Sinti and Roma in National Socialism

In her early work of the 1940s, Ruth Baumgarte processed in drawings with open eyes the horrifying atrocities committed against her fellow human beings, especially the Sinti and Roma and the so-called "lost generation". Ruth Baumgartes place of residence in Berlin-Karlshorst and today's place of the memorial plaque are located at the site of the no longer existing Laubenkolonie Wiesengrund, which was used as a settlement by Sinti and Roma in the 1940s, not far from the so-called "Gypsy camp" in Berlin-Marzahn. The young artist maintained contact with Sinti and Roma despite increasingly strict restrictions. Some works, which she could only execute with special permission from post-war Berlin, tell of expulsion and persecution, such as the sketch and drawing for the work Gypsies in the Rain from 1942/43. Two musicians flee through the rain from a danger looming in the picture. The guarded railroad tracks leading to the historic Berlin-Wuhlheide train station, one of the transit stations for the deportation trains, are found as a cautionary sign of the incipient genocide. Ruth Baumgartes works, created in Berlin-Karlshorst, date from a time of persecution and repression, when the so-called "Gypsy camp" already existed in Berlin-Marzahn. The young artist thus became a precise observer of her environment, who did not shy away from forbidden and inconvenient truths, but dedicated her artistic work to man in his reality throughout her life.

Photo: Giovanni Lo Curto