Clara Fürst (15 February 1879 in

Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

– 1944 in

Auschwitz Auschwitz, or Oświęcim, was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschw ...

) was a concert pianist. Daughter of the painter Gustav Fürst she was the first wife of a German-American painter, and leading exponent of Expressionism,

Lyonel Feininger Lyonel Charles Adrian Feininger (; July 17, 1871January 13, 1956) was a German-American painter, and a leading exponent of Expressionism. He also worked as a caricaturist and comic strip artist. He was born and grew up in New York City. In 1887 h ...

. The Fürst family hailed originally from Hungary from where they had migrated to Germany and settled in Frankfurt/Oder.

Personal life

In 1900, Clara Fürst met Lyonel Feininger in Berlin through her brother Edmund Fürst (1874–1955), who, like Lyonel Feininger had studied at the Berlin Art Academy for several years. They married in 1901, and they had two daughters. In 1905 they separated. The first-born of these daughters was the photographer and artist Eleonore Feininger''Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)'', New Yor

/ref> (born 1901) who began her photographic activities in the studio of Karl Schenker in Berlin. The second daughter was Marianne, born in 1902. Clara Feininger had lived in Berlin-Steglitz, Birkbuschstrasse 6 for about 20 years after 1915. While Edmund Fürst and his family emigrated to Palestine in 1934 and Lyonel Feininger, whose Cubism-based art was considered "degenerate" by the National Socialists, moved to the US in 1937, Clara Feininger stayed in Berlin. She probably lived off the maintenance payments Lyonel Feininger had to make after the divorce in 1907. Around 1939 she lived temporarily outside Berlin in Schöneiche, but returned to Berlin in 1941 and lived at Beethovenstraße 29 in Lichtenrad, subletting from Hildegard and Werner Braun.

Transportation & Death

Clara was classified as a Geltungsjüdin (Jewish by Validity) under the Nazi Party's

Nuremberg Laws The Nuremberg Laws (, ) were antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935, at a special meeting of the Reichstag convened during the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. The two laws were the Law ...

as her father had been Jewish and her mother was not. The fact that she left the Jewish community in February 1938 did not protect her from further persecution. On 10 January 1944 she was deported to

Theresienstadt Theresienstadt Ghetto was established by the SS during World War II in the fortress town of Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia ( German-occupied Czechoslovakia). Theresienstadt served as a waystation to the extermination c ...

in the 99th transport to that concentration camp and from there to Auschwitz on 23 October 1944, where she was murdered.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Furst, Clara 1879 births 1944 deaths German people who died in Auschwitz concentration camp German Jews who died in the Holocaust 20th-century German women 20th-century German pianists 20th-century German women pianists