Friedl Dicker-Brandeis


Frederika "Friedl" Dicker-Brandeis, was an Austrian artist and educator murdered by the Nazis in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

Biography

Frederika Dicker was born in Vienna on 30 July 1898. She married Pavel Brandeis in 1936 and used the hyphenated surname after that. Dicker-Brandeis was a student of Johannes Itten at his private school in Vienna, and later followed Itten to study and teach at the Weimar Bauhaus. She was involved in the textile design, printmaking, bookbinding, and typography workshops there from 1919-1923. After leaving the Bauhaus, she worked as an artist and textile designer in Berlin, Prague, and Hronov. Dicker-Brandeis wrote to a friend in 1940:

In World War II

Dicker-Brandeis and her husband were deported to the Terezín "model ghetto" on December 17, 1942. During her time at Terezín, she gave art lessons and lectures.
She helped to organize secret education classes for the children of Terezín. She saw drawing and art as a way for the children to understand their emotions and their environment. In this capacity, she was giving art therapy.
At Terezin, she persisted in pursuing her goal — "to rouse the desire towards creative work."
In September 1944, Brandeis was transported to Auschwitz; Dicker-Brandeis volunteered for the next transport to join him. But before she was taken away, she gave to Raja Engländerova, the chief tutor of Girls' Home L 410, two suitcases with 4,500 drawings.
F. Dicker-Brandeis was murdered in Birkenau on 9 October 1944. Her husband Pavel, survived.

Legacy

After the war, Willy Groag, the director of the Girls' home L 410 brought the suitcases with children's drawings to the Jewish Community in Prague. From the nearly 660 authors of the drawings, 550 were killed in the Holocaust. The drawings are now in the Jewish Museum in Prague's collection, with some on display in the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague.
In 1999, a Friedl Dicker-Brandeis exhibition, organized by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and curated by Elena Makarova of Israel, opened in Vienna. The exhibition was shown in Czech Republic, Germany, Sweden, France, USA, and Japan. Tokyo Fuji Art Museum founder Daisaku Ikeda, who was instrumental in bringing the exhibit to Japan, commented:
Her work was included in the 2019 exhibition City Of Women: Female artists in Vienna from 1900 to 1938 at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere.

Gallery