Published: 21 June 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Europe's only art museum dedicated to persecuted artists is in a pretty town with an ugly history
This historic town of Solingen, West Germany is a picturesque place, built on a hillside overlooking Cologne, Dortmund, Bochum, and even Belgium.
It is hard to match the beauty of the city to its history of persecution or to the tragic contemporary politics explored there.
The town boasts Europe's only institution that deals permanently with persecuted artists and their banned works, Zentrum für verfolgte Künste (Center for Persecuted Arts).
The art museum explores the political narratives and causes of persecution in exhibitions and events, including a Jewish festival entitled L’chaim.
A current exhibition shows the war photos of the Ukrainian photojournalist Maks Levin, who was killed while working as a photojournalist in the current war, at age 40.
When Levin was found dead on 1 April he had been fatally shot twice by Russian servicemen while unarmed and wearing a press jacket. Levin had been documenting the military situation in Ukraine for eight years. His photographs are already icons of this war. The magazine Der Spiegel used Levin's photo of a destroyed apartment block as its cover on 5 March.
The Center for Persecuted Arts was founded in 2015, initiated by the Else-Lasker-Schüler-Gesellschaft Society, which is dedicated to a culture of remembrance.
Solingen has a deep history of persecution, not only in Nazi-Germany but also more recently. The birthplace of Adolph Eichmann, it expelled or murdered its Jewish population during the Holocaust. The German population has suffered too. The old city was destroyed in the Allied attacks in 1944 and thousands of people were killed and wounded.
