A hundred years ago, on June 24 1922, Walter Rathenau – Germany's first and only Jewish Foreign Minister – fell victim to an assassin’s bullet. Rathenau was a wealthy industrialist, statesman and aesthete. He restored the late 18th-century former royal palace in Bad Freienwalde to something like its original glory; “He lived wonderfully”, reflected the writer Joseph Roth, “Among great books and rare objects, amid beautiful paintings and colours… surrounded by the evidence of the human past, of human wisdom, human beauty, human strength, and human suffering”.
To mark 100 years since Rathenau's assassination, the Jewish Country Houses project, together with urKultur, commissioned a new site-specific artwork to breathe new life into the walls at Schloss Freienwalde , which hints towards both the life once lived here and a possible future. The leading British German painter Sophie von Hellermann was invited to use the Schloss as a studio in which to paint scenes from Rathenau’s life in her characteristic expressive style, and to breathe new life into this sleeping beauty of a house by painting directly on its walls. This unique intervention complements redisplay of the existing Walter Rathenau Museum in Schloss Freienwalde; moreover, it promised to revive his legacy there and – perhaps – establish its importance as a site of German, Jewish and European memory.
Sophie von Hellermann at Schloss Freienwalde ran from 26 June 2022. Curated by Ruth Ur (urKultur) for the Jewish Country Houses project.
