Center for Persecuted Arts Wuppertaler Straße 160 42653 Solingen Tel. +49 212 2 58 14-18
[email protected] HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT Oscar Zügel, Ikarus (Icarus), 1935/36, oil on plywood, 100 x 81 cm Donation from the Oscar Zügel Archive. Art and Social Responsi‐ bility, Balingen to the Center for Persecuted Arts, Solingen In 1990, the WDR journalist Hajo Jahn founded the Else Lasker-Schüler Society in Wuppertal, the birthplace of the painter-poet Else Lasker-Schüler. She had become famous in Berlin and was forced to flee from there to escape the National Socialists. Because Hajo Jahn saw her biogra‐ phy as a link between the various forms of persecuted arts, he committed himself to a contem‐ porary culture of remembrance and a “Center for Persecuted Arts” that would take all artistic genres into account. Against the background of the outbreak of racism directed against refugees and minorities in reunified Germany, Hajo Jahn and Jürgen Serke initiated a nationwide action of the Else Lasker- Schüler Society on November 9, 1992: “A Night in Germany,” a reaction to the arson attacks, in which authors read in the homes of asylum seekers—“against xenophobia, violence, and anti- Semitism,” in Rostock, Moelln, Cottbus, Hünxe, Magdeburg, Schwerin, Dresden, and Solingen. In 1994, the Else Lasker-Schüler Society Wuppertal, together with Exil-PEN, called for the founding of a Center for Persecuted Arts. On September 12, 1994, the Else Lasker-Schüler Society presented the dependent foundation “Burned and Banished Poets/Artists – For a Center of Persecuted Arts” in the Düsseldorf state parliament. There, an appeal with signatures of fifty authors was submitted, including Günter Grass, Siegfried Lenz, Johannes Mario Simmel, and Tankred Dorst, as well as the East German writers Sarah Kirsch, Reiner Kunze, Jürgen Fuchs, and Wolf Biermann; further signees included Herta Müller and the Israelis Yehuda Amichai, Jakob Hessing, and Tuvia Rübner.