Arnon Grunberg

Afternoon

Letter

An afternoon at the Liebermann Villa at the Wannsee, the villa where the painter Max Liebermann and his family spent their summers.
On display is among other things a letter written to Liebermann in 1924 in which Liebermann got attacked with antisemitic slurs because he had managed to get a job as professor in an art school, probably the writer meant Liebermann's post as president of the Prussian Academy of Arts, in the letter it is stated that he got his job solely because of "Ihre vordringlichen echt jüdischen Eigenschaften."
The letter ends with the threat to remove Mr. Liebermann violently from his post.
The combination of bitter resentment, conspiracy theory and biological racism and anti-Semitism feels frighteningly contemporary.

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