THE KING OF BERLIN

Clara Arnheim Clouds over the Sea c.1930

CLOUDS OVER HIDDENSEE

BERLIN-THERESIENSTADT 1942 

On Thursday July 9, 1942, the 77-year-old artist Clara Arnheim left Berlin’s Anhalter Bahnhof station on a train destined for the Theresienstadt Ghetto. Shortly before she left her home for the last time, it's said that she entrusted some of her paintings into the safekeeping of the German family to whom she rented out two rooms in the large apartment in the fashionable Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg where she'd lived since she was a child. 

BERLIN-VILNIUS 1985

On an unrecorded day in 1985, the elderly Lithuanian art dealer and long-time resident of Berlin Mykolas Žilinskas left the Soviet-occupied part of the city on a train destined for Vilnius. Among the items in his luggage were 13 watercolour paintings that had been produced by Clara Arnheim on the Baltic Sea island of Hiddensee some 50 years before. 

Clouds over Hiddensee is a proposed project that aims to conduct and investigation into the suspected connections between these two very different train journeys, and to turn the results into a presentation and/or exhibition. For information concerning how you can get involved in the project, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

1 See Gabriela Jaskulla's 2016 doctoral thesis on the life and work of Clara Arnheim for more information.