The art world knows her as the first wife of the artist Max Ernst, muse of the Dadaists and Surrealists. Yet Luise Straus-Ernst, born to a Jewish manufacturing family in Cologne in 1893, was much more than that: art historian, author of short stories, articles and novels, and pioneering radio writer
Luise Straus-Ernst did much as one of the first female PhDs in art history of her generation to promote Max Ernst’s oeuvre and the so-called Cologne Dada. Paul Klee, Lionel Feininger, André Breton, Paul Eluard and Tristan Tzara all moved in her circle. Her marriage to Ernst lasted for only a few years before he was drawn to Paris, while she and their son Jimmy stayed in Cologne. Soon, however, she too had to leave because she was Jewish. In 1933, she also immigrated to Paris. She didn’t believe that Hitler’s regime would prevail and hid out in a hotel in Provence, where she wrote her autobiography Nomadengut. Max Ernst refused an exit visa that arrived at the eleventh hour for the “married couple Ernst,” citing the fact that they had been divorced for 16 years. In 1944, Luise Straus-Ernst was deported on one of the last convoys east. She died in Auschwitz, at the age of 51.
“A terrific book: thoroughly researched, brilliantly written. The book is a wonderful portrait of the period.” – (DeutschlandRadio Kultur on Die Freuds)
