Ilse Häfner-Mode

Ilse Häfner-Mode (24 December 1902 - 15 March 1973) was a German-Jewish artist of what German commentators sometimes term the "lost (or forgotten) generation" ("Verschollene Generation"). Most of her work, which consists both of oil paintings and of watercolours, latterly sometimes enhanced through the artist's own embroidery using silk thread, is held in private collections. The organisers of an exhibition devoted to her work in 2013 were nevertheless able to get hold of approximately 100 of her paintings, on loan, from around 30 collectors.

On account of her Jewish provenance she and her family were subjected to increasing levels of persecution after 1933. She was nevertheless still living in Nazi Germany when the Second World War broke out in 1939, after which it was no longer possible to emigrate. She lived in Germany throughout the Holocaust years and survived. Häfner-Mode later boasted that the National Socialists had prevented her from exhibiting or selling her art: but they never succeeded in preventing her from painting.

Her son Thomas, who later also became an artist, was, according to one source, "given to a merchant who was travelling to India". The reality was a little less stark. Between 1938 and 1948 Thomas Häfner grew up in Ceylon while benefitting from education at a school for British children. He thereby survived the holocaust, albeit badly traumatised through the circumstances of his separation from his mother.

Life Ilse Mode was born in Kempen (as Kępno was known before 1920), a small market town and administrative centre which at the time of her birth was part of the Prussian Province of Posen. Her father worked as a pharmacist. Some months before her second birthday the family relocated to Berlin, then a rapidly expanding boom city. The couple's son, Thomas Häfner (1928-1985), was born on Christmas Eve, 1928.

After leaving Art College she lived in Berlin as a free-lance artist. She produced portraits and other compositions rich in figures, both in oils and as watercolours. She also specialised in "needle paintings". In 1928 the critic-collector Paul Westheim reviewed a "mother and child" painting by Häfner-Mode in Das Kunstblatt: "... in ethos, in composition and in artistic theology, she removes any social empathy". of the "lost generation".

During 1942 or 1943 (sources differ), as the tide of the European war turned decisively against the German army, the extent and savagery of persecution suffered by those who had been identified as Jewish, and who were still living in Germany, intensified. Häfner-Mode left Berlin and went to live with the family of her brother-in-law in the Leopoldshöhe countryside east of Bielefeld. There was an assumption that here, in the seemingly remote countryside, she would be safe. Contemporaries interviewed later recalled her as a friendly and likeable woman. She was able to obtain boards and other artists' materials from the village carpenter, and made a modest living through painting portraits of the wealthier inhabitants of the Lippe region in which she had ended up. In September 1944 officers from the Gestapo in Minden appeared and arrested her. Her presence had been reported to the authorities by a villager. Sources are, in most respects, silent about her work, which initially involved constructing huts for camp accommodation and then transferred the vast underground construction site, but it is known that Häfner-Mode was able to continue with her art in the camp, producing numerous pen and ink drawings.

By that time Häfner-Mode was badly weakened, both physically and spiritually. From something she wrote at that time, it appears that she did not expect to live for much longer, but nevertheless did not feel ready for death.

At least one commentator expresses incredulity that Häfner-Mode then wished to return to Germany after her experiences in her homeland, but return she did. She moved back to the Leopoldshöhe countryside where she had briefly found refuge during the Hitler years. Protracted arguments about compensation were only settled after a lawsuit and "diverse interventions". In the end she was awarded 6,000 Deutsche Mark in damages "for a twelve year ban on painting and on professional activity, and for eight months of detention in a camp".

Meanwhile, in 1948 her son had returned from Ceylon. He successfully passed the admission exam for the prestigious Kunstakademie art academy in Düsseldorf. On completion of his studies he remained in Düsseldorf and built a successful career as a painter, while keeping in close contact with each of his parents. In 1954 his father died and Ilse Häfner-Mode relocated from the Lippe Uplands to Düsseldorf, where mother and son now lived together.

Ilse Häfner-Mode died at Düsseldorf on 15 March 1973.