“PAINT ME AS YOU WOULD A SHADOW”: Felix Nussbaum’s Long Hide-and-Seek With the Third Reich
Felix Nussbaum, Portrait with Jewish Identity Card
Brussels, April 1944.
Night after night Felix Nussbaum tiptoed up the attic stairs of 22 rue Archimède, careful not to rattle the banister. The skylight was blacked out with cardboard, but a single lamp pooled enough light for him to work. He laid a fresh canvas across two chairs and marked the date in the corner—18 April—because dates mattered now. They were proof of conscience, mile-markers on a road that the Nazis had tried to erase. Then he mixed an unholy violet from leftover pigments, dipped his brush, and began painting an orchestra of skeletons.
The band he conjured—tambourines rattling, drums throbbing—played a jaunty tune called “The Lambeth Walk,” a London dance-hall hit that Goebbels himself had once denounced. In the bombed-out landscape Felix added fragments of walls, a lamppost strung with a swinging corpse, and, almost hidden, his own gaunt face behind the organ grinder’s crank. He called the painting Triumph of Death. It would be his last finished canvas.
The Triumph of Death, detail
THE FIRST ESCAPE
A decade earlier Nussbaum had been the bright hope of Osnabrück, the surgeon’s son who won the Rome Prize and sketched street scenes on the Via Appia. But late in 1933 Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s cultural commissar, strode through the German Academy in Rome to inspect its “racial hygiene.” Modernists and Jews were persona non grata; Felix was both. Overnight he and his Polish-born partner, the painter Felka Platek, fled Italy with two suitcases of clothes and a portfolio of half-dry oils.
BRUSSELS’ UNEASY SHELTER
Brussels offered cheap rooms and a tolerant café culture. Felix found a skylit studio, hung his work in small galleries, painted Felka reading by a cold stove. Yet the canvases grew darker: cramped interiors with padlocked doors; night skies latticed by barbed wire; solitary figures clutching worn passports. In The Refugee (1939) a man—Felix disguised in a shabby raincoat—leans across a bare table while a globe tilts Europe toward the viewer like an accusation.
The Refugee
BARBED-WIRE INTERLUDE
In May 1940 the Wehrmacht rolled into Belgium. Felix and Felka were arrested as “enemy aliens” and herded onto cattle trucks bound for the internment camp of Saint-Cyprien in Vichy France. Felix drew what he saw: skeletal men coughing in sand-blown barracks, guards silhouetted against dunes. Weeks later, during a transfer, the latch on a train door jammed—one of those careless miracles of war. Felix slipped through the gap and vanished back to Brussels. Felka followed soon after. Friends found them an attic. Paint and canvas arrived in brown-paper parcels; food in soup tins that were passed hand to hand up the stairs.
PAINTING THE NARROWING CORRIDOR
Hiding sharpened Felix’s eye to a terrifying lucidity. In Self-Portrait with Jewish Identity Card (1943) he stands against a concrete wall, passport in one hand, the other gripping the lapel of a trench coat that merges with the wall itself—as if he is turning into stone. Behind him a dead sapling stretches brittle branches; in German, Nussbaum means “nut tree.”
Each morning he stacked the damp canvases face-to-face, wrapped them in rags so footsteps wouldn’t echo, and pushed them behind a false panel. “If I perish,” he told the landlord, “don’t let my paintings die.”
Felix Nussbaum
THE KNOCK AT THE DOOR
At dawn on 20 June 1944 informers led German police to the attic. Felix and Felka were marched down the stairs, their brushes still wet. At the Mechelen transit camp they became numbers—XXVI / 284 and XXVI / 285—and on 31 July a freight train carried them to Auschwitz. An infirmary log dated 20 September records prisoner B-3594 treated for a blister on the index finger; it is Felix’s last trace. Felka disappeared into the same darkness.
CANVAS AFTER-LIVES
The landlord kept his promise. When the war ended, he opened the hiding place and found more than two hundred paintings—faces that seemed to breathe under a decade of dust. Osnabrück claimed the trove and, half a century later, hired architect Daniel Libeskind to build the Felix Nussbaum Haus, a museum of tilting corridors and sudden dead-ends that feel like walking through the painter’s own claustrophobic dream. There Triumph of Death now hangs in a long, narrow gallery; viewers approach it the same way Felix approached history—step by careful step, aware the walls are closing.
WHY HIS FLIGHT STILL MATTERS
Felix Nussbaum never carried a gun, never printed leaflets. His resistance was pictorial exactitude: he painted what it felt like to be hounded, fingerprinted, hidden, betrayed. The cool surfaces of New Objectivity became, in his hands, mirrors fogged by fear and then wiped clean. The Nazis destroyed the man, yet the work they hunted survives—proof that even in an attic with cardboard over the skylight, a brush can carve a witness out of the dark.
When you stand before that skeleton orchestra, you hear the faint echo of the Lambeth Walk, jaunty and obscene, and you realise Felix painted the last bars of his own requiem—and hid it well enough that the music plays on.