Arnold Zadikow

Death and the Cannon by Arnold Zadikow 1915, British Museum exhibition: "The other side of the medal: how Germany saw the First World War", 9 May – 23 November 2014

Arnold Zadikow (Kolberg, Pomerania 1884 - 1943 Theresienstadt concentration camp) was a modernist German-Jewish sculptor and medalist who worked in Germany and France. He mainly worked on portrait busts, gravestones and plaques. He was a soldier on the Western Front during the Great War and sustained combat injuries in 1917 before being taken to a British prisoner of war camp. He dwelt mainly in Munich and Rome, but briefly worked in Paris in 1932. Zadikow liked to work with biblical motifs, and his sculpture of the young David was displayed in the entrance of the Berlin Jewish Museum in 1933. Considered his most important work, the statue was lost during the Second World War.

In 1933, sensing trouble for Germany's Jewish population, Zadikow to Prague with his wife Hilda and his daughter Marianka. He was later joined by other German Jewish artists such as Oskar Kokoschka, John Heartfield and Thomas Theodor Heine. The Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Jews in the country faced increasing persecution, and finally on the 15th May 1942, the Zadikows were rounded up and ordered to board a train to Theresienstadt concentration camp, where Arnold was to pass away. Hilda and Marianka were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau the following year, but managed to survive long enough to be liberated in 1945.

Throughout his working life, Zadikow designed decorative gravestones, including that of the German physician and pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld.

References

• bin Gorion, E. (1935) Philo-Lexicon: Handbuch des jüdischen Wissens. Philo Verlag.
• Brenner, M. et al., The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (1996).
• Brenner, M. (1999). Jewish Culture in Contemporary America and Weimar Germany: Parallels and Differences. Central European University Jewish Studies Yearbook, 2(2).
• Does, R. (2014). Magnus Hirschfeld: the origins of the gay liberation movement. NYU Press.