The Émigré (Dr. Walter Lindenthal), 1941

Lotte Laserstein

Narrator: Lotte Laserstein paints Walter Lindenthal (1886 1975) wearing a brown winter coat and a warm scarf. He is sitting directly facing the observer, a wool blanket over his lap to protect him from the cold. With his hands folded over a newspaper or book, Lindenthal stares before him with an inscrutable gaze. The background is a diffuse light gray, and the shadow suggests he is sitting against a wall, in a “non place.” This is a person who is waiting for something, he is on the way to an unknown destination. Laserstein blurs Lindenthal’s eye area so that he appears more as a proxy for all who have been driven out, jerked from a safe existence, who wait in uncertainty banished to their thoughts and memories. The painting’s muted, dark tones in brown and gray unders core the grave mental state of the emigrant.

In Stockholm in 1939, Laserstein came to know the lawyer Dr. Walter Lindenthal twelve years her senior and also an emigrant from Berlin. Because he was Jewish, he had been removed from his position as lawyer on the City Council already in 1933. In Sweden, Lindenthal worked occasionally as a librarian, but he gradually became known as an esteemed translator of Swedish and Norwegian fiction into German. Through the late 1940s, he was also an editor at the Bermann Fischer publishing company in Stockholm. Laserstein and Lindenthal, who shared the experiences of escape and exile, became very good friends over the years, and their friendship lasted throughout their lives. They socialized in Stockholm, but the friends al so traveled to Ascona in Switzerland many times after the end of the war and even visited Israel together.