Loth and his daugthers

The Rostock painter Kate Diehn-Bitt had maintained relationships with artists on Fischland since the 1930s, including Hertha von Guttenberg, with whom she had exhibited at the Gurlitt Gallery in Berlin in 1935. Because of the unpleasant expressive content of her works, this exhibition was closed after only a few days. Diehn-Bitt fell under a professional ban, which forced her to work in secret from then on. In the 1950s, she then frequently created themes from the Old Testament. Her works on the Joseph legend in particular make it clear how much she connected her own experiences as an artist with the ostracism that the Jewish people had suffered in Nazi-ruled Germany. She had come to this identification through the persuasive power of the family constellation in which she had experienced security, stimulation, love and all-round support since the age of six. In this family climate, different religions had an equal place: the Protestant Christian one of her mother Elsa and the Jewish one of her stepfather Leo Glaser. Both of their lives flowed into a liberal attitude of mutual tolerance and acceptance that was open to all things spiritual. The security that the young Käthe gained from this atmosphere paved the way for her to find herself and an artistic existence. It had to be severely shaken when, as early as 1928, the anti-Semitic mania in Germany pushed her parental home into that unfortunate and sorrowful isolation that ended in death for so many of Leo Glaser's companions in fate. The parallel persecution of so-called "non-art" thinking and "non-art" art affected the painter, who was just beginning a successful career, from 1935 onwards and sealed her fate with her stepfather. When the campaign against modern art continued after the end of the inferno in the Soviet occupation zone, there seemed to be little prospect of a light at the end of the tunnel for the artist, who was now in her fifth decade. After the death of Elsa Bitt, Leo Glaser had left Germany in 1948 and died in faraway New York. The collage "Loth and his Daughters" from 1955 clearly shows this farewell motif. It once again evokes - in an expressionist mode of expression - Glaser's futureless situation. Having escaped the inferno, ultimately through the support of the wife he had now lost, as a rootless survivor dependent on the rest of the family: the stepdaughters who remained in Germany. Rarely does a biblical metaphor apply so well to the personal and at the same time represent the history of an entire generation.