The painter, publicist and poet Arie Goral is born as Walter Lovis Sternheim in 1909 to a Jewish family in Rheda, Westphalia. He does not take the name Arie Goral (Hebrew for lion and destiny) until he arrives in Palestine towards the end of the Second World War.
In 1913, the family moves to Hamburg, where he spents his childhood and youth. At an early age, he joins the Jewish hiking association ‘Blau-Weiß’ and later, around 1923, the Zionist-Socialist ‘Jung-Jüdischer Wanderbund’ (Young Jewish Hiking Association). He begins an apprenticeship as a textile merchant, later one as a bookseller. He does not complete either apprenticeship. His real interest is in Zionist politics. He meets Martin Buber and Salman Rubaschow (later Salman Shasar, President of Israel) and goes on a journey with the ‘Wanderbund’. It is an unsettled life. Emigration comes sooner than expected and unintentionally. He experiences the ‘Jew Boycott Day’ in Hamburg on 1 April 1933 first-hand when SA hordes storm the Hermann Tietz department store (today the Alsterhaus), where he works in the book department. A month later, he flees from the Nazi henchmen searching for him, initially to France. There he works on farms, living destitute as a tramp in the mountains near Andorra, in Marseille and in Paris. He marries Anna Szmajewicz, an artist from Danzig, with whom he emigrates to Palestine on 24 December 1934.
After a brief spell in a kibbutz, he initially lives in a small wooden hut on the beach. Their son dies in his first year of life, which leads to the breakdown of their marriage. Goral moves to Jerusalem for a time, where he is accepted into the circle of artists around Else Lasker-Schüler. His first poems are published in small print runs. To finance his life, he workes as a construction worker, a lifeguard at the Dead Sea, and also as a bodyguard for the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassi, who had fled to Jerusalem from the Italian army. As a soldier in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Goral witnesses the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants across the Jordan River to the east. This experience traumatises him and becomes one of the main themes of his paintings over the decades.
It is not known exactly when Goral begins to paint. In 1950, he moves to Florence, where he has received a scholarship to the Academy of Fine Arts, and studies graphic design, painting and art education. In 1951, he has his first exhibition of his own works at the ‘La Saletta’ gallery. This is followed by a trip through Europe, visiting France, Holland, Belgium and England. In England, he takes part in an exhibition called ‘Temporary Jewish Artists’. He meets Oskar Kokoschka and Herbert Read. Read’s book ‘Education through Art’ makes such a strong impression on him that he bases his later work with and for young people on it.
At the invitation of Erich Kästner, he exhibits pictures by Israeli children, created in 1949 in a ‘children’s studio’ he ran in Rechovot, in Munich, the first Jewish exhibition after the war. This is followed by invitations to Hamburg and Bremen, where he is initially mainly involved in political education. He supports the anti-nuclear movement, which was active at the time, both educationally and artistically. He eventually settles in Hamburg, his ‘beloved, hated hometown,’ and becomes politically and journalistically active once again.
In 1974, he stops painting. ‘I said everything I could say in pictures,’ he later tells Michael K. Nathan, the son of his friend from his youth in Hamburg, Dr Waldemar Nathan, who had emigrated to Palestine in the early 1930s. From then on, he devotes himself exclusively to his political and journalistic work, writing his memoirs of his youth, ‘Jeckepotz – Eine jüdisch-deutsche Jugend 1914-1933’ (Jeckepotz – A Jewish-German Youth 1914-1933) in 1989, and continuing to work as a journalist.
Arie Goral dies in 1996 in Hamburg. The city of Hamburg honours the political activist and artist in 2019 by naming a square in the former Jewish Grindelviertel district after Arie Goral.
The years of emigration to Palestine, later Israel, brought little peace to Arie Goral-Sternheim’s life. When Else Lasker-Schüler dies, whose death he witnesses first-hand, he moves from Jerusalem to the small town of Rechovot. His friend from his youth in Hamburg, Dr Waldemar Nathan, and his cousin Dr Kurt Mendel live there. Although he temporarily finds employment at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, his life remains disordered. He never learns Hebrew and is unable to adapt to social conditions. ‘I starved, sometimes sleeping in doorways,’ he writes to a friend. Dr. Nathan, who runs a country doctor’s practice in Rechovot, supports him and pays the rent for his basement room. Occasionally, he gives lectures on art in Dr. Nathan’s apartment. His audience consists of members of the German-Jewish community in Rechovot, all of whom, like himself and his host, are refugees from Germany.
Arie Goral achieves greater impact later, after returning to Hamburg in the early 1950s. In campaigns which he leads with great energy together with Michael K. Nathan and other young activists, he achieves, to name just three: the erection of a monument to Heinrich Heine on Hamburg’s Rathausmarkt; the naming of the Hamburg State and University Library after Carl von Ossietzky; and the elimination of number plates bearing the letter combinations HH-SS, HH-SA, HH-NS and HH-KZ from the Hamburg city fleet.
In memory of Arie Goral’s artistic work, Michael K. Nathan, who as a child in Palestine was once a student at Goral’s painting school, later a long-time friend and, after his death, chairman of the Arie Goral-Sternheim Society for many years, donated several of the artist’s works to the Museum Kunst der Verlorenen Generation.
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