Luise Straus-Ernst – a life between success and persecution

As an art historian and cultural journalist, Luise Straus-Ernst was well established in the artistic life of Cologne. After taking her doctorate at the University of Bonn, she worked as a research assistant at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum. In 1919, on the death of the museum’s director of sculpture and antiquities, Dr. Joseph Poppelreuter, she took over until the end of that year as temporary head of the museum. When the National Socialists gained power in 1933, she emigrated to Paris; but she did not escape the Shoah. In July 1944 she was deported in one of the last transports from Drancy to Auschwitz, where all trace of her ends.