Josef Haubrich – A saviour of art

The Wallraf-Richartz-Museum owes its important collection of German Expressionist and Post-Expressionist art largely to the Cologne lawyer and art collector Josef Haubrich (1889–1961).

Many of the works Haubrich had collected were banned by the Nazis as ‘degenerate’ and removed from Germany’s museums and galleries. There was another reason, too, why Haubrich was a thorn in the Nazi’s flesh: his wife, Alice Gottschalk (1892–1944), a gynaecologist and pediatrician, was Jewish. Subjected to intense persecution, she was finally driven to suicide. Despite these severe blows to his personal as well as public life, Haubrich continued to expand his collection, part of which he deposited in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum’s storerooms, where it was better protected from the destructive rage of the Nazis and the wartime bombardment of the city. Haubrich gifted his collection to the museum in 1955, signalling a new start in German society.