She paints herself. A direct gaze. A hand on her cheek, almost like a question.

Anita Rée created this self-portrait in Hamburg in 1930. At the time, she was one of the city’s most renowned female painters and a founding member of the Hamburg Secession. Her murals adorned Hamburg’s schools.

Three years later, she was dead.

What happened in the meantime is not the story of an illness. It is the story of exclusion.

Rée came from a Jewish merchant family but had been baptized and confirmed in the Protestant faith. She never identified as Jewish. That did her no good. In the late 1920s, she was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for a Hamburg church. In 1932, the acceptance of the finished work was refused. The reason given: A Jewish woman was not allowed to paint a Christian painting. The church council yielded to the pressure. The congregation never got to see the painting.

In 1932, Rée left Hamburg in a hurry. Sylt became her refuge—a small, unheated attic room in Kampen. In 1933, her own artists’ association expelled her as a “member unfit for the arts.”

Isolation is rarely just a feeling. Often, it is the result of decisions made by other people: doors that close, associations that expel members, commissions that are canceled.

In December 1933, Anita Rée took her own life in Kampen. Alone. With no hope of regaining the life she had built for herself.

—

I stood for a long time in front of this self-portrait at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. My wife Milena took the photo. Rée’s gaze meets mine. Across nearly a century.

I don’t know exclusion through persecution. I know it through my life, which has been like a roller coaster ride that has now lasted for 30 years. Being misunderstood. Not having a place, even though you’re right in the middle of it all.

The difference between Rée’s story and mine is crucial. I had people who stood by me. Milena. My family. Later, an organization that emerged precisely from this experience. Support changes everything. Not because it cures an illness or eliminates exclusion. But because it gives you a reason to keep going, even when the doors outside are closing. Where Rée could no longer find a door, I found one. That’s the whole difference.

Exclusion can destroy a person. Slowly or quickly, visibly or invisibly. The feeling of belonging isn’t just an empty phrase. It’s one of the few things that can truly offer protection. That’s why we at StrassenBLUES create spaces where no one is left standing in front of closed doors. That’s why I’m telling this story.

I know this feeling from my own experience. Being excluded, even though you have something to offer.

The journey continues.

She, too, led a life full of ups and downs.

Virginia was the daughter of a famous man. She grew up in a house where Thomas Hardy and Henry James were regular visitors. Back then, London’s intellectual elite gathered in their own salon.

But Virginia wasn’t allowed to go to school. Her brothers studied at Cambridge. She had private tutors. That’s how it was back then for girls, even in the best families. Especially in the best families.

The higher the social standing of the family, the tighter the corset for the daughters. Virginia never forgot that experience. Instead, she read her way through her father’s private library: Leslie Stephen, writer, historian, and editor of a monumental biographical encyclopedia. Early on, she expressed a desire to become a writer. At a time when that was not a profession for women. At most, a hobby.

• At 13, she lost her mother. This was followed by her first nervous breakdown.
• At 15, her half-sister Stella, who had taken on the role of mother, died.
• At 22, her father.
• At 24, her brother Thoby—from typhus—at the age of 26.

Four people in eleven years. Each loss tore her deeper.

Her era had no language for what was happening to her. They called it a nervous breakdown. They prescribed rest. They temporarily forbade her from writing. Of all things. The one thing that kept her going.

And yet: she wrote.

She moved with her siblings to Bloomsbury and became part of a circle that challenged stuffy England—in art, in thought, in the way of life. In 1917, she and her husband Leonard founded a publishing house, the Hogarth Press. The two set the first books by hand, letter by letter, in their own dining room. She wrote novels that changed literature forever. Celebrated in her lifetime, internationally renowned, today one of the most important authors of the modern era.

Her most famous work: *Mrs. Dalloway*. The book I’m holding in my hands in the photo.

A single day in the life of a London hostess. On the outside: buying flowers, preparing for an evening party. On the inside: a storm of memories, doubts, and fears. And running parallel to this is the story of a man returning from war, whose inner world is falling apart while high society engages in small talk.

Two people who never meet—and yet carry the same thing within them.

Woolf wrote about this book, saying she wanted to show life and death side by side, the world of those who conform and the world of those who fall outside it. She knew what she was writing about. From both sides.

And then there is her essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” from 1929. It is still quoted today when the question arises of what women need to think freely. Her answer back then: their own money and a room of their own. Nothing more. And that is precisely what women lacked. It was not talent they lacked. They always had that. Rather, it was the conditions to make use of it.

In 1941, she walked into the River Ouse. She was a good swimmer, so she put a stone in her coat pocket.

Her farewell letter to Leonard begins: “My dearest, I certainly feel that I am going mad again.”

And it ends: “I do not believe that two people could have been happier than we have been.” Both are in one letter. Both are true.

Virginia Woolf was mentally ill. Could she have survived today—with our knowledge, with our help?

That is what I cannot stop thinking about.

Those were Vincent’s last words. Passed down by his brother Theo, who was there—as always.

I stand in front of this self-portrait at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and my thoughts aren’t just on Vincent. I’m thinking of Theo.

Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853 into an affluent Dutch middle-class family. He drew even as a child: serious, quiet, pensive. As a young man, he worked as an art dealer, traveled throughout Europe, and wrote hundreds of letters. After being transferred to London, he fell into depression. What followed were decades marked by swings between creative frenzy and mental breakdowns. Poverty. Crises. Hospital stays. And always: Theo.

Theo van Gogh was four years younger. He worked as an art dealer in Paris and sent Vincent money every month—often his own. He replied to every letter. He believed in the paintings when no buyer wanted them. He endured what hardly anyone can endure: constant closeness to a person who lived between genius and the abyss.

Vincent died on July 29, 1890, in Auvers-sur-Oise. He was 37 years old. Two days earlier, he had shot himself. Theo was at his deathbed.

What happened to Theo afterward is rarely told.

On October 9, 1890—ten weeks after Vincent’s death—Theo broke down. On October 12, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. The admission form states in the “Cause of Illness” column:

“Chronic illness. Overwork and grief. He has led a life full of emotional strain.”

That sentence is over 130 years old. It could have been written today.

Theo died on January 25, 1891. He was 33 years old. Half a year after Vincent. Today, their graves lie side by side in the cemetery at Auvers-sur-Oise.

—

Many family members know what happened to Theo. Even without the 19th century, even without syphilis. The burden that remains after being there for someone for years. The trauma that eats away at the body when that person is suddenly gone. The exhaustion that no one sees, because everyone was focused on the other person.

Family members carry a burden that rarely gets a name. No medical record for them. No diagnosis. Just: carry on.

Life is a roller coaster for Theo, too.

For everyone who isn’t the center of attention—and yet gives it their all.

The ride continues.