Anita Rée: What Exclusion Destroys, Belonging Can Make Up For

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.

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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.