Munich Stories Michels, Max
Seestrasse 8, 80802 München
My name is Angelika Michels Rooney. I am the only grandchild of Max Michels, who lived in this house in the Seestrasse 8. I would like to tell you a bit about my grandfather, or at least the bits that I know.
Max was born in 1880 in Maldewin, Kreis Regenwalde, Pommern (Pomerania) into a large Jewish family. He was the second eldest son, but he was the tallest, standing 6’2” in his stocking feet. From what I have gathered from my father and his living cousins, he was a big man in every way…he was big hearted, generous and joyful, at least until the last years. Most of the pictures I have of him before the end, show a man with a big grin and laughing, merry eyes.
Maldewin, the village where he and his family were from was also unusual. It was not a Jewish shtetel, but a tiny “Dorf” (village) owned entirely by a local nobleman. Generations before, the nobleman’s ancestors had invited several Jewish families to live there to ply the usual Jewish trades. My ancestors owned the local market/grocery store. Thus, Max learned salesmanship at his father’s knee. He was a born salesman.
Like most of his siblings, he left Maldewin as soon as he was an adult. He moved to Berlin where he worked for the Warenhaus Herman Tietz, the big department store on Leipzinger Strasse. Sometime after the turn of the century, I believe around 1912, he moved on to Munich. Munich, in those years, was the place to be for ambitious young people, a real magnet. It was a thriving art center, almost equally as famous as Paris. Max fell in love with Munich and also with a young woman there, equally as ambitious and unusual as himself. Her name was Anna and she would become my grandmother.
Anna had been born in Innsbruck, Austria. She came from a middle class, conventional Catholic family. Her father was a master shoemaker who not only owned his own business and had a number of employees, but who also owned his own home, a not so common thing in those days. The house still stands! My husband and I visited it some years back.
I think Anna was the youngest of several children. She was the wild child. She was unconventional to say the least. She ran away to Munich at sixteen and never looked back. She soon was immersed in the Munich art scene. How my grandparents met is unknown to me. But, meet they did. They married in 1914 probably just before Max was called up for service in the First World War. He had been in the reserves previously. During the War, he served with the Bavarian Infantry Battalion in Belgium and France with the rank of captain. He was severely wounded in 1916, I believe at Verdun. He was invalided back to Bavaria and served out the War behind the lines. For his exemplary service, he received two Iron Crosses (the honorable World War I one’s) and a number of other medals and commendations, which I have. He came home a hero.
After the War, my grandparents parlayed my grandmother’s contacts in the Munich art world and my grandfather’s sales expertise into an art business. They first owned an art gallery on Karolianplatz, the Max Michels Gallery and later bought an existing gallery, the Georg Stuffler Gallery, which was located in the Park Hotel on Maximillianplatz. They handled museum quality paintings from well-known artists such as Franz Von Stuck and Franz Defregger. In fact, a Von Stuck painting bought from their gallery in the early 1930’s became the nucleus of the foremost German Art Museum in the United States, the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Washington.
I believe that my grandparents moved into this house in the mid to late 1920’s. They lived a good life here and grew their business, their art gallery, into a very successful concern. Many of their friends were artists. My grandmother was painted by Von Stuck and Franz Defregger was my father’s godfather.
My father was born in 1919 and grew up in this house. However, everything changed after Hitler came to power. I can only tell you what I know about that time and my grandfather’s life from what I heard from my father and his family. In 1936, my grandfather signed over all his interest in the Gallery to my grandmother, since as a Jew, he could no longer own property.
In 1938 my grandparents divorced. My grandmother stated that she was forced to do so because of the political situation. My grandfather must have moved out of this house at that time and he moved in with his youngest sister elsewhere in Munich. He and his sister lived together until they were both transported to the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp in 1942. All that his iron crosses and his status as a hero of the First World War gained him was time. They were on one of the last transports from Munich. In 1944 he was shipped from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz where he was gassed on October 18, 1944.
My father as a half Jewish boy was also in peril. In 1939, his parents were able to get him out of Germany to Shanghai, a last refuge for Jews. My parents met and married there and that is where I was born. We spent the War under the Japanese occupation in the Shanghai Ghetto, known as HongKew, the only Ghetto outside of Europe during the War. In 1948 we emigrated to the United States.
My grandmother lived in this house with her second husband until around 1954. She died in 1958.
My grandfather was a good man, and according to my cousins he was everyone’s favorite uncle, warm and generous. He could roar with laughter and he had a magnificent temper, but it was all bark and no bite. I never met my grandfather, but I know him. I know that he loved a good cigar…I have his cigar cutter, I know that his favorite wine was a white sparkling Italian called Friscatti. I know he loved to fish in the Isar River. I know he would have loved me, my father told me so. As I said, my grandfather was a good man. He did not deserve to die in the way he did. He should have died of old age, in his own bed, probably in this house. But, in that case, ironically, I would not be speaking here today.
(Commemoration speech of Angelika Rooney Michels for her grandfather Max Michels in Munich on November 12, 2018)
