Marie Luise Kohn (Künstlername: Maria Luiko)

Marie Luise Kohn was born at Elvirastrasse 3 in Munich on January 25, 1904. Her parents, Olga and Heinrich Kohn, ran a grain and feed wholesale business. In 1914, the family moved to Loristrasse 7. Like her sister, the future lawyer Dr Elisabeth Kohn, Marie Luise attended the Luisengymnasium high school. In the winter semester 1923-24 she was admitted to the renowned art academy Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. She made watercolours, oil paintings, lithographs, woodcuts and lino prints, soon exhibiting them to the public under the name Maria Luiko. At the end of the 1920s, she attracted the attention of the renowned art collector Heinrich Thannhauser, who sold some of her work in the USA. Maria Luiko was on the way to becoming a recognised artist.
The Nazi seizure of power put an end to these plans. Because she was Jewish, the Nazis refused her membership of the Reich Association of Fine Arts (Reichskammer der bildenden Künste). Maria Luiko looked for other ways in which she could work as an artist in spite of this. She showed her work in exhibitions for an exclusively Jewish audience, including the Reich exhibition of Jewish artists in the Jewish Museum in Berlin in 1936. She also founded together with some fellow artists the Munich Puppet Theatre for Jewish Artists, for which she designed and made puppets. Following her final exhibition in Berlin in 1937, she worked as an assistant librarian in the library of the Jewish community and as a volunteer teaching arts and crafts and drawing at the Jewish elementary school.
Maria Luiko planned to emigrate to Palestine, but this was no longer possible. In August 1939, she had to move into a “Jew house” at Frundsbergstrasse 8 with her sister Elisabeth and their widowed mother. In early November 1941, Maria Luiko, her mother and her sister received their deportation order. On November 20, 1941 the Gestapo (secret state police) deported Maria Luiko with her mother Olga and her sister Elisabeth Kohn and around 1,000 other Jews to Kaunas in Lithuania. Five days later, an SS special detail shot all the deportees.(Text: Ingrid Reuther; editor: C. Fritsche; translation: C. Hales)