Mieke Monjau (1903 - 1997)

Mieke Monjau was born as Marie Martens in Düsseldorf in 1903. As early as the 1920s, Mieke Monjau had connections to the Düsseldorf avant-garde art scene, moving within socialist and communist circles. Mieke Monjau married the painter and teacher, Franz Monjau.

During the Nazi period, Mieke and Franz Monjau were constantly subjected to Nazi persecution. They were briefly arrested in 1933 as part of a Nazi round-up campaign against the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) and Franz Monjau was banned from his working in his profession. Franz Monjau was interned in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944, where he subsequently died as a result of the ill treatment he sustained in custody. After the war, Mieke Monjau organised aid for Düsseldorf artists from émigrés in the USA. She worked as a physiotherapist well into her old age and managed the estates of her deceased husband and his friend and fellow artist, Julo Levin, who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1945. Numerous works by Franz Monjau and Julo Levin, as well as a collection of paintings by Jewish children between 1936 and 1941, survived the war and the Nazi regime thanks to Mieke Monjau’s endeavours. Following her death in 1997, these works as well as her estate, were incorporated into the Stiftung Monjau-Levin (Monjau-Levin Foundation), which is administered by the Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf.

In January 1991, Mieke Monjau donated seventy-two objects predominantly from Central and West Africa to the Ethnological Collection. Mieke Monjau’s interest in art beyond the boundaries of Europe was already present in the 1920s, where she became acquainted with the influence that art from Oceania and Africa had had on the work of her artist friends. Mieke Monjau acquired her African collection in Germany, Switzerland and Liechtenstein over the course of twenty years. Mieke Monjau only acquired one artefact in Africa itself. It was the prized piece of her entire collection throughout her life.