When Arthur Schlossmann died in 1932, the Academy planned the erection of a memorial, but when the pedestal was erected the Nazi party came into power so that it remained empty, as Schlossmann was considered a Non-Aryan and liberal. Clandestinely, the bronze memorial was kept aside until after the war, when the monument has been inaugurated in 1948 in presence of Schlossmann's emigrant family in the General Municipal Hospital in Düsseldorf.
Today the open air memorial in front of the Administration Building (13.70) is a copy; the original bronze has been transferred to the Pediatrics Clinic. Even a Festschrift initiative for the decennial jubilee of the Academy was also overshadowed by Nazi intervention prohibiting the medical historian Wilhelm Haberling to include Schlossmann in his historical biographical handbook of physicians in Düsseldorf (appeared in Düsseldorfer Jahrbuch 38, 1936).
Behind the monument, the back side of the former surgical clinics is characterised by protruding operating theatres for the sake of optimum daylight. Further to the left /East opens the view on the sun terraces of the Wilhelminian Private Pavillon which was designed in order to attract wealthy patients. Due to financial losses after opening and social change after WWI, this pavillon has been rededicated for obstetrics and gynecology.
More info (in German) in the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek
- Picture: Thorsten Halling; text: Thorsten Halling & Ulrich Koppitz
- Locate the item on this Google Map
Bibliography
- Max Plassmann, Die Jubiläumsfeiern der Medizinischen Akademie Düsseldorf, in: Jahrbuch der Heinrich-Heine-Universität 2005/2006, S. 669-678