Mendelsohn's Incessant Visions

I grew up in Tel Aviv and, to my surprise, in 2003, UNESCO announced Tel Aviv as a World Heritage Site. I looked at Tel Aviv as a very ugly, unsympathetic place, and I didn't understand why it was chosen for conservation. I was intrigued to understand what this was about. I started looking at the buildings, trying to figure out what was behind the peeling plaster and the soot. I started looking for the beauty and the aesthetic. So I talked to architects and that is how I first heard of Erich Mendelsohn. He was someone who greatly influenced the spirit of the places where he lived, and his spirit is still alive in these places today. However, history hasn’t remembered him. His life story drew me into deep research for about seven years.

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The key to the story was in the ties and tensions between Mendelsohn and his wife Louise.  She was a beautiful muze, a German Jew and he was an Ostjuden, a jew from Prussia, an artist. She was much younger than him, but  had developed emotional intelligence which he relied on. He was the classic egocentric artist, who moved between despair and uphoria and she was his stability. It was clear that the main story is the relationship between the two, which opened up all the doors to creativity and success for him.