Felix Nussbaum: The Sunflowers He Never Got to Paint

A journey through art, memory, and the burden of history in Osnabrück, Germany

Trains in Germany are a running joke these days.
Timetables slip, platforms reshuffle, the once-mythic punctuality is gone.
For most travelers it’s an inconvenience; for me, it’s an echo.

I ride these tracks with the knowledge that, eighty years ago, the timetables did run on time—straight to places whose names echo with unbearable weight: Auschwitz, Sobibor, Bergen-Belsen.

So, a “classic Deutsche Bahn delay” is never just a delay. It is a tug on a thread that leads back to family ghosts.

That thread pulled hardest on the morning I headed to Osnabrück—to the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus, a museum built for a painter who, like millions, took his last German train against his will. His story awaited me there, traced in canvases that turned from blazing colour to nightmare browns as the 1930s darkened.

My notebook was open on my lap, Hebrew letters on the page. The green and harmless landscape slid past. The train did what German trains now do: it stopped, stalled, and apologised.

Then I began to write.

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On the Train to Osnabrück

I’m on the train to Osnabrück,
a classic Deutsche Bahn delay—
more than an hour.
Track work along the line,
three stations cancelled.
What awaits me there?

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The question wasn’t rhetorical.

Before I could confront Nussbaum’s art, the modern world confronted me—a fellow passenger eyeing the Hebrew script in my notebook, following me through two carriages. Eight decades separate his final self-portrait from my 2025 train ride, yet the stare felt older than either of us.

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The Encounter

I noticed a young man of Arab descent.
He trailed me,
caught the Hebrew in my notebook.
“Where are you from?”
“None of your business,” I said.
We disembarked;
I slipped out the opposite door,
vanished onto a different platform.

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For a moment, the station felt like a set from 1941—one wrong answer and the journey changes tracks.

I almost told the police, then thought of Nussbaum painting in hiding, clutching his passport replacement: a yellow Jewish star.

I chose the bus instead, straight to the museum that bears his name.

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The museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, is not a neutral container. It cuts through Osnabrück like a wound.

From the outside, it's all asymmetry and sharp metal angles—a fragment torn from something larger, perhaps from history itself. Inside, the architecture is even more punishing: long, narrow corridors, disorienting sightlines, and ceilings that seem to descend as you move.

There are no right angles in this building, no visual comfort. You are not invited to linger—you are compelled to reckon.

It is not just a museum of Felix Nussbaum. It is a physical metaphor for what was done to him.

As I stepped inside, I felt it: I was walking into a story with no clear escape.

Self-Portraits

Self-Portrait with Jewish Identity Card, Felix Nussbaum, 1943

Among the first works that confronted me in the museum was his 1943 self-portrait—the one with the yellow star of David.

He paints himself pressed against a wall so claustrophobically close it becomes a second skin—freedom ends at the bricks. Yet over his shoulder, through a gap, we glimpse a fragment of roofline: ordinary city life still ticking beyond the trap. Above, the sky is iron-grey but not entirely dead; a faint ribbon of blue lingers, hinting that in Brussels—still outside the camps—Nussbaum carried a shred of unspent optimism.

His eyes register fear, but the act of painting proclaims defiance: he does not conceal the yellow star, he monumentalises it. With palette clenched like a manifesto, he eternalises the very label meant to erase him. In the hopeless geometry of 1943, this portrait is the most radical gesture he could make: “I am here, I see myself, I will not vanish in silence.”

What the painting doesn’t show is what came next.
In 1944, hiding in Brussels, Felix was betrayed—snitched on by an informer.

He was arrested on June 20th, 1944 and deported on the last train to Auschwitz.

He did not survive.

Contrast that canvas with his 1927 Self-Portrait with Green Hat.

Self-Portrait with Green Hat, Felix Nussbaum, 1927

There, the twenty-three-year-old faces us in a pale blue shirt, crisp white jacket, and a flamboyant emerald hat tilted just so. The palette is sunlit—creamy background, optimistic greens—yet his eyes are steady, almost steely. This isn’t Dali-esque eccentricity for its own sake; it is a young painter who understands the world and decides to gild it with colour. His skin is warm, healthy, radiant—flesh that breathes and blushes—so unlike the pallid, tight-lipped ghost we saw earlier in the 1943 self-portrait. The hat belongs to a free young man, not a prisoner. You meet Felix Nussbaum, the man: grounded, ambitious, delighting in pigment.

Sixteen years later the hat is gone, replaced by a yellow star; the creamy wall by a slab of prison grey. The earlier painting declares, “Here I am, and colour is my freedom.” The later work answers, “This is what remains when a society refuses to see the man and sees only the tag.” Side by side, the two portraits are before-and-after X-rays of Europe’s moral collapse.

I wrote this as I was sitting by his 1943 self-portrait:

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Felix, nice to meet you.
Although I suspected you would prefer not to,
We meet right in front of your portrait with the yellow badge.
I felt a bit like your portrait today due to the encounter with that person.

In your time,
It was of course much more terrible.
You died, murdered in Auschwitz. And me?
Some man tailed me...
They sent you on a train to Auschwitz,
I took a bus to your museum.

I feel we have something in common.
We both loved Germany.
The German language in particular.
We both wandered among the Gentiles.
We both pursue art.
You, even in your darkest days, chose the brush.
If only the same for me.

I can imagine what you would say to me now.
How you would react
When I told you that I'm wandering here in your city,
Speaking your language,
And still encountering the same "phenomenon."
I still have to hide my identity,
In the same city,
In the same country.
True, perhaps these are different people,
A minority,
But the same state,
The same Osnabrück.

Felix,
How well you would have fit in Tel Aviv.
That's our place.
This becomes clearer to me each day I'm here in Europe.
I think you would agree,
But perhaps not.

The biggest difference between us is that you had a red card,
A yellow badge.
Me:
A blue passport.

Thank you Felix.

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Portrait of the Artist’s Father

Portrait of the Artist’s Father, Felix Nussbaum, 1927

Before the hat, before the star, there was Philipp Nussbaum—German patriot, First-World-War veteran, prosperous steel-trader, pillar of Osnabrück’s middle class. In Felix’s 1927 canvas, he is every inch the confident bourgeois dandy: crisp white collar framing a boldly striped green-and-pink suit, a flashy tie, cigarette angled just so, boutonnière punctuating the lapel, a cane resting at the ready. Even his fedora tilts with flair. Behind him hangs a painted vista of Osnabrück by his son— a city within a painting inside the museum that now bears the family name.

Colour is everywhere: the colourful orange tie, the warm flesh tones, the background’s cool aquamarine. Father and son share the same taste for chromatic bravado. Yet Philipp's direct gaze—steady, mildly wrinkled, world-wise—grounds all this flourish in reality; this is not frivolity but lived assurance. This is a man who fought for Germany, prospered in peace, loved smoke, style, and life itself.

A dozen years later, that stylish cane would reappear in Felix’s later canvases like a ghost-memory of the father who never made it to safety. Philipp and his wife Rahel were seized in hiding, deported via Westerbork, and murdered in Auschwitz. In 1927, though, the future still looks stable; the portrait glows with optimism.

Set this image beside the self-portrait with the yellow star, and the moral descent is unmistakable: from a father whose identity is draped in colour and civic pride to a son whose individuality has been reduced to a badge. Two generations, one palette drained of hope.

The Refugee

The Refugee, Felix Nussbaum, 1939

A decade after the jovial Father and four years before the skeletal orchestra, Nussbaum paints a single, shrunken figure in a stripped-bare room. He titles it The Refugee and signs the date: 1939—by then, he had already been living in Brussels for several years, having fled Germany after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.

A vast cream-white table slices the composition on a brutal diagonal, its near edge jutting toward us like a plank. It dominates the room the way bureaucracy now dominates his life—documents, borders, petitions, denials. The man (surely Felix himself) sits inexplicably at the table’s extreme far corner, almost beside rather than at it, head buried in his hands, body crushed into the angle of two walls. He owns no centre here.

On the tabletop stands a globe, turned so Europe is front-and-centre, casting an outsized shadow that falls across the blank surface and nudges the refugee further into the corner. Geography itself has become an obstacle. Next to the figure, on the floor, lies a walking-stick and hat—objects we recognise from Philipp’s portrait. The cane evokes Philipp—still clinging to Germany in 1939, unaware that his flight would end not in refuge but in a cattle-car to Auschwitz.

The palette is already tunnelling into the browns of The Triumph of Death, yet two slender notes of persistence intrude: through a crumbling archway we glimpse a strip of pale sky and a pair of birds, and beyond the window a leafless tree lifts its branches, suggesting that spring is only postponed, not annulled. Hope is reduced to architectural punctuation, but it has not vanished.

Here, then, is the hinge of Nussbaum’s story:

• The exuberant greens and pinks of the 1920s lie behind him.

• The apocalyptic skeletons wait ahead.

• In between sits a refugee, exiled from the world, measuring the distance between what was and what will be.

The cane, the globe, the claustrophobic table—all convey the same message: there is no seat for him at Europe's banquet. But even in this moment of dread, he chooses the brush; the act of painting is still an act of possession. Soon he will turn the music of civilisation into a danse macabre, yet first he records the silence—one man, one room, one vanished homeland.

I turned a corner, unsure if I was even meant to. In Daniel Libeskind’s building, direction is never given freely. It unfolds with tension. Hallways run off at brutal diagonals. There is no straight chronology—only fragments, choices, interruptions. And perhaps that’s the point.

The 1930s were a decade of doubling back, of confusion, of false reprieves. Nussbaum’s art darkens here, yes—but not yet completely. There are still faces. Still light. Still symbols that resist fate.

In this building, like in those years, one still believes there might be a door leading out.

The Triumph of Death?

The Triumph of Death, Felix Nussbaum, 1944

In a relentlessly brown, scorched-earth panorama—part history painting, part nightmare—Nussbaum assembles a macabre orchestra. Skeletons thrash at a violin, kettledrums, trumpet, clarinet: music as rattle and dirge. Beneath their bony feet lie the relics of a civilisation that once defined “enlightened” Europe—scientific instruments, measuring compasses, a telephone receiver, a nude study, scattered books, even a crumpled sheet of staff paper. All the tools of reason and beauty are reduced to debris.

Behind the ensemble, a wrecked car smoulders; furthest back, a city silhouette trembles under burning skies. Along the horizon, a row of vacant, mask-like faces stare out—some gaping, some expressionless, representing three stations of the same track: suffering, apathy, extinction. The skeletal trees—leafless motifs that haunt several of Nussbaum’s late works—drive the point home: no sap, no spring, only permanence of death.

Nussbaum paints an apocalypse with forensic detail and formal sophistication. Every object, every gesture, is legible; the brushwork is disciplined, never frantic. That control is its own accusation: the catastrophe is man-made, organised, orchestrated. Created while he hid in Brussels—just before an informant betrayed him and he was loaded onto one of the last trains to Auschwitz—the canvas feels inevitable and, at the same time, impossibly courageous. Given the circumstances, it is exactly the painting a man inside the Holocaust might create, and perhaps the only one Europe deserved to receive.

There is—against all expectations—a razor-thin sliver of humour here, a gallows-grin. Skeletons do not merely rattle: they tune, rehearse, take their places like seasoned professionals.

It is the old danse-macabre joke revived for 1944: Europe, so proud of Bach and Brahms, now entrusts its orchestra to bone and ash. Nussbaum’s irony cuts two ways. First, it satirises the killers: look how “civilisation” ends, not in glory but in a band of clattering buffoons.

Second, it is his private last laugh. He knows the score is stacked against him—yet by painting Death as a ridiculous ensemble, he steals a moment of sovereignty. It is as if he whispers, “You will erase my body, but I will frame your absurdity for eternity. One day, a traveller will stand here, still alive, still listening, while your empire is dust.” The humour doesn’t soften the horror; it enlarges it, reminding us that even on the brink, the artist could see how small his persecutors would look from the vantage-point of the future.

The Sunflowers

I stepped out of Libeskind’s angular museum and drifted into the medieval lanes Nussbaum once painted in cheerful pastels. Timbered facades, clipped hedges, pensioners on sturdy bicycles—Germany at its most postcard-neat. I ducked into a small brewery and ordered a Rampendahl Dunkel—dark, malty, with a gentle bitterness that lingers just enough to warm my chest. I caught myself smiling: so this is the town he loved.

The contradiction was almost embarrassingly clear. Twenty minutes earlier, I’d been staring at skeletons beating kettledrums; now I was enjoying lager in a square that respectfully flies banners for its lost Jewish son. Osnabrück both cursed him and now curates him. A city can pivot fast—history proved that—but today it felt disarmingly civil, even kind.

That tension—welcome and warning in the same breath—is the Jewish condition in Germany, maybe in Europe at large. It beckons; it betrays. What to do? Nussbaum’s answer was to paint until there was no colour left in the tube. Mine, perhaps, is to keep writing on delayed trains and café tables.

Perhaps what Nussbaum wanted, more than anything, was simply to remain in his homeland and paint sunflowers. Maybe that was his true ambition. Not to become a prophet of death, not to be etched into Holocaust museums or canonised by tragedy—but to live, and to paint, and to do so in colour. In another life, he might have been Germany’s Van Gogh. But the same state that once schooled him forced him to flee—to Rome, to Brussels, to anywhere that offered brief refuge—until even painting sunflowers became impossible.

Instead, he painted dead trees.

Instead, he created The Triumph of Death.

History did not allow him to be ordinary. It cast him as witness, chased him into symbolism, elevated him into a tragic visionary. And still he chose the brush. That, in the end, was his ‘crime’—and his greatness. He persisted. He answered the call of his time not with silence, but with art.

So I walked back toward the station, notebook still open, beer still warming the chest, and thought: Create until the end—because endings arrive on their own timetable, punctual or not.

And yet…

It’s not The Triumph of Death I keep thinking about.

It’s the sunflowers.

Sunflowers, Felix Nussbaum, 1928

Long before the brown skies and the yellow badge, Nussbaum painted sunflowers—bright, open, defiantly alive. That was his true desire: not to become a prophet of doom, not to haunt museum corridors with skeletons and silence, but to live in colour, to stay in Osnabrück and simply paint.

The Triumph of Death was the painting that history forced out of him.

The sunflowers were the ones he chose.

To end with the sunflowers is to restore his intention. To give back what was taken.

And maybe that’s the greatest honour we can offer an artist like Nussbaum:

To remember not just how he died, but how he dreamed.

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