: Bedřich Fritta, Film and Reality, 1942
Pen and ink, 31,1 x 56,1 cm
© permanent loan to the Jewish Museum Berlin from the Fritta-Haas family, photo: Jens Ziehe

Two propaganda films were shot in the ghetto. This drawing refers to the first one, which was produced in October and November 1942 under SS supervision and directed by a prisoner, Irena Dodalová, whom the the mask girl depicted in the sketch resembles, with her facial features and curly hair.
The second, more well-known film, "Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film" from the Jewish Settlement Area, was made in August and September 1944. It was filmed in the ghetto after it had been "beautified" for a visit from the International Red Cross delegation. By then, Fritta was already imprisoned in the Small Fortress.

Phantasmagorias

In this group of drawings, Fritta works with the visual language of the fantastic and grotesque. He depicts the ghetto as a theater of death triumphant and the end of the world. The pictures are influenced by the iconography of the Flood and the Dance Macabre, and by the uncanny pictorial worlds of symbolism around 1900, such as the art of the Austrian Alfred Kubin.

Fritta sometimes also gives this surreal atmosphere to drawings that portray specific events or common situations. In Life and Death in the Yard, the grotesquely enlarged head of the figure in the foreground reveals the artist's vision of the uncanny and dangerously unfathomable aspects of everyday ghetto life. In Film and Reality, Fritta creates an eerie tableau by distorting the set of a propaganda film.

: Bedřich Fritta, Life and Death in the Yard, 1943/44
Ink, pen and brush, 53,2 x 81,8 cm
© permanent loan to the Jewish Museum Berlin from the Fritta-Haas family, photo: Jens Ziehe

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: Bedřich Fritta, Drum of Death , 1943/44
Pen and ink, 43,8 x 31 cm
© permanent loan to the Jewish Museum Berlin from the Fritta-Haas family, photo: Jens Ziehe

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: Bedřich Fritta, Tower of Death, 1943/44
Pen and ink, 46,8 x 33,8 cm
© permanent loan to the Jewish Museum Berlin from the Fritta-Haas family, photo: Jens Ziehe

Fritta's Tower of Death can be regarded as alluding to the tower of the camp headquarters, topped by a flag. In the basement of that building, there was a jail where prisoners were locked up and tortured.

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: Bedřich Fritta, Fantasia, 1943/44
Pen and ink, scratched crayon, 40 x 57 cm
© permanent loan to the Jewish Museum Berlin from the Fritta-Haas family, photo: Jens Ziehe

The extravagant figure raising her champagne glass may be read as the Whore of Babylon. She appears in the biblical Book of Revelation holding a golden cup and drunk with the blood of saints, as the embodiment of evil. In this picture, her saber and shako refer to the military history of the Theresienstadt fortress.

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: Bedřich Fritta, Fantasia (The Flood), 1943/44
Pen and ink, 38,6 x 54,8 cm
© permanent loan to the Jewish Museum Berlin from the Fritta-Haas family, photo: Jens Ziehe

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Bedřich Fritta
Drawings
from the
Theresienstadt
Ghetto

Phantasmagorias