Stumbling Stones in Chemnitz
Alice Glaser
Alice Glaser, née Wertheimer
Born: 30 June 1893
Died: after 14 November 1941
Godparents: Classes Holunder and Lärche of the Montessori School Chemnitz
Place of installation:
Clara-Zetkin-Straße 1Stumbling stone laying on:
5 December 2019
Life path
Alice Glaser came from a respected merchant family in Chemnitz. Her parents were Abraham Wertheimer and Rosalie Lindenfeld. She had a younger sister, Flora. Her father was co-owner of the fashion house Gebr. Wertheimer on Johannisplatz, which was founded in 1889. Her father died in December 1912.
Alice, who graduated from the Städtische Höhere Mädchenschule, grew up in a world of the latest fashion creations from Berlin, Paris and Vienna. Through her mother, she developed an early appreciation of art and education. On her 25th birthday, Alice Glaser married the doctor, social hygienist and staunch social democrat Dr Kurt Siegfried Glaser (1892-1982) from Zittau. In June 1919, the couple moved to Berlin, where their only daughter Marianne was born on 4 January 1922. In June 1922, the couple moved to Chemnitz, where Adolf Wassermann, Alice's brother-in-law, had developed the fashion house into one of the most impressive of its kind in Saxony. Her husband settled in the city centre as a specialist for skin and venereal diseases. The marriage ended in divorce on 6 November 1928.
Alice Glaser was one of the women who founded a local branch of the Jewish Women's Association in 1925. In this capacity, she was instrumental in the founding of the first Jewish kindergarten in the city, which took place in February 1927.
As early as March 1926, she had held talks with the city's Youth and Welfare Office about the creation of a private kindergarten in which the educational methods of the Italian reform pedagogue Maria Montessori, based on the image of "the child as the master builder of himself", were to be applied. On 20 April 1926, the self-confident woman spoke about the kindergarten project at a meeting of the Women's Association.
At the end of 1926, Alice Glaser returned to Berlin with her daughter Marianne. In 1928, she began studying at the Bauhaus in Dessau. She then worked as a window dresser in Berlin. A few weeks after the November pogrom in 1938, she was able to take her daughter to safety in Argentina, where she later married a rabbi. On 14 November 1941, Alice Glaser was deported to the Minsk ghetto and murdered there. She was 48 years old.
Stumbling Stones in Chemnitz
It is a project against forgetting: stumbling stones have been laid in Chemnitz every year since 2007.
Embedded in the pavement, the memorial stones commemorate the tragic fates of fellow citizens who were persecuted, deported, murdered or driven to their deaths during the National Socialist regime.
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