Felix Nussbaum was born in Osnabrück in 1904 into a prosperous Jewish merchant family. He became a painter, studied in Berlin and Hamburg, and was travelling in Italy on a fellowship when Hitler came to power in 1933 — which meant he could not go home. He spent the following decade moving between Belgium, France, and Spain, painting obsessively from hiding, before being arrested in Brussels in 1944 and deported. He was murdered at Auschwitz weeks before the liberation of the camp, aged forty.
The museum dedicated to his work was designed by Daniel Libeskind and opened in 1998. Libeskind built it as an extension to the existing Cultural History Museum using deliberately disorienting geometry: narrow corridors, tilted floors, angular spaces that offer no comfortable resting point. The windows, by design, never look directly at the sky — you see only walls, trees, or other surfaces, never open horizon. The effect is unsettling in a way that feels appropriate rather than heavy-handed. The paintings themselves are extraordinary: self-portraits in hiding, images of crowds and displacement, work that became steadily darker and more urgent as the years in exile continued.