For more than three decades, the British painter and filmmaker Barbara Loftus has been artistically engaged with the early life story of her German-Jewish mother Hildegard Basch. The exhibition A Disinheritance at Haus am Lützowplatz is the result of this intensive research and artistic project.

Only at the age of seventy-nine did her mother begin—prompted by a chance situation—to speak with her daughter, who was born in England in 1946, about a previously suppressed part of her past. There was the Berlin-Schöneberg of the 1920s, and the upper-middle-class apartment at Lutherstraße 51, later Keithstraße 14, where Hildegard Basch grew up with her parents Sigismund and Herta and her brother Heinz. And there was the systematic exclusion of the Jewish population beginning in 1933, which ultimately led to the persecution, deportation, and murder of members of her family. The artist's grandparents and her uncle were murdered in 1942 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp; her mother emigrated to England in 1939 as a young woman.

The recorded memories of her mother form the core of an ongoing body of work by Barbara Loftus, developed across different media to this day. The exhibition at Haus am Lützowplatz builds on a presentation of her works in 2013 at Museum Ephraim-Palais, Berlin.

A catalogue with texts by Barbara Loftus, Marc Wellmann und Lutz Winckler will be published by Permanentverlag.