Ludwig Italiener

Ludwig Italiener was born in Gdansk on October 18, 1855. He had four brothers, his father Isidor Italiener (1797 - 1893) was a wood broker. The family moved from Danzig to Berlin.
Here Ludwig married Anna Rothstein (1864 - 1928), they had three children. Ernst (1894 - 1916), Karl (1889 - 1943) and Käthe (1896 - 1999).
Music played an important role in the Italien family. As a 4-year-old, Karl serenaded his mother on her birthday with "Der kleine Haushalt" ("The Little Household"), which his father had composed to the tune of a ballad by Carl Loewe. A year later, his father had written a little poem, which he sang for his birthday to another melody by Loewe. Sister Käthe "had" to take over the piano lessons a few years later, which brother Karl was not allowed to continue because of bad school grades, but which had already been paid for.
Little is known about Ludwig and the time before the First World War and afterwards in the 1920s.
Ludwig Italiener was a member of the Masonic Lodge Germania zur Einigkeit since 1893. His son Karl also became a lodge brother there.  A lodge directory from 1929/30 describes his profession as a merchant, and his home was at Reichskanzlerplatz 4 - today's Theodor-Heuß-Platz - in Charlottenburg. His business address was at Scharrenstrasse 16 on the Gertraudenbrücke in Berlin Mitte. He was an Honorary Master of the Chair and a member of the Honorary Council of his Lodge. He must also have been a wealthy man, because in an account book of the Germania, which is in the Secret State Archives in Dahlem, a "Julius Brodnitz and Ludwig Italiener Foundation" is listed with 100,000 RM.
His grandson Fred Beutler, who is 93 and living in the U.S. in 2019, described his grandfather's profession as a lumber dealer and real estate agent. He remembers him as a particularly warm-hearted man who loved to play with his grandchildren.
His wife Anna had already died in 1928, and his son Ernst had been killed in the First World War. Ludwig's son Karl lived in exile in Holland and his daughter Käthe emigrated with her husband and his beloved grandchildren to Milwaukee in 1935. He was left alone in Berlin, and his grandson still remembers the man crying as he said goodbye at the train station.
In the last years of his life he lived in a Jewish old people's home at Klopstockstr. 58 in the Hansaviertel. There the Jewish community owned a house, which before 1933 had housed a school and a middle-class kitchen of the Jewish community. After 1933 it was apparently used as an old people's home.

Ludwig Italiener died on November 17, 1941 in the Jewish Hospital in Wedding. On November 22, 1941, his son Karl wrote from exile in Holland to his sister Käthe Beutler in Milwaukee that he had learned of his father's death from a distant relative. At first, she found him a few more times in the old people's home in "sufficient health". But due to the lack of food and poor medical care for the Jewish population, his health had deteriorated so much that he had to be hospitalized. "Under other circumstances he could certainly have lived a few more years, but in this way his strength always diminished until the clock ran out completely," his son wrote.
The following year Karl Italiener was arrested in Holland and deported to Mauthausen, where he was murdered on October 7, 1942.