Julius Posener

Who was Julius Posener?

Julius Posener was a German architectural historian, author and higher education teacher.

Coming from a bourgeois-Jewish background, son of the painter Moritz Posener and a daughter of the real estate developer Oppenheim, Julius Posener grew up in the middle-class environment in the architecturally stimulating Berlin villa colony Lichterfelde-West. His parents had built themselves a villa in the English country home style there as founders of progressive architecture. This environment had lastingly formed him from his own statement:

"I lived in Germany, the best country that there is, the best villa suburb, in the best house with the most beautiful garden wide and far ... When I recited to myself in the evenings before going to bed, I was content with the world and loved God so gratefully"

Posener's way of life and activity would be formed strongly through the break of the felt ideal and the succeeding Third Reich. He studied Architecture from 1923 to 1929, under among others Hans Poelzig, at the Technischen Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenberg.After his studies, he was active among others in the office of Erich Mendelsohn in Berlin and lived temporarily also already in Paris. He fled there after the 1933 power struggle of the Nazis. Posener emigrated to Palestine in 1935, he registered voluntarily for the British Army and would be naturalized in 1946. After the war, he taught in London and in Kuala Lampur from 1956. He followed the call for the teaching position for Building history at the Berlin Higher Education for Building Arts and taught there until 1971.