This year's one-room exhibition focuses on Martha Liebermann, whose death anniversary will be 80 in 2023. Martha was considered reserved in public and an alert mind in private, and there also a sharp critic of her husband's art. She was an accomplished hostess, involved in the Jewish community and charitable causes. She accompanied Max through the difficult early stages of his career, his success as Secession and Academy president, and into the difficult years of the Nazi dictatorship. Max Liebermann died already in 1935, but Martha felt all the repressive measures to which Jewish citizens were exposed. She lost her respected social position, her two houses, all her possessions were gradually confiscated and finally her life was threatened. Despite support from Sweden and Switzerland, she was not granted an exit permit and evaded deportation by committing suicide on March 10, 1943.

The exhibition focuses on two portraits of the Liebermann couple made by the Swede Anders Zorn (1860-1920) in the 1890s. Zorn was good friends with Liebermann, who brought him to the Berlin Secession and later helped him become a member of the Royal Academy of Arts. His portrait of Martha was commissioned by Max Liebermann, who felt unable to do his wife justice in terms of painting. in the painting, Martha confronts us as an elegant, self-confident lady of the house. Max Liebermann is also portrayed by Zorn as a private man in bourgeois society dress, not as a painter.

Martha took the two Zorn paintings with her in 1935 when she moved from Pariser Platz to Graf-Spree-Strasse. At that time, Martha Liebermann could not have known what role these paintings would play in her futile efforts to leave Nazi Germany.

With the one-room exhibitions, the Brandenburg Gate Foundation complements its permanent presentation Liebermann's World, which is dedicated to Max Liebermann's life, work, and his house on Pariser Platz. In a condensed form, Liebermann's personal and private networks and their artistic reverberations are illuminated on the basis of a few works. in 2019/20, the first edition was dedicated to Theodor Fontane, followed by Richard Dehmel in 2022.