Komárom

Komárom was György Rauscher’s home city from 1903 onward. His family settled there when he was a year old, he returned to it through his career for the months when he painted most freely, and he was buried in its Jewish cemetery in 1930.

The family’s town

The Rauschers moved to Komárom in 1903, when the painter’s father took up a medical practice there (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 5). The family belonged to the town’s Jewish professional bourgeoisie: the father a physician and later honorary chief municipal medical officer, the mother the keeper of a cosmetics salon in the family house on Deák Ferenc utca.

The maternal Milch family were Komárom timber merchants and collectors, and the writer Zsolt Béla, a distant kinsman, came from the same milieu (see /sitters/zsolt-bela).

Where he worked

Even when his studies and exhibitions drew him to Budapest, Berlin, and Paris, Rauscher described Komárom as the place of his “artistic recharge.” He spent his summers there, working in the family’s studio at the Beöthy villa on Erzsébet sziget.

His burial, and the community’s fate

Rauscher was buried in the Komárom Jewish cemetery on 5 October 1930 (/bibliography#magyarorszag-1930-10-07). The Jewish community that had been the world of his childhood was deported in 1944, and his parents were among those murdered at Auschwitz; that history is held on the /holocaust-memorial. The 2024 Töredékek exhibition at the Komárom Menház marked the eightieth anniversary of the deportation (see /exhibitions/2024-menhaz-komarom-holocaust).

A note on the name

“Komárom” here means the historic town on both banks of the Danube. The Hungarian side, Dél-Komárom, is home to the Komáromi Klapka György Múzeum (see /klapka-muzeum); the northern side, Komárno in present-day Slovakia, is home to the Duna Menti Múzeum. Both hold and have shown Rauscher’s work.