Maxmilian (Maxim) Johann Monter (Morgenstern)

Architect and painter. Born into a large Jewish family, in 1903 he changed his original surname from Morgenstern to Monter and also began to use a shortened version of his first name, Maxim. Attended upper secondary school and the German Technical University in Prague. After graduation, he spent 1888–1894 working as a painter and architect in Žatec, Munich and near Lake Constance. In 1894–1895 he was a teaching assistant at the Department of Architecture of Prague’s German Technical University, and in 1895–1904 he taught at the state technical school in Czernowitz (Chernivtsi), the historical provincial capital of Bukovina, where he designed several important buildings, among them a town house with the Café Habsburg (1898). In 1904 he started as a professor at the German state technical school in Brno. As a painter, he exhibited oil paintings and watercolours at exhibitions by the Mährischer Kunstverein (Moravian Art Association). As an architect, he published his works in Der Architect, Der Bautechniker, Wiener Bauindustrie-Zeitung and Deutsche Bauhütte. In Brno, he collaborated with the builders Josef Jelinek and especially Adolf Bacher. He designed numerous apartment buildings for parcels made available by the redevelopment of downtown Brno, thus contributing significantly to defining the new face of the city. Shortly after being transferred to the state technical school in Vienna’s first district (in 1910), he left Brno for Vienna, where he lived and worked for several more decades. Because of his Jewish background, he and his wife were deported to the Terezín (Theresienstadt) concentration camp, where he died on 2 October 1942. Monter’s architectural oeuvre, which stylistically straddled the line between late historicism and Art Nouveau, introduced elements of German (especially Munich) architecture into Brno of the first decade of the 20th century.

Pavla Cenková 

Architect
Maxmilian (Maxim) Johann Monter (Morgenstern)

Date of birth
23. 3. 1865 Kostelec nad Labem

Deceased
2. 10. 1942 Terezín