The exhibition "A Disinheritance" at Haus am Lützowplatz (HaL) is the result of a sustained artistic engagement, begun in 1994, by the British painter and filmmaker Barbara Loftus (*1946) with the earlier life of her mother Hildegard, née Basch (1915–2007). Hildegard survived the National Socialist regime in British exile, while her parents and her brother were deported to Auschwitz on 14 December 1942 and murdered there.

For decades, the daughter knew little in concrete terms about her mother's childhood in Berlin-Schöneberg during the 1920s; about her upbringing in the initially upper-middle-class apartment at Lutherstraße 51 (renamed Keithstraße 14 in 1939); about the financial difficulties faced by her grandparents, Sigismund and Herta, during the period of hyperinflation and the global economic crisis; or about the increasingly severe social marginalisation of the Jewish population from 1933 onwards, culminating in persecution, deportation and annihilation.

It was only at the age of seventy-nine that Barbara's mother began, prompted by a chance situation, to speak about this part of her past. Since then, her daughter has devoted herself to this previously concealed family history with remarkable commitment and consistency. Barbara Loftus studied at Harrow School of Art from 1962 to 1964 and subsequently at Brighton College of Art from 1964 to 1968. Following a number of exhibitions and teaching positions, the memories of her mother that became accessible from 1994 onwards became the catalyst for new artistic approaches—such as archival research and documentary filmmaking—and at the same time the sole focus of a body of work that continues to this day.

A selection of her (re)constructed "memory images" was shown in 2013/14 at the Ephraim-Palais on the occasion of the thematic year Destroyed Diversity. Berlin 1933–1938–1945, commemorating the Nazi seizure of power and the November pogroms. The works exhibited there were subsequently acquired by the State of Berlin for the collection of the Stadtmuseum Berlin. A selection of these works now forms the core of the exhibition at Haus am Lützowplatz, supplemented by numerous new works, a film completed in 2018, and a new publication.

The concept for the exhibition was developed by Paul Spies during his tenure as Director of the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, in dialogue with Marc Wellmann and Barbara Loftus. The close proximity to Keithstraße, as well as the fact that the exhibition spaces at Lützowplatz are located in a residential building that remained in Jewish ownership until 1938, constituted the central, meaning-generating points of reference.