Echoes of Exile: Moscow Archives and the Arts in Paris 1933-1945 9783110290653, 9783110290585

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Echoes of Exile

Contact Zones

Editors Lars Blunck, Bénédicte Savoy, Avinoam Shalem

Volume 2

Echoes of Exile

Moscow Archives and the Arts in Paris 1933–1945 Editor Ines Rotermund-Reynard

Publication was financed by

ISBN 978‑3‑11-029058‑5 ISSN 2196–3746 Library of Congress Cataloging‑in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.‌de © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston Photo on the title page: Otto Freundlich, Composition inachevée (Unfinished Composition), ca. 1940 (Detail) Typesetter: LVD GmbH, Berlin Printer: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen Printed in Germany www.degruyter.‌com

Acknowledgements First and foremost, my gratitude to Prof. Dr. Bernd Bonwetsch, founding director of the German Historical Institute (DHI Moskau) in Moscow, who awarded me a research grant which included organization of the international conference Wie das zweite Exil das erste zum Sprechen bringt – Moskauer Archive und die Künste in Paris 1933-1945 (How the Second Exile Gives a Voice to the First – Moscow Archives and the Arts in Paris 1933-1945). That conference took place at the DHI Moskau in June 2011, and the present volume can be called its “scientific harvest”. My gratitude also goes to the Zeit-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius and the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Stiftung, without whose co-funding the realization of this international, interdisciplinary project and book would not have been possible. I am also extremely grateful to Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Katzer, who became director of the DHI Moskau in 2010 and supported all aspects of the project with great humanity and understanding. My thanks also to Prof. Dr. Andreas Beyer, former director of the Deutsche Forum für Kunstgeschichte in Paris (DFK Paris), who very kindly offered me a place to work in his Paris Institute while I was preparing this project. And I am pleased to add that our Moscow conference was the first cooperation between the two sister institutions, the DHI Moskau and the DFK Paris, both members of the Foundation of German Humanities Institutes Abroad (DGIA), now the Max Weber Foundation. The final publication of this book is a result of the generous financial support of the International Music & Art Foundation, and I wish to express my very special thanks to Walter Feilchenfeldt, who made this possible. Once again, my thanks to Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Katzer (DHI Moskau), as well as Prof. Dr. Thomas Kirchner, current director of the DFK Paris, whose institutions co-funded the publication. On the scientific side, special thoughts go to Ingrid Schierle and Dr. Corinna KuhrKorolev, both former research fellows of the DHI Moskau, who from the very beginning encouraged the project and were of precious aid in getting it off the ground. The DHI Moskau team were ideal collaborators, and I especially thank Andrej Doronin for his always helpful advice and in particular, for arranging our informative and fascinating visit to the Special Archive in Moscow, led by its deputy director Vladimir Korotayev. I also thank my colleagues at the DFK Paris office, with whom I shared an exceptional moment of scientific inspiration. It was my good fortune to have worked closely with Isabelle le Masne de Chermont, current head of the Department of Manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and Didier Schulmann, director of the Bibliothèque Kandinsky and curator of the Musée National d’Art Moderne/Centre Pompidou. They served as advisers and friends in the preparation of the conference and as important participants in Moscow. And of course, I extend my deepest thanks to the authors of this book for accepting to meet together in Moscow, despite the often tedious administrative details involved, and share what turned out to be a very special interdisciplinary experience, not only

from the point of view of knowledge and discovery, but of friendship and ideas for future collaboration as well. For organizational work, special acknowledgements to Dr. Brigitte Ziehl, Alisa Kronberg, Wadim Tuschinski, Yevgeni Markov, Mira Kozhanova and Valerie Leimann, for scientific participation to Laurie Stein (whom I especially thank for the title Echoes of Exile) and for their warm-hearted reception in Moscow, to Irene Mikhaylina and Karina Airapetova. Lastly, I wish to express my thanks to Dr. Katja Richter and Verena Bestle of de Gruyter Publishing House for their collaboration, and to our translators Catherine Framm and Judith Andreyev. As the authors’ contributions were in both French and German as well as in English, it is thanks to the latter’s patience with detail that all has been harmonized in what we believe to be an interesting and varied, very readable whole. Ines Rotermund-Reynard

Preface This book is the fruit of the international conference Wie das zweite Exil das erste zum Sprechen bringt – Moskauer Archive und die Künste in Paris 1933–1945 (How the second exile gives a voice to the first – Moscow Archives and the arts in Paris 1933– 1945), which took place at the German Historical Institute (DHI Moskau) in Moscow, June 23–24, 2011. The aim of the conference, held in French, German and Russian, was to promote international discussion and basic research on art history during the years 1933–1945. It was made possible thanks to a cooperation between the DHI Moskau and the German Center for Art History in Paris (DFK Paris) and was co‑funded by the Zeit-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius and the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung. The idea was to bring together specialists in different historical fields, with different experiences in the art world and who normally did not meet or work together – specialists in national heritage despoiled by war, specialists in provenance research, art historians, specialists in exile studies, in Russian archives – and to suggest new research prospects emanating from these newly discovered documents. The diversity of participants (from France, Germany, Russia, and the U. S.) would enable both a deeper and broader perspective concerning the years between 1933–1945, a clearer, more authentic image of cultural repression before the Nazis actually seized power in France in 1940. And Paris was all the more important as it was the intellectual and artistic refuge for the majority of those who were against the Nazi regime in Germany. Prior to our conference only some scholars had the possibility of doing research in the archives. The way to Moscow is not all that simple: for many, the city itself is far away, and the consultation of documents in the Central State Special Archive requires time and funding. Only four authors present in this volume were able to undertake a longer stay in the Russian capital and plow through some of the files in detail. Fortunately,

Figure 1: One of the corridors in the storeroom, Central State Special Archive in Moscow.

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Vladimir Korotayev, deputy director of the Central State Special Archive, joined us at the conference and gave all the participants a chance to discover these treasures during an exclusive visit in his “house”. We were even invited to peek behind the walls for a glimpse of the archival storerooms (Fig. 1).

The Voice of the “Other Germany”… In the 1930s, Paris was the home of an entire “other Germany”. This was the first exile, that of men and women who, with the means available to them, fought against the politics of the Nazi régime  – intellectuals, artists, painters, journalists, historians, political thinkers, say nothing of those who were fleeing persecution because of their Jewish origin. Beginning in September 1939 and even before the German Army invaded France, a large majority of these German-speaking exiles, among them Austrians, Czechoslovaks and Hungarians, were arrested as “undesirable foreigners” and sent by the French government to French internment camps. As of June 1940, with the German occupation of Paris, the living quarters of these exiles were searched and their contents spoliated by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR, Rosenberg Special Task Force), one of the Nazi agencies responsible for looting cultural property in Nazi-occupied countries during World War II. These spoliated goods were sorted by the ERR into categories – art works, furniture, documents, etc., then stored in various places in Paris or dispatched to Germany, depending on how the occupant intended to use them. With the start of bombing raids on Berlin, all or most of the Nazi archives, including those confiscated from opponents of the regime, were moved further east for security to German-occupied Czechoslovakia. But at the end of the war, those archives were discovered by the victorious Red Army and transported to Moscow. Thus in 1946 the Central State Special Archive of the USSR was set up, and for decades, its existence remained unknown to all but a few officials of the Russian Secret Service. Only as of 1992, thanks to Perestroika, have those documents become accessible to interested parties. Still holding 593 fonds of captured foreign records, this archive has been part of the Russian Military State Archive (RGVA) since 1999. Despite various divisions and name changes since its creation (see article by P. K. Grimsted in this volume for further detail), for purposes of clarity, we use the shorter and more common name Special Archive throughout. Although our volume concerns only a very small part of the archive –  papers belonging to anti-Fascist exiles in France and those of the German Jewish art critic Paul Westheim in particular – we feel it is nonetheless essential to take a few moments to give the reader an idea of the singular nature of the archive as whole. In fact, the papers of three distinct groups are assembled side‑by-side in this archive, all of which was hidden away in remote castles or other supposedly secure

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places in German occupied territories. The first group is made up of a variety of documents from the organizational and administrative bodies of the Nazi government itself. The second is composed of documents spoliated by the Nazis and often of a private nature – papers belonging to Jews, Freemasons, and émigrés in general. The third group contains official papers from all the occupied countries, among them France, Holland, Austria, Belgium, Poland, Greece, etc. The majority of the files concern the years 1920–40. This singular mixture of documents reflects the despotic irrationality, the haste and fiendish activity of those years of human history. Hitler’s guest book is stored a few feet from the correspondence between the Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer, letters spoliated from Benjamin’s Paris apartment while he was fleeing France and seeking refuge in Spain. When Benjamin committed suicide in September 1940 in Port Bou in the South of France, thinking it would no longer be possible to escape the Nazis and the collaborating French police, the contents of his Parisian apartment had probably already been confiscated by the ERR. Again, perhaps only a few boxes further down we find eight daily journals written for Goebbels, and not far away, the personal papers of the English sculptress Daphne Hardy, wartime companion of the anti-Fascist writer Arthur Koestler and translator of his book Scum of the Earth, relating his experience in the French internment camps. In the same building had been stored the six linear kilometers of the French Security Directorate, restituted to France in the context of post-Perestroika restitutions, part of the second wave of restitutions after those of the Cold War period of the 1950s‑60s, when certain documents ‑often only a part of the holdings concerning a particular person or subject, probably for strategic reasons – were returned to countries friendly to the USSR – notably East Germany. Thus another feature of this archive, as the reader will discover in the following articles, is its almost chaotic disparity, the contrary of a definitive, immobile collection of documents. To this day, there are certainly a number of files whose very existence remains unknown to the public, alongside files and/or remnants of files that have been returned to their country of origin, and files whose restitution is in the process of negotiation. In addition, there are those that have been – again, perhaps partially – transferred to and from other Russian archives. Thus, the changing face of the Moscow Special Archive. Architecturally speaking too, the building itself has a strange history reflecting these dark years of human history. Originally, it was destined to house the archives of the gulag, and ironically enough, prisoners of the gulag were used to build it. Left unfinished at the end of the war, it was finally completed over five years time by German Prisoners of War and the Special Archive was placed under its roof in 1951. It was only the Cold War that gave this archive its special status of war trophy, which included the possibility of its being exploited in a political context as hostage material. It is what the Moscow archives tell us about Paris and the arts in the years 1933– 1945 that interests us here. Indeed, the city was tense hub of activity – a refuge for

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artists, intellectuals and political exiles, a wellspring of creativity in the visual arts and stubborn resistance to oppression, and above all, a central platform for the constant movement of art dealers and collectors crisscrossing from all over Europe and abroad, attempting, for the most part, to save in whatever way they could the art and artists of the “other Germany” from Nazi persecution and destruction. Much – and many – did not survive; thus the echoes that arise from the Moscow archives are all the more valuable in our effort to reconstruct an authentic image of those years.

Contributions Hélène Roussel, French Germanist and specialist in exile studies, presents a panorama of the German-speaking exiles in France as of the early 1930s, focusing on visual artists and their resistance to National Socialism. She offers us an overview of the writers, artists and art critics who sought refuge in France and describes how, by setting up a university, publishing newspapers, organizing art exhibitions and other activities –  they mobilized themselves in an attempt both to preserve the art and thinking of the “other”, or in the words of Heinrich Mann, the “better Germany”, one of honor, spirit and heart – and to continue to earn a living as independent artists. Yet the extraordinary hub of activity that was Paris at the time turned out to be not a refuge but a place of danger from which most were obliged to flee when the Germans drove into the city. Hélène Roussel follows the movement of the artists, photographers, art critics and their families from Paris to their final destinations, those who were fortunate to freedom and others to their death in concentration camps. Bénédicte Savoy, art historian and specialist in national heritage despoiled by war, approaches the subject of looted art from a historical point of view. The looting of artistic treasures has been a constant since antiquity and the loss of artistic and ritual objects is deeply rooted in the collective memory, particularly in the case of visual images, due to their emotional component. While emphasizing the “slow-healing wound of loss”, Savoy recalls the debates involving restitution – the two opposing cultural approaches of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the cosmo-political and national points of view respectively, an advocate of the former being Goethe, who saw no reason why artistic treasures should not be equally distributed. She also examines the notion of revenge for the spoliation of works of art: as bearers of a cultural identity, the loss of such objects can easily be exploited and instrumentalized for political or other purposes. The historical truth preserved in archives is therefore essential to the understanding of the human, social and cultural context in which a work of art emerged and consequently, to a fair judgment of to whom it might belong. In her passionate story of the Soviet Union’s “Trophy” Archives, Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, specialist in Russian archives and editor of the groundbreaking book Returned from Russia: Nazi Archival Plunder in Western Europe and recent Restitu-

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tion Issues briefly recounts her experience, beginning in the fall of 1990, involving the discovery and examination of the exiled archives captured by the Soviet Army in 1945 and kept secret for close to 50 years. In addition to a global history of what constitutes today’s Special Archive in Moscow, she describes events such as finding, in 1990, Soviet reports from 1945 about the Soviet discovery of French archives in a Gestapo research center in a remote castle of Czechoslovakia and orders by Stalin’s security chief Lavrenti Beria for their transport to Moscow in 28 railroad wagons. Focusing on papers related to the art world, she goes briefly into the activities of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, (Reich Security Main Office, RSHA), one of whose units not only plundered French government security agencies, but was charged with the “parallel and ironic function of preserving the archival and library heritage of those ‘enemies’ for sordid propaganda research and intellectual analysis”. However, since it was the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) that was responsible for looting the cultural valuables, in particular from French Jews later processed in the Jeu de Paume and sent to various repositories in Bavaria and Austria, so far at least, there is no evidence of French artworks among the trophy collections in Russia. After reviewing the whereabouts of other archives potentially containing information on plundered art and libraries, Grimsted details personal papers and collections of French books belonging to East European or Jewish émigrés now to be found in Moscow, Minsk, and Kiev and closes with a listing of papers belonging to owners of art collections that have been returned to France. Following Grimsted’s global view of the Moscow archives, Kerstin Holm, Moscow correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung interviews the deputy director of the Special Archive, Vladimir Korotayev, offering us a more intimate portrait of the life of this extraordinary collection of documents, its establishment by the Secret Service in 1946, its contents and restitutions, opening to the public along with the collapse of the Soviet Union, some of its more spectacular pieces, and the presence of so many millions of files that some remain as yet unidentified. Among others, Korotayev emphasizes the human interest element in files containing memoirs of Wehrmacht soldiers and Soviet prisoners of war, giving examples that on both sides, testify to inner conflict and dissatisfaction with their political leaders. He also mentions the use of certain files used as evidence in post-war trials of Nazi war criminals. The interview with Korotayev closes with the description of the secrecy of the Archive, a “microworld”, as he calls it, until it was opened to the public in the 1990s. The article by Isabelle le Masne de Chermont concerns the archive of the French police, the only exiled archive to have made the round trip Paris-Berlin-Moscow-Paris. A case study, the author’s search for information on the art dealer Paul Graupe led her to the dossier of Arthur Goldschmidt, one of Graupe’s associates, whose file records information of interest both to the specific case of the Paul Graupe Company and to the task of piecing together of the history of the art market between the two wars. French police files dealt with a wide variety of subjects: from gambling and criminal affairs to residence permits, visa requests, passports and expulsions, political

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activity and counterespionage. Particular attention was paid to foreigners, essentially by means of name files, fed by extensive fieldwork. Obviously, such files were of great interest to the Germans who, as of 1939, supervised their constitution and in 1943, finally transported them to Germany from where, as related above by Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, they arrived in Moscow in 1945. As the author explains, the Arthur Goldschmidt file in the records of the French police is invaluable for art historians, as it contains information on the professional networks and family milieu of Graupe’s associate that enable them to further their research in other sources. Keith Holz, an art historian specialized in modern European art, is one of the four researchers to have delved deeply into the Moscow archives, thanks to a DHI Moskau grant in 2010. He looked closely through all the Westheim papers (Fond  602) and decided to focus on the painter Oskar Kokoschka and his artistic and political commitment at the time of the London exhibit “Twentieth Century German Art”, in 1938. The very rich correspondence files in Fond  602 give new insight into the artistic development of the free-thinking rebel Kokoschka, who selected four paintings for the exhibit (“not the most beautiful but the best”) that pictorially and specifically expressed his revolt against the Nazis and their notion of him as a “degenerate” artist. Holz analyzes in detail the artistic and political activities of Kokoschka, who, while remaining in Prague until 1938, became the public voice of all the exiled artists in Paris. In addition, Holz underlines the importance of Kokoschka’s personal network of three women who, working in the shadows, managed to save his and other artists’ works, which would otherwise have been lost or destroyed. My own contribution concerns the authentic voice of Charlotte Weidler, which can finally be restored thanks to the opening of Fond  602 of the Moscow Special Archive. Weidler was an art historian and adviser on North European contemporary art for the annual Carnegie Institute exhibitions and a close friend and confidante of the art critic Paul Westheim. Through her correspondence with Westheim “preserved” in the Moscow archives, we discover her activities as a kind of secret agent, informing Westheim, who had fled to Paris, of National Socialist social and cultural policies in Germany, material which enabled him to pursue his activities as an anti-Fascist art critic in the exile press. Among others, this research brings to light the importance of setting “communicative memory”, in the words of Aleida Assmann, or everyday, oral memories, alongside “cultural memory”, or the discourse of the archive, in the effort to reconstruct an authentic portrait of persons as of the time, and to accept the conflicts and contradictions that shaped their lives and the history of their era. Christina Feilchenfeldt, art historian and granddaughter of the art dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt, co‑director of the well-known Paul Cassirer Gallery, as a direct descendant of Walter Feilchenfeldt with exclusive access to as yet mainly unpublished family archives, brought to the conference new material to add to the picture of the complex network of painters and dealers of the period 1933–1945. The Paul Cassirer gallery was specialized in French Impressionists and various other European schools of art, giving

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it a unique position on the Berlin art scene. Feilchenfeldt recalls the history of the gallery after the death of its founder, Paul Cassirer, in 1926. The two remaining partners, Greta Ring and Walter Feilchenfeldt, together with Helmuth Lütjens, director of the Amsterdam branch, continued to manage the gallery and kept it alive throughout the years of economic crisis and the Third Reich. During those years, Feilchenfeldt, constantly moving between Berlin, Amsterdam, Zurich and London – where Grete Ring opened a new branch of the gallery in 1938 – crossing the paths of collectors, critics and artists in Paris, began to transfer his clients’ artworks as loans to various exhibitions, as a way of both saving the artworks and securing their owners’ survival in exile. The article by Christian Fuhrmeister, specialist in twentieth century art (history) and Susanne Kienlechner, free-lance researcher based in Munich, is an attempt to integrate the biography and works of August Liebmann Mayer into the history of the history of art. Mayer was a major art historian, curator, expert on Spanish and Italian old masters, and prolific author of scholarly works. The authors relate how Mayer’s notoriety was progressively undermined by anti-Semitic tactics, leading him to resign his university professorship and eventually emigrate with his family to Paris in 1935. His art collection confiscated, Mayer was nonetheless able to take his books and research material with him to Paris. However, after being interned in French camps as an “undesirable foreigner”, his Paris flat was seized in 1942 by the ERR and his library sent to Berlin as part of the “Sammlung Göring”. Yet very few of Mayer’s papers are to be found in the Moscow Fond 1399, which Fuhrmeister was able to consult in depth. Mayer’s tragic destiny is an example of the process of systematic deprivation of the rights of European Jewry, which in his case, ended in deportation and murder in Auschwitz. We hope these contributions will open the door to further research and collaboration in all fields of activity involving spoliation, restitution and the wounds of loss. Paris, February 2014

Ines Rotermund-Reynard

Contents Hélène Roussel German-speaking Artists in Parisian Exile: Their Routes to the French Capital, Activities There, and Final Flight – a Short Introduction   1 Bénédicte Savoy Plunder, Restitution, Emotion and the Weight of Archives: A Historical Approach   27 Patricia Kennedy Grimsted “Trophy” Archives in Moscow and the Art Scene in France and Germany under the National Socialist Regime, 1933–1945: A Brief Orientation   45 Kerstin Holm, Vladimir Korotayev Lifting the Veil on Moscow’s Secret Archives 

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Isabelle le Masne de Chermont The Arthur Goldschmidt File in the Archive of the Direction de la Sûreté: French Police Archives Shed Light on Paul Graupe & Cie (Paris, 1937–1939)   75 Keith Holz “… not my most beautiful but my best paintings …”: Oskar Kokoschka’s List for London   85 Ines Rotermund-Reynard The Art Historian Charlotte Weidler: a Lost Voice Speaks from the Moscow Special Archive   105 Christina Feilchenfeldt The Paul Cassirer Gallery (1933–1945): Berlin – Amsterdam – London 

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Christian Fuhrmeister, Susanne Kienlechner August Liebmann Mayer (1885–1944) – Success, Failure, Emigration, Deportation and Murder   139 Picture Credits  Authors  Index  Tables 

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German-speaking Artists in Parisian Exile: Their Routes to the French Capital, Activities There, and Final Flight – a Short Introduction In retrospect Until the mid-1980s, there were few scholarly studies on German-speaking artists in exile. The few that existed focused mainly on art in the resistance against National Socialism, and while recognizing the importance of resistance on the part of exiles, considered its role to be subordinate. Two studies by Richard Hiepe published in West Germany share that point of view,1 as well as a first study in East Germany on visual artists in exile by Harald Olbrich, published in 1965.2 Erhard Frommhold, in 1968, also saw the art of the exiles primarily as a form of political resistance and his attitude towards modern art was free of preconceptions, unlike the East German authorities of the time, who still considered it decadent.3 Then in 1983, the Berlinische Galerie in West Berlin held an exhibition devoted to visual artists in exile, focusing not on resistance by exiled artists but rather on their common bond based on their previous professional lives in Berlin.4 In East Germany, the influence of exiled artists, writers on art, and their organizations in France was first introduced in depth by Dieter Schiller in the volume devoted to France in the series Kunst und Literatur im antifaschistischen Exil 1933–1945.5 In 1977 at the University of Paris 8, Gilbert Badia founded the first research group for the study of the German exile in France from 1933 to 1945. This group contacted other researchers concerned with the same subject both in East and West Germany. Thanks to these contacts with the Academy of the Arts of the GDR, I had the opportunity, as a Germanist from the Paris 8 group, to examine the exile documents at the East German Central State Archive in the early 1980s. These documents had been

1 Richard Hiepe, Gewissen und Gestaltung. Deutsche Kunst im Widerstand, Frankfurt/M. 1960; Ri­ chard Hiepe, Karl-Ludwig Hofmann, Heidrun Schröder-Kehler, Widerstand statt Anpassung. Deutsche Kunst im Widerstand gegen den Faschismus 1933–1945, Berlin 1980. 2 Harald Olbrich, Zur künstlerischen und kulturpolitischen Leistung deutscher bildender Künstler im Exil 1933 bis 1945 mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Emigration in der Tschechoslowakei, diss. (type­ script), Univ. Leipzig 1965. 3 Kunst im Widerstand. Malerei Graphik Plastik 1922 bis 1945, edited and introduction by Erhard Frommhold, foreword by Ernst Niekisch, Dresden 1968. 4 Aus Berlin emigriert. Werke Berliner Künstler, die nach 1933 Deutschland verlassen mußten, exh. cat. [with texts by Eberhard Roters (founder of the Berlinische Galerie) and Albert Klein], Berlinische Ga­ lerie, Berlin 1983. 5 Dieter Schiller et al., Exil in Frankreich, Leipzig 1981.

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confiscated in Paris in 1940 by the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, ERR), and sent on to Berlin, from where the Soviet army then transferred them to Moscow in 1945; in 1965 they were partially returned to East Germany.6 Because of the unclear legal situation of such documents in the former GDR, the authorities dealt with them very cautiously. Visitors were only allowed to ask whether records existed for specific exiles or exile organizations. For example, a voluminous file existed for Eugen Spiro, who had been president of the Freier Künstlerbund (Association of Free Artists) in Paris, but no documentation existed at all for the art critic Paul Westheim. And although both men worked together closely in the Künstler­ bund, Westheim records in the Spiro file were rare. Thanks to recent research by Ines Rotermund-Reynard, we now know that these were kept back by the USSR and can be viewed in the Moscow Special Archive.7 Not only have existing documents been examined, but new documentation has also been undertaken: for example, in the context of a research project on cultural institutions and activities of the German exile community in France from 1933 to 1940, I filmed video interviews between 1982 and 1984 with artists who had been in exile in Paris, including the painters Albert Flocon8 and Jean Leppien, as well as the fine arts and fashion photographer Willy Maywald. My 1984 article “Visual Artists in French Exile and the Freier Künstlerbund” was probably one of the earliest writings on that subject.9 Since the 1990s, numerous research works have appeared focusing on various aspects of the German-speaking exile in France.10 Of special note are the studies by

6 Today they are in the Federal Archives in Berlin-Lichterfelde, with the exception of the Eugen Spiro papers, which can now be viewed in the archive of the Academy of the Arts. 7 Ines Rotermund-Reynard, Geheime Netzwerke  – Charlotte Weidlers Briefe an den Kunstkritiker Paul Westheim (1933–1940), in: Burcu Dogramaci, Karin Wimmer (eds.), Netzwerke des Exils. Künstle­ rische Verflechtungen, Austausch und Patronage nach 1933, Berlin 2011, pp. 261–276; see inter alia Rotermund-Reynard’s contribution in this volume. 8 Students interviewed Albert Flocon (previously Mentzel) in 1982 in the context of a video project on German exile in France in 1933–1945. The resulting video montage, Exil ’33, Paris ’82. Des émi­ grés allemands en France racontent (eds. Monika Bellan and Hélène Roussel), can be accessed at www.archives-video.‌univ-paris8.fr/video.‌php?recordID=​116 (accessed April 2014). 9 “Die exilierten bildenden Künstler im französischen Exil und der Freie Künstlerbund” was first published in French under the title “Les peintres allemands émigrés en France et l’Union des artistes libres” in: Gilbert Badia et al., Les bannis de Hitler. Accueil et lutte des exilés allemands en France (1933–1945), Paris 1984, pp. 287–326; then in an expanded German version in: Exilforschung. Ein inter­ nationales Jahrbuch 2 (1984), pp. 173–211. 10 See also Emmanuelle Foster, Les artistes peintres et graveurs allemands en exil à Paris 1933–1939, diss., Univ. Paris  1 1990; Otto Freundlich et ses amis, exh. cat., Musée de Pontoise, Pontoise 1993; Joachim Heussinger von Waldegg, Otto Freundlich: Ascension. Anweisung und Utopie, Frankfurt/M. 1987; Michael Janitzky, Robert Liebknecht, Gießen 1991; Joël Mettay, Le pas perdu. A la recherche d’Otto Freundlich, Céret 1993 (in German: Die verlorene Spur. Auf der Suche nach Otto Freundlich, Göttingen 2005); Peter Rautmann, Max Beckmann in Paris 1937 bis 1939. Kunst und Gewalt am Vorabend des



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Keith Holz11 of the relevant institutions and art concepts in Prague, Paris, and London, the dissertation in French by Nicolas Surlapierre12 on German artists exiled in France, the research done by Ines Rotermund-Reynard,13 and the book by Klaus von Beyme14 Das Zeitalter der Avantgarden (The Age of the Avant-gardes). But a comprehensive overview like the one completed for exiled musicians by Anna Langenbruch in 2011, has yet to be undertaken for the visual artists in Parisian exile.15

Art Critics, Writers on Art and Art Historians Exiled in Paris At that time, Paris was the destination for renowned art historians like Carl Einstein, Max Raphael, Max Osborn, but also younger, less well-known scholars like Karl von Tolnay, Klaus Berger, John Rewald, Aenne Liebreich, Luise Straus-Ernst, as well as noted art critics like Paul Westheim and Fritz Schiff, and the younger Herta Wescher and Fritz Neugass. Herta Wescher, for example, who later wrote the standard work on collage, wrote for Axis, the British journal for abstract art, from 1935–37.16 And as

2. Weltkriegs, in: Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch 10 (1992), pp. 12 ff.; Marie Gispert, “L’Alle­ magne n’a pas de peintres”. Diffusion et réception de l’art allemand moderne en France durant l’Entredeux-guerres, 1918–1939, diss., Univ. Paris 1 2006; ead., Clarté, matelots et bouillabaisse. La diffusion de l’œuvre de George Grosz en France durant l’Entre-deux-guerres, in: Cahiers du MNAM, no. 102 (Winter 2007–2008), pp. 10–33; Andrea Winklbauer (ed.), Moderne auf der Flucht. Österreichische ­KünstlerInnen in Frankreich 1938–1945, exh. cat., Jüdisches Museum, Wien 2008. 11 Keith Holz, Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague, and London. Resistance and Acquies­ cence in a Democratic Public Sphere, Ann Arbor 2004; Keith Holz, Wolfgang Schopf, Im Auge des Exils. Josef Breitenbach und die Freie Deutsche Kultur in Paris 1933 bis 1941, Berlin 2001. 12 Nicolas Surlapierre, Les artistes allemands en exil en France de 1933 à 1945. Histoire et imaginaire, diss., Univ. Amiens 2000, Lille 2003. 13 Ines Rotermund-Reynard, Die Realität des Visuellen. Der Kunstkritiker Paul Westheim und die französische Kunst, in: Hélène Roussel, Lutz Winckler (eds.), Rechts und links der Seine. Pariser Tage­ blatt und Pariser Tageszeitung 1933–1940, Tübingen 2002, pp. 129–144; Ines Rotermund-Reynard, “Dieses ist ein Land, in dem ein Kunstmensch leben kann.” Der Kunstkritiker Paul Westheim im Prozess der Akkulturation während der französischen und mexikanischen Emigration 1933–1963, bi‑national diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales Paris and Freie Univ. Berlin 2007 (microfiche-edition 2012). 14 Klaus von Beyme, Das Zeitalter der Avantgarden. Kunst und Gesellschaft 1905–1955, München 2005. 15 Anna Langenbruch, Topographien musikalischen Handelns im Pariser Exil. Eine Histoire croisée des Exils deutschsprachiger Musikerinnen und Musiker in Paris 1933–1939, bi‑national diss., Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales Paris 2011, Hildesheim 2014. 16 Herta Wescher, Die Collage. Geschichte eines künstlerischen Ausdrucksmittels, Köln 1968.

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 Hélène Roussel

late as 1940, Max Osborn, the oldest among them, was contributing to Münzenberg’s journal Die Zukunft.17 Osborn, a long-time art critic for the Vossische Zeitung, founding member of the Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Cultural Federation) in 1933 in Berlin, arrived in Paris in 1938 by way of Palestine, before finally making his way to New York in 1941. Paul Westheim, as a universally recognized art critic and writer on art, played a central role as a cultural mediator in Paris, not only between exiled artists, writers, journalists, and readers of the exile press, but also between exiles and French art critics, connoisseurs, and readers.18 As early as 1909, he had been on the board of directors when the Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller (SDS) (Association for the Protection of German Writers) was founded.19 In the 1920s, he had especially championed Expressionism in his journal, Das Kunstblatt. In Paris, he spoke numerous times at events of the newly founded SDS, and in 1937 he was once again voted to be on the board.20 Westheim made regular contributions to the Pariser Tageblatt and the Pariser Tageszeitung, with articles about French art, sharp criticisms of National Socialist art policies, and a chronicle of the Parisian art scene. He also published further essays on Third Reich art policies in other exile periodicals, such as Das Neue Tage-Buch and Die Neue Weltbühne. The art historian and collector, Wilhelm Uhde, a well-versed connoisseur of French modernism and naïve art, also played the role of cultural mediator between exiled artists and contemporary French art. Though actually not an exile himself (he had lived in Paris until 1914 and had been living there again since 1924), he did occasionally write for the exile press (for Die Sammlung, and later for Die Zukunft) and his book Von Bismarck bis Picasso: Erinnerungen und Bekenntnisse (From Bismarck to Picasso: Recollections and Confessions) was published in 1938 by Oprecht in Zurich, a publishing company that included in its collection books by exiles. With their writings, these experts on art inspired artists to reflect on the German and French art tradition as well as on new developments in modernism. Pursuing the kind of reflection on art that had developed in Germany, they played an important

17 Max Osborn (b. 1870, Cologne – d. 1946, New York). 18 In René Huyghes’ Histoire de l’art contemporain, Paris 1935, Westheim wrote the article L’impressionnisme et l’expressionisme en Allemagne, pp. 423–432; two other German authors contributed to the same volume: Fritz Schiff, La peinture de l’Allemagne inquiète, pp. 441–446, and Will Grohmann, L’art non figuratif en Allemagne, pp. 433–440. 19 See Paul Westheim, Ein Dreißigjähriger, in: Die Neue Weltbühne [Prag/Paris] 34, no. 46 (Nov. 17, 1938), pp. 1449–1452, here p. 1449, cited here from Ernst Fischer, Der “Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller” 1909–1933, in: Archiv für die Geschichte des Buchwesens, vol. 21, Frankfurt/M. 1980, col. 31. 20 Fritz Schiff, too, was one of the initiators of this new founding, see Alfred Kantorowicz, Fünf Jahre Schutzverband deutscher Schriftsteller im Exil, in: Das Wort. Literarische Monatsschrift 3, no. 12 (Dec. 1938), pp. 60–76.



German-speaking Artists in Parisian Exile 

 5

role in the aesthetic debates of the 1930s. These discussions included a focus on the defense of culture against destruction under Fascism and on the role of art and artists in social movements. Both issues were dominant topics in the art circles close to the Front populaire as well as the Kollektiv Deutscher Künstler (German Artists Group) and were the context for two seminal works by Walter Benjamin: Der Autor als Produzent (The Author as Producer) (1934) and Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) (1935). Closely related to this discussion was the Expressionism debate of 1937–1938, at the crux of which was the definition of Realism: though the Deutscher, or the Freier Künstler­bund was not involved directly, it did take part through one of its members, the art historian Klaus Berger.21 The role played in the organization’s discussions on the subject of Realism among others, by Max Ernst, Otto Freundlich and Max Lingner, who had already lived in Paris longer and joined the Association des Écrivains et Artistes révolutionnaires (AEAR, Federation of Revolutionary Arts and Writers),22 remains to be studied. Unfortunately, such research faces a formidable obstacle: due to war and the Occupation, all the archival material of the AEAR has disappeared. It should be recalled here that among the exiled writers in Paris there was also a competent art historian in the person of Anna Seghers, who in 1924 had completed her dissertation on the subject “Jews and Judaism in Rembrandt’s Works”.23 In 1938, she gave a series of lectures at the German Popular School in Paris.24 Entitled “Selected Chapters from the History of German Literature,”25 the course was given “a strong orientation towards art history.”26 In the same year, she appealed to the American Guild for Cultural Freedom in support of the young and penniless art historians Lothar Freund and Erich Lehmann-Lukas, requesting not only financial assistance but also help in getting their writings published: “Would it not be possible to provide art historians –  especially relatively unknown ones  – with other alternatives besides just financial support? Though their interpretations may vary greatly, the emigrated art historians all work in a common direction counter to what is now taught in Germany.

21 Klaus Berger, Das Erbe des Expressionismus, in: Das Wort. Literarische Monatsschrift 3, no. 2 (Feb.  1938), pp. 100–102. 22 AEAR: Federation of Revolutionary Writers and Artists. 23 Juden und Judentum im Werke Rembrandts. Netty Reiling completed her doctorate in Heidelberg under the supervision of the Rembrandt expert Carl Neumann. Her thesis was published in 1981 under her nom de plume, Anna Seghers, by Reclam, Leipzig, with a foreword by Christa Wolf. 24 This school, the Deutsche Volkshochschule, like the Freie Deutsche Hochschule (Free German College) in Paris, was founded and directed by Laszlo Radvanyi, Seghers’ husband, who, before 1933, had directed the Berlin Marxist School for Workers (MASCH). 25 Deutsche Volkszeitung, Apr. ​10, 1938. 26 See Anna Seghers to Fritz Erpenbeck, beginning of June 1938, in: Christiane Zehl Romero, Almut Giesecke (eds.), Anna Seghers, Ich erwarte Eure Briefe wie den Besuch der besten Freunde. Briefe 1924– 1952, Berlin 2008, p. 46.

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 Hélène Roussel

Could one not get them into closer contact with the appropriate specialized publishers?”27 Besides contributing to the exile community, Seghers made use of her time in Paris to write and be inspired by new impressions: her encounter with Mexican Muralism moved her to write the beautiful essay: Die gemalte Zeit. Mexikanische Fresken (Painted Time. Mexican Frescoes, 1947) and shortly after her return to Berlin, she memorialized the stained glass windows of the Paris Sainte Chapelle in her piece Glauben an Irdisches (Faith in the Terrestrial, 1948).28 Finally, the art collectors who commissioned or purchased the artists’ works played an essential role. Stephan Lackner, who supported Max Beckmann in this way, or to a lesser degree Wilhelm Uhde, in the case of Ferdinand Springer, are but two examples of collectors who helped to secure the material existence of artists in exile in Paris.

The Decision: Exile or “Inner Emigration”? The number of visual artists forced into exile on Hitler’s rise to power, as a result of discrimination, restrictions, and persecution of a political, ideological, aesthetic, and/or racist nature, is estimated to be “at least four hundred, probably five hundred artists.”29 If we include photographers, not all of whom considered themselves visual artists, then two hundred more people must be added.30 The exodus of these artists thus seems to have been less massive than that of writers and journalists (close to 2,500 or more) or professors and scholars (close to 2,000 or more).31 One main reason for this was that the decision to remain in Germany or go into exile had a somewhat different meaning for potential victims of National Socialist art policies than it did for writers and journalists. Compared to the written word, the greater ambiguity of expression inherent in painting or sculpture allowed for more circumvention and camouflage vis‑à-vis the Nazi authorities. Furthermore, painters, graphic artists and photographers, though forbidden to exhibit, were still able to fall

27 Anna Seghers, in a letter (in which the latter name is incorrectly written) of Oct. 12, 1938 to the American Guild in Paris, advocates support for both of them, ibid., pp. 52–53. 28 Glauben an Irdisches appeared in French translation under the title “Wrocław et la Sainte-Chapelle” in: Europe. Revue Mensuelle 26, no. 36 (Dec. 1948), pp. 131–136. 29 See Martin Schieder, Vaterlandsverräter und Formalisten. Vom schwierigen Umgang mit den (R) emigranten im geteilten Deutschland, in: Sigrid Hofer (ed.): Grenzgänge zwischen Ost und West, Dresden 2012 (Schriftenreihe Arbeitskreis Kunst in der DDR, vol. 1), pp. 10–26, here p. 11. 30 See Alexander Stephan, Die intellektuelle, literarische und künstlerische Emigration, in: Claus-­ Dieter Krohn et al. (eds.), Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration 1933-1945, Darmstadt 1998, cols. 30–46, here col. 31. 31 Ibid.



German-speaking Artists in Parisian Exile 

 7

back on other activities, often in the realm of the applied arts or commercial art. Some victims of the prohibition to exhibit works of art ceased all forms of artistic activity, often retreating to the countryside. Others attempted to escape the National Socialist sphere of power by going on study trips abroad. This was a possibility for a while, but after the war broke out they were drafted into the Wehrmacht – as in the case of Curt Lahs.32 Another difference between writers and visual artists was the different timing with which they were forcibly brought under control through the Nazi policy of “Gleich­schaltung”.33 Four years went by between the book burning on May 10, 1933 and the opening of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in July 1937, which set in motion the massive and final elimination of modern art and artists. That July, the “First Great German Art Exhibition” also opened, showing the art that from then on would be officially promoted. Thus in general, visual artists were affected by National Socialist policies somewhat later than writers and journalists.

Phases of “Gleichschaltung” Even before the National Socialist art policies took on their uniform anti-modern orientation, defamatory articles were appearing in the German press, and sanctions were taken against artists politically out of favor and their works. Photographers and photojournalists were faced with the Gleichschaltung of the press as early as February 1933 and many of the politically endangered artists – Simon Guttmann, Robert Capa,34 Walter Reuter, Erich Salomon, Josef Breitenbach, and Georg Wronkow – went into exile soon thereafter. By the law that went into effect on April 7, 1933, the Nazis excluded from public institutions all artists they deemed unacceptable, whether because of their oppositional views, their avant-garde conceptual language or their Jewish background (in the latter case, regardless of their aesthetic or ideological tendencies). Those artists were not admitted to the Reichskulturkammer (RKK) (Reich Chamber of Culture) founded in September 1933, which meant that they were essentially forbidden to work, even if the policy was not consistently applied in all places. Beginning in April 1935, art exhibits and fairs had to be approved by the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts, making it very difficult for artists politically out of favor to sell their works. In 1936, the modern art departments of museums were closed, museum

32 In 1933, Curt Lahs was stripped of his professorship at the Staatliche Kunstschule Berlin and travelled to France, Yugoslavia and Italy until 1943. 33 “Gleichschaltung”: Nazi term for co‑ordination by force of all aspects of society in order to establish totalitarian control (transl. note). 34 Robert Capa (i. e. Endre Ernő Friedmann), from Hungary, had been living as a political refugee in Berlin since 1931, before fleeing by way of Vienna and the Saarland to Paris in the autumn of 1933.

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 Hélène Roussel

holdings were subjected to “cleansing”, and actions against avant-garde and Jewish artists intensified: members of the RKK were obliged to have a certificate of Aryanism. This isolation of modernism and its defamation as “degenerate art” led to the confiscation of artworks, their sale abroad for next to nothing, and finally, in many cases to their incineration. The Jewish artists who stayed in the country suffered under the continually escalating Nazi anti-Semitic policies as well: from ghettoization (beginning in 1933, the activities of Jews were restricted to Jewish institutions) to discrimination (by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935) and the confiscation of their property through “Aryanization” (artworks included), and finally, to deportation and murder in concen­ tration camps.

How Did Artists React to the Nazis’ First Measures? Certainly not all the artists who were in danger beginning in 1933 – either as Communists in the banned Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists of Germany (ASSO),35 as Social Democrats or as pacifists – took note of the early signals and left the country. Reading their biographies, we remark that few went into exile as a result of sanctions. Contrary to what we might expect, relatively few ASSO members went into exile, despite the fact that many were pursued for illegal resistance activities. And only a small number came to Paris, such as Jezekiel David Kirszenbaum, Horst Strempel, or the graphic artist Fritz Wolff.36 The early exiles were mostly artists internationally known as anti-Fascist exponents of the Weimar avant-garde and who were in extreme danger, such as George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Oskar Kokoschka; there were also younger oppositional artists not yet firmly established in Germany and Jewish artists having understood the first anti-Semitic warning signs. These artists came for the most part from Berlin, an art metropolis detested by the Nazis, and much more rarely, from smaller art centers like Dresden. The first choice of those who decided to go into exile in 1933 was usually Paris or Prague, which became centers for political, journalistic, and cultural exile. Beginning in July 1938, after the Évian Conference on Refugees, London also became one of the main possible destinations, otherwise the United States, which in 1933 had already taken in well-known artists such as George Grosz and Bauhaus teachers such as Josef Albers.37

35 The Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler Deutschlands was founded in 1928 and banned in 1933. 36 The caricaturist Alois Erbach also seems to have come to Paris before settling in Mallorca. See www.hasencleverart.com/images/XXerJahre_Web_Download.‌pdf (accessed July 2012). 37 George Grosz had taught there in 1932 and planned to settle in the US for a longer period of time, which he did in January 1933.



German-speaking Artists in Parisian Exile 

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Why Paris? Because of its rich artistic tradition and multiplicity of avant-garde movements, Paris for a few years became the capital city for artists in exile. With its many art collections and collectors, gallery owners and auction houses, it was an important hub for the modern art market. After the turn of the 20th century, Montparnasse gradually took over from Montmartre as the artists’ quarter, thanks to the number of artists living there, the international character of the artistic community, and the presence of the most modern art movements. As a general rule, German-speaking exiles blended quite easily into this artistic topography. The figurehead of the group was the recently deceased Jules Pascin, originally from Bulgaria and who had become a mediator between the various Bohemian circles of Budapest, Vienna, Munich, Berlin, and Montparnasse, as well as an important representative of the École de Paris.38 Since the 1920s many German and Austrian artists (some in the early 30s) had settled in Paris, among them the painters Edith Auerbach, Max Lingner, Wolfgang Paalen, Lilly Steiner, and Viktor Tischler, as well as the photographers Germaine Krull, Ilse Bing, and Willy Maywald. A number of them had already become well integrated in the Parisian art world, as for example Max Ernst in the Surrealists group, Otto Freundlich in Abstraction-Création, and Ilse Bing in the avant-garde circles of photography. (Fig. 2) But due to the influx of exiles, these earlier “emigrants” got caught up in current “German issues” and were often solidary with the newcomers. Some who were better integrated were able to help needy colleagues (Willy Maywald, for example, organized exhibits in his studio for the deeply impoverished Otto Freundlich), and took part in their collective activities. Max Lingner and Max Ernst joined the Kollektiv Deutscher Künstler, which held meetings in Ernst’s atelier-apartment on rue Jacob, and also joined the Freier Künstlerbund. When war was declared in 1939, the common fate of the exiles befell these emigrants as well, even those who, like Jean Arp,39 Ferdinand Springer, and Hans Reichel, hardly thought of themselves as exiles. But they too were interned or forced to flee the German occupation.

Who Fled to Paris Between 1933 and 1939 and by What Routes? Artists representing all types of visual arts and all art movements came to Paris: in 1933, for example, the painters Eric Isenburger, Robert Liebknecht (Pl. I), Richard Lindner,

38 Jules Pascin (1885–1930) was the pseudonym of Julius Mordechai Pinkas. 39 Hans (Jean) Arp had already become a French citizen in 1926.

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 Hélène Roussel

Fig. 2: Ilse Bing, Greta Garbo Poster, Paris 1932.

Käte Münzer-Neumann, Julius Wolfgang Schülein,40 Horst Strempel, Günther Strupp and Gert Wollheim; the graphic artists Fritz and Else Wolff and Ludwig Wronkow, as well as Jack Bilbo,41 painter and graphic artist, Friedrich Hagen, writer, painter, stage director and actor, Hein Heckroth, painter and set designer, and painter and sculptor Peter Lipmann-Wulf. Fred Stein, having just completed law studies, also fled to Paris, where he became a fine arts photographer. Foreign artists who had been part of the German art world also came to Paris: the Austrian painter, graphic artist and caricaturist Heinrich Sussmann, the Dutchman Cesar Domela, the Poles Jankel Adler and J. D. Kirszenbaum, and the Russian Wassily Kandinsky. Only a few settled immediately in 1933 on the Côte d’Azur: the painter Hermann Henry Gowa in Nice and the Austrian painter and photographer Walter Bondy in Sanary. In 1936, Hedwig Dülberg-Arnheim, an older Bauhaus artist,

40 Schülein came with his French wife, the painter and graphic artist Suzanne Carvallo-Schülein, who had lived in Germany for over 20 years. 41 I. e. Hugo Cyrill Kulp Baruch.



German-speaking Artists in Parisian Exile 

 11

embroiderer and wood carver, came to Nice. As late as 1939, Charlotte Salomon moved to Villefranche-sur-mer.42 Their grounds for emigration varied. Some belonged to avant-garde movements that had been repressed in Germany, as was the case for Gert Wollheim, who was a member of Das Junge Rheinland. Others could simply find no possibility to continue their work in the Third Reich. Many artists of Jewish origin, or with Jewish family members, recognized the danger that had been building up starting in 1933. Finally, there were some who had been directly persecuted and managed to find their way to Paris after having been arrested: Heinz Lohmar and Günter Strupp in 1933, Hanns Kralik in 1934 by way of Holland, Heinz Kiwitz in 1937 via Denmark. None of the teachers from the Bauhaus, which was permanently closed down in April 1933, went into exile in Paris.43 But many graduates of the school did, above all the younger ones: in 1933, the painter and engraver Albert Flocon (previously Mentzel) with his Jewish wife Lotte Rothschild (metal workshop at the Bauhaus), the painter Jean (previously Kurt) Leppien with his Hungarian-Jewish companion Suzanne Markos-Ney (architecture workshop and weaving studio), the Lithuanian painter Moses Bagel (Moshe Bahelfer) and his wife Gitel Gold, the graphic designer Heinz (later Walter) Allner, the Polish architect, carpenter, stage director, choreographer and exhibition organizer Jean (previously Isaak) Weinfeld. A number of artists left Germany for Paris later on. In 1935, Paris saw the arrival of Francis Bott (at that time Frabo), Johnny Friedlaender, Erwin Graumann, Hans Hartung, Leo Maillet (previously Leopold Mayer) and Eugen Spiro; in 1936, Erwin Oehl, Arnold Fiedler, Anton Räderscheidt and the photographers Ilse Salberg (Räderscheidt’s new companion) and Erwin Blumenfeld44; in 1937 Heinz Kiwitz, Franz Willi Wendt and his partner Greta Saur; in 1938, Hans Bellmer, Gert Caden, Adolf Fleisch­ mann and Hermann Lismann. These artists, however, had been confronted with political, artistic, or anti-Semitic repression – many of them had lived clandestinely or had been for some time in concentration camps. Some exiled artists came to France by way of other countries, frequently involuntarily. Max Beckmann was an exception in this respect. He came to Paris from Amster-

42 See Charlotte Salomon, Vie? ou Théâtre?, exh. cat., Musée National d’art moderne/Centre Pompidou, Paris 1992. 43 See Isabelle Ewig, Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Matthias Noell (eds.), Le Bauhaus et la France. Das Bau­ haus und Frankreich. 1919-1940, Berlin 2003. 44 Erwin Blumenfeld had lived in Amsterdam since 1923 with his Dutch wife Lena Citroën, earning the family’s livelihood with a leather goods shop. At the same time, he made dadaist collages and drawings and gradually became a photographer, but was unable to establish himself there as an artist. After he went bankrupt he moved to France, where he had his first success as a fine arts and fashion photographer. In 1941 he fled to the United States, where he became famous. Millions of flyers of his 1933 Anti-nazi photo-collage of Hitler’s face (Grauenfresse) were dropped over Germany in 1943 by the U. S. Air Force.

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 Hélène Roussel

dam in September 1937, and again from October 1938 to May/June 1939, but due to the declaration of war, was unable to carry out his plan to move to Paris and spent the war years in Amsterdam.45 For many others, the routes they took to the French capital were determined by where they had sought refuge or from where they were being expelled: via the Netherlands (Hans Richter, Hanns Kralik), Switzerland, Italy (Heinz Lohmar via both of these countries), Yugoslavia, Luxembourg (Leo Maillet) or Spain (Wols,46 Raoul Hausmann). In the wake of the Spanish Civil War, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen fled Mallorca in 1936, traveling by way of Paris to Ascona. He was then expelled from Switzerland and in 1939 arrived in Cagnes-sur-mer. Meanwhile, Raoul Hausmann fled Ibiza in 1936, going first to Paris, then to Switzerland in 1937, from where he was expelled; he then fled to Czechoslovakia and finally returned to Paris in 1939. From 1936 on, many artists interrupted their stay in Paris to take part in the Spanish Civil War – among these were Walter Reuter, Robert Capa, and Gerda Taro, who went to Spain as war reporters. Francis Bott and the graphic artist Heinz Kiwitz fought in the Thälmann Brigade, while the art historian Carl Einstein became the spokesman for the Durruti Column. Gerda Taro and Heinz Kiwitz lost their lives in the Civil War. In 1936–37, artists began to leave Czechoslovakia, which was feeling pressure from the Nazi regime even before the Munich Pact, and sought refuge in other countries. Most of them, like Oskar Kokoschka, fled to England, but quite a few came to Paris: Francis Bott in 1936 (via Vienna, Prague, Yugoslavia, and Northern Italy), the graphic artist Johnny Friedlaender in 1937, or the engraver and writer Johannes Wüsten in 1938. Also in 1938, after the annexation of Austria, artists like the painter Georg Merkel and his wife Louise Merkel-Romée, Trude Schmidl-Waehner, and the graphic artist Bil Spira arrived in Paris. In the wake of the Munich Pact, many other German-speaking artists who had found asylum in Czechoslovakia now fled to Paris, as did the Czechoslovak artist Adolf Hoffmeister in 1939. And after the pogroms of November 9–10, 1938, Jewish citizens and artists fled Germany. Hermann Lismann, for example, arrived in Paris in 1938. Many who came at this late date stayed only briefly and withdrew to the countryside, frequently to the Riviera.

Asylum in France? The 1930s were years of unrest in France. The worldwide economic crisis had an effect on the art market, and the quick succession of governments caused abrupt changes in economic and social policies, which also had consequences on immigration and

45 See Rautmann 1992 (as fn. 10), pp. 12–14. 46 Wols is the pseudonym of Wolfgang Schulze. He came to Paris in July 1932 and in October 1933 travel­led to Spain. When he was expelled from Spain in 1935 and returned to Paris, his life in exile began.



German-speaking Artists in Parisian Exile 

 13

asylum policies. Asylum was still granted quite liberally in 1933, but in 1934–35 the authorities tightened immigration regulations and began expelling exiles (in 1934, the sculptor Will Lammert, for example, was affected by this and fled to the USSR). From May 1936 until approximately the end of 1937, the Popular Front government developed a more generous asylum policy, but as of May 1938 the legislative decrees issued by Prime Minister Édouard Daladier greatly exacerbated the situation of foreigners and for those exiles striving for permanent integration, Daladier’s France proved to be no more than a precarious way station. As a result, in the years leading up to the war, they increasingly became refugees. Moreover, along with the appeasement policy that by then prevailed, public expression by German exiles of opinions critical of the Nazi regime was not infrequently censored by the French authorities. Among the cases of censorship should be noted interventions undertaken on the request of the National Socialist government because of the exhibit Cinq ans de régime hitlérien.47 For these reasons and because of the failure to create a German popular front in exile, as of 1938 Paris gradually ceased to be an attractive destination for exiled artists, and many then left.48 While the Weimar generation congregated mostly in the region around Sanary (as was the case for Anton Räderscheidt and Ilse Salberg) and Nice/Cagnes-sur-mer, the geographic distribution of the younger artists seems to have been more random.49 To the majority of exiles, unlike the majority of the French, it became quickly apparent that the Munich Pact was not going to save the peace and that another world war was in sight. More than ever, they would need to find new asylum, outside of Europe. This was increasingly difficult, as in most countries, immigration requirements were becoming progressively more restrictive, a situation which was hardly improved by the ineffective refugee conference in Évian (July 1938). Commenting on the political climate in France in 1938, Stephan Lackner wrote: “Hitler’s emissaries were agitating against the emigrants.” Hence, “Mistrust of the refugees was spreading, the French were in panic-stricken terror of spies in disguise, and the result was fear of anyone who had a boche accent. And Max Beckmann did indeed have such an accent.”50

47 See Gilbert Badia, Heurs et malheurs d’une exposition sur le IIIe Reich (1938), in: Badia et al. 1984 (as fn. 9), pp. 261–286; Holz/Schopf 2001 (as fn. 11), pp. 123–145. 48 See Surlapierre 2000 (as fn. 12), p. 449. 49 Ibid., p. 450. 50 Stephan Lackner, Ich erinnere mich gut an Max Beckmann, Mainz 1967, pp. 74–75. Quoted from Rautmann 1992 (as fn. 10), p. 13.

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 Hélène Roussel

Germany Has No Painters? In 1933, this was the contention of the art critic Jacques Guenne, founder and publisher of the periodical L’art vivant.51 Of all the foreign artists in France, German artists were the most ignored, or else criticized. The revenge propaganda after 1871 had resulted in deeply ingrained anti-German sentiments and stereotypes in the minds of the French – prejudices which to some degree lived on between the wars. On the other hand, exhibits of German art at the Paris World Fairs and salons had received a positive welcome. But the devastation of the French countryside, of cities and edifices during the First World War again stirred up anti-German feelings in the post-war era as well. It was not until after Locarno that Paris gave German art any recognition worthy of mention.52 In the 1930s, such resentment and stereotypes were typical of rightist press campaigns, whose fierce offensive exploited the fear brought on by the world economic crisis and opposed anything in any way related to culture that was not “French” and even launched xenophobic and anti-Semitic attacks against the École de Paris. Simultaneously, French art institutions and critics often reacted with protectionist measures, forcing foreign artists to the fringes of the Parisian art market, already at a low point in those years due to the crisis. Thus, the situation that greeted German-speaking artists exiled in Paris was anything but advantageous. On the other hand, there were art critics and art review publishers like Waldemar George, Christian Zervos,53 and Tériade, who pleaded for a more appropriate evaluation of modern German art.54 Since the 1920s, Paul Westheim and Will Grohmann had been arguing along those lines in their articles in the French press.55 Here and there, in various French circles, initiatives, i. e. demonstrations of solidarity, sprang up in support of the exiled artists. Two exhibits of the works of German-­ Jewish artists were organized in the context of the Salon d’Automne 1933 and 1934 under the patronage of the French Comité pour la protection des intellectuels juifs per­ sécutés.56 And for the exhibit Freie deutsche Kunst in November 1938, the Freier Künst­ lerbund was provided with a gallery at the Maison de la Culture (the AEAR had been transformed into the Maison de la Culture in the context of the expanding Popular Front movement in March 1935, with the intent of bringing together intellectuals and

51 See Gispert 2006 (as fn. 10), passim. 52 See Friederike Kitschen, Julia Drost (eds.), Deutsche Kunst – Französische Perspektiven. Kommen­ tierter Quellenband zur Rezeption deutscher Kunst in Frankreich 1870–1945, Berlin 2007, pp. 12–25. 53 In his journal Cahiers d’art, Zervos published a critical essay on Nazi art policies: Réflexions sur la tentative d’esthétique dirigée du IIIe Reich, in: Cahiers d’art 11, nos. 8–10 (1936), pp. 209–212, and 12, no. 11 (1937), pp. 51–61. 54 See ibid., pp. 209–212. 55 See Gispert 2006 (as fn. 10), pp. 412–422. 56 See Roussel 1984 (as fn. 9), pp. 177–178.



German-speaking Artists in Parisian Exile 

 15

artists on a broader basis).57 Such initiatives sporadically contributed to heightening the French public’s awareness of exiled artists. But above all, these artists had to find their own ways of keeping their heads above water in the city of Paris.

Between Earning a Living and Creating Art The exiled artists were visual artists of all kinds. In Paris, besides their main artistic activities, most engaged in a variety of applied arts in order to deal with the difficult living conditions. They illustrated books (for example, Hanns (Jean) Kralik for Wolfgang Langhoff’s Moorsoldaten58) or designed book covers (as in the case of John Heartfield, Paul Urban, and Jean Leppien under the name of Lépine, especially for Münzenberg’s Éditions du Carrefour). They also designed advertising billboards and political posters, books, brochures, and documentary exhibits. Jean Leppien, for example, collaborated in the design of the exhibition of the Institute for the Study of Fascism (INFA) in 1935, Erwin Oehl in the creation of the Peace Pavilion for the 1937 Universal Exhibition in Paris, and Heinz Lohmar, Alfred Herrmann, Friedrich Hagen, Hanns Kralik, and Erwin Oehl worked on the Thälmann Committee exhibition Cinq ans de régime hitlérien of Feburary 1938, with Heinz Kiwitz providing linocuts for the accompanying book.59 Exiled artists did the graphics, layouts, and illustrations for both exile and French periodicals. Thus, Heinrich Sussmann designed the layout for the Pariser Tageszeitung; Max Lingner did illustrations for Monde, then for L’Humanité; Horst Strempel for Monde, Ce Soir, and La patrie humaine; Johnny Friedlaender, in 1938–39, for Marianne; and Fritz Wolff for the Pariser Tageszeitung, of which he was the publisher. Heartfield supplied photomontages for the Arbeiter-Il­ lustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ); Robert Capa and Gerda Taro did photo reportage for Regards, the French counterpart to AIZ; Hans Namuth for Vu; Gisèle Freund for Paris Match, Life, and Vu; and photos by Erwin Blumenfeld appeared from 1935 on in Photographie. Arts et Métiers graphiques, from 1937 on in Vogue Paris, and in 1939 he received a contract with Harper’s Bazaar. Heinz Lohmar designed the stage sets for the cabaret Die Laterne and both Brecht performances in Paris. While the artists were dependent on such work, their contributions were an aesthetic enrichment for the respective media and establishments, and the commissions they received for such projects helped many of them continue their independent creative work in exile. The artworks of very few were marketable in France, and at the time Paris was filled to the brim with needy

57 See inter alia Raymond Spiteri, Donald LaCoss (eds.), Surrealism, politics and culture, Aldershot (England) 2003, p. 145, fn. 68. 58 Die Moorsoldaten, 13 Monate Konzentrationslager. Unpolitischer Tatsachenbericht, Zürich 1935. 59 The album was published in 1938 under the title Cinq ans de dictature hitlérienne, Éditions du Comité Thaelmann.

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 Hélène Roussel

artists.60 Some also managed to scrape by doing odd jobs unrelated to their actual professions – Hanns Kralik, for example, who played a small role in Jean Renoir’s La grande illusion.61

Attempts at Acculturation and Visibility Most of the Weimar Republic’s modern art movements were represented among the exiles: newer as well older forms, ranging from Impressionism to socially critical Verism, from Expressionism to Abstraction, from the New Objectivity to Constructivism and Surrealism.62 But with physical distance from Germany, artists also developed a new inner distance from the German art world and a new readiness for cultural transfer and acculturation in the international context. On the one hand, dealing with the experience of persecution and exile considerably changed their imaginative world and their imagery,63 and on the other, their creative work in Paris took on new characteristics through exchange with the French art world. Thus we cannot speak of them simply as “Weimar in exile”, all the more so as the younger generation was determined to break with the conditions of the art world of the Weimar Republic and make a radically new beginning in Parisian exile.64 In Paris, the exiled Bauhaus students kept in close contact with each other, as well as with fellow students who had come (back) to Paris before 1933, such as the French painter Jacques Germain, the Hungarian painter and composer Henri Nouveau (previously Heinrik Neugeboren), and the photographer Florence Henri. These contacts, beginning prior to 1933 and lasting long after 1945, formed an international network of friends sharing similar aesthetic and philosophical ideas. At the same time, these artists established connections with exiled artists from other countries, as well as with French artists. They engaged in a fruitful exchange with the École de Paris, and at the same time continued the Bauhaus spirit in their own respective artistic work and imparted this spirit to France – a cultural transfer that lasted far beyond the year 1945. Since the exiled artists in Paris were confronted with both a large number of French and foreign artists in Paris and an art market much reduced by the economic crisis, it was difficult for them to become established in positions of recognition in the existing art power structure, or force-field, as Bourdieu would call it. Only a few managed to have a solo exhibit: Hans Reichel, for example, for whom Roger Bissière

60 See the account by Luis Ortega, Le chômage in: Journal des peintres et sculpteurs de la Maison de la culture, no. 1 (Jan. ​1938), in: Paris – Paris 1937–1957. Créations en France, Paris 1981, p. 52. 61 See www.nrw.‌vvn-bda.de/texte/0711_kralik.‌htm (accessed June 2012). 62 Surlapierre 2000 (as fn. 12), p. 61. 63 Ibid., esp. pp. 441–648. 64 Ibid., p. 61.



German-speaking Artists in Parisian Exile 

 17

organized three exhibits in the Académie Ranson between 1930 and 1936. The Pierre Gallery showed the work of Cesar Domela in 1934 and 1939, and in 1936 that of Wolfgang Paalen, whose work had already been seen in 1934 in the Vignon Gallery. In 1935, 150 photomontages by John Heartfield were shown at the Maison de la Culture.65 Robert Liebknecht had an exhibit in 1938 in the Jeanne Castel Gallery. The Billiet-Vorms Gallery showed the works of Max Lingner in 1933 and 1939, Anton Räderscheidt in 1937 and the photographer Erwin Blumenfeld in 1936; the Jeanne Bucher Gallery presented Erwin Graumann in 1938. Wolfgang Paalen had a solo show in June 1938 in the Renou et Colle Gallery. For Otto Freundlich’s  60th birthday, the Jeanne Bucher Gallery devoted a show to him in 1938, and he had a further exhibit in 1939 in the René Breteau Gallery. Georg Merkel showed his works in 1939.66 Wolfgang Schulze (Wols) had an exhibit of his photographic works in 1937 in the Galerie de la Pléiade. Ilse Bing und Hans Bellmer also belonged to the group of photographers shown at this well-known gallery. Many artists, however, participated in group exhibits or in salons: at the first exhibit of German-Jewish artists in the context of the Salon d’Automne 1933, Wollheim, Isenburger, Schülein, and Lipmann-Wulf, Edith Auerbach, Eugenie Fuchs, and Käte Münzer were represented.67 Eugen Spiro had been a co‑founder of this salon in 1903 and still showed many of his own works there.68 The Salon des Indépendants showed the work of Otto Freundlich in 1934 and again in 1935 and of Robert Liebknecht in 1937. In the Salon des Surindépendants, which promoted surrealist and abstract artists, Richard Oelze exhibited in 1933, Ferdinand Springer in 1936, Erwin Graumann in 1937, and Hans Hartung in 1935 and 1937. Hartung took part in the show De Cézanne à l’art non-figuratif, organized by Christian Zervos at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in 1937, and Cesar Domela participated in the exhibit Origine et développement de l’Art Indépendant in the same museum. François-Willi Wendt was represented in 1938 in the exhibit Point 38 par les jeunes in Galerie L’Équipe, and in 1939, Otto Freund­ lich and his partner, Hannah Kosnick-Kloss participated in the first Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in the Galerie Charpentier. For an artist on his or her own, the difficulty of achieving public visibility as well as the greater need for a network of like-minded people prompted the artists to form associations, be they of an aesthetic or political nature. Some, who had arrived before 1933, had already joined artist groups that were international in scope: Max Ernst, for

65 See Louis Aragon, John Heartfield et la beauté révolutionnaire, in: Commune, no. 21 (1935), pp. 985–991. 66 See Winklbauer 2008 (as fn. 10), p. 162. 67 Paul Westheim, Kameradschaft, in: Das Neue Tage-Buch 1, no. 20 (Nov. ​11, 1933), pp. 481–482. 68 According to https://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/ger086.‌htm (accessed June 2012).

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 Hélène Roussel

Fig. 3: Max Ernst, The barbarians, 1937, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY).

example, became affiliated with the Surrealists and participated in their exhibitions. (Fig. 3) Otto Freundlich joined the group Abstraction-Création in 1925, remaining a member until 1934. Ernst, Lingner, and possibly Freundlich as well became members of the AEAR.69 But exiles in the narrower sense of the word were also able to establish connections to these groups: as of 1935, Hans Bellmer showed his works in all the Surrealist shows even though he did not leave Germany until 1938. Cesar Domela joined Abstraction-Création and his works were frequently presented in the group’s eponymous journal. It was this group that Wolfgang Paalen, Hans Arp, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp finally left in 1935. Paalen then joined the Surrealists and together with Hans Arp took part in the exhibit Dessins Surréalistes as well as in the Exposition Sur­ réaliste d’Objets in the Charles Ratton Gallery in 1936, and in February 1938 in the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in the Beaux-Arts Gallery. In the latter exhibition, Breitenbach presented some of his photographs and produced a photojournalistic commentary on the show. Works by Hans Bellmer (1936), Max Ernst (1937), and Wolfgang Paalen appeared in the Surrealist periodical Minotaure as well as in Christian Zervos’ Cahiers d’art. In 1937, photographs by Erwin Blumenfeld appeared in the journal Verve, which was published by Tériade, the one-time publisher of Mino­ taure. Also in 1937, Cesar Domela, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Hans Arp founded their own journal Plastique. In addition to their integration in Parisian artist groups, the exiled artists also formed their own organizations, reactivating and extending their old networks from the time of the Weimar Republic.

69 See Holz 2004 (as fn. 11), p. 104.



German-speaking Artists in Parisian Exile 

 19

Under the Banner of the Popular Front: Joining Forces in the Kollektiv Deutscher Künstler The attempts of exiled artists to join forces and create an advocacy group seem at first to have been more modest and sporadic compared to those of the writers, who as early as the summer of 1933 had organized themselves with the newly founded Schutzver­ band Deutscher Schriftsteller (SDS, Association for the Protection of German Writers) in Paris: in June 1935, the Erster Internationaler Schriftstellerkongress zur Verteidigung der Kultur (First International Writers’ Congress for the Defense of Culture) constituted a high point of these efforts and from 1933 to 1939 SDS evenings took place regularly. The founding of the Kollektiv Deutscher Künstler (KDK) by the painters Heinz Lohmar and Otto Freundlich took place later, in autumn 1935, with the participation of the film director Slatan Dudow, the writers Egon Erwin Kisch and Gustav Regler, as well as the art critic Paul Westheim. In this way, the common bond between the various art forms was emphasized and the connection to the SDS was secured, thanks to Kisch, Regler, and Westheim, who belonged to both associations. In the KDK, connections with the Weimar Republic artist groups were renewed, whether from the Novembergruppe (November Group), the Kölner Gruppe Progressiver Künstler (Cologne Group of Progressive Artists), the Rote Gruppe (Red Group), or the ASSO. The KDK organized film screenings,70 and in 1935–36 successfully put together a rich program of public discussions focusing on current questions involving art in society – partially in connection with the French debate on Realism that was ongoing during these years. Obviously however, it did not seem to have been able to mount a collective exhibition. At the beginning of 1937, the KDK published Die Mappe, a selection of good reproductions of works produced in exile by Ernst, Kralik, Lingner, Lohmar, Vitezlav Wack, and Wolf. The intention was that this would be the first issue of an art review, in which “painters, graphic artists, sculptors, photographers, and writers on art […] might regularly publish their works in the form of originals and reproductions.”71 But no further issues appeared, and the KDK clearly seems to have become inactive. Keith Holz, who has presented the most comprehensive research on the KDK, explains its decline in these terms: the rise to power of the Popular Front indirectly had a negative effect on the KDK in that it resulted in a stronger art market, which provided exiles too with new possibilities to show their work.72 Furthermore, the new state acquisition policies offered artists more opportunities to sell their works. For example, the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris acquired at least one of Spiro’s paintings while he lived there in exile. The French state and the Musée de Grenoble

70 It showed two films by Slatan Dudow: Kuhle Wampe oder wem gehört die Welt?, made in collaboration with Brecht and Eisler in 1932, and Seifenblasen, 1934. 71 Cited from Schiller et al. 1981 (as fn. 5), p. 316. 72 Holz 2004 (as fn. 11), pp. 116–117.

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 Hélène Roussel

bought paintings from the self-taught painter Fred Uhlman after he showed his works at the Némont couple’s Le Niveau Gallery in Paris in 1937 and 1938. The painting acquired by the state is now in the collection of the Musée national d’art moderne.73 Indeed, the change in the political situation which occurred later with the downfall of the Popular Front also prompted anti-Fascist artists to leave the collective organizations and intensify their efforts to present their work in solo exhibits. Moreover, as of 1936–37 – after the start of the Moscow Trials and the publication of Gide’s critical account of his trip to the USSR74 – heated arguments arose within the leftist spectrum of exiles on the role played by the Soviet Union and the Comintern (especially in the Spanish Civil War) and on the Pariser Tageblatt affair.75 These conflicts could only have negative consequences on an association of artists with ties to the avant-garde of the Weimar Republic and considering itself a group of artists having an affinity with the Popular Front. When, towards April 1937 the German Popular Front Committee collapsed, the KDK did not survive.76

The Freier Künstlerbund Engaged in a Counter-­ Exhibition Against Munich … and London! The intensification of Nazi art policies in 1936 and 1937 led to a new attempt by exiled artists in Paris to organize. This attempt can only be sketched briefly here.77 In response to widespread protest against the ban of the Deutscher Künstlerbund in 1936 in Germany, in the autumn of 1937, Spiro and Westheim proposed founding it anew in Paris. The painters Max Lingner, Erwin Oehl, and Gert Wollheim, and the art historians Sabine Spiero and Herta Wescher took part in this initiative. As a protest against the “Degenerate Art” exhibit, the newly formed association in Paris decided to organize an exhibit of German art in exile. The plan was pursued for many months, but unfortunately was hindered and postponed due to other exhibition projects, one in particular which was developing in the group around the art critic Herbert Read and the art collector Irmgard Burchard in London. The Deutscher Künstlerbund was not officially founded until early in 1938, and it changed its name to the Freier

73 Didier Schulmann, curator at the Musée national d’art moderne/Centre Pompidou, recently confirmed this information to Ines Rotermund-Reynard. 74 Retour de l’URSS (1936) et Retouches à mon retour de l’URSS (1937); German translation by Ferdinand Hardekopf under the title Zurück aus Sowjet-Russland und Retuschen zu meinem Russlandbuch, Zürich 1937. 75 See inter alia Roussel/Winckler 2002 (as fn. 13). 76 Holz 2004 (as fn. 11), p. 125. 77 See Roussel 1984 (as fn. 9), pp. 182–203; Holz 2004 (as fn. 11), pp. 173–178, 197–199, 201–203, 222–241, 263, 276, 278, 280; see Keith Holz’s contribution in this book.



German-speaking Artists in Parisian Exile 

 21

Künstlerbund (FKb), at the request of the Austrian painter Viktor Tischler, to make it easier for Austrian artists to become members after the Anschluss. The use of the attribute “frei” (free) was a pointed reference to the un‑free state of art in the Third Reich and was an appeal to independent artists in exile to gather together in solidarity. Other institutions founded in exile had already been named in a similar fashion (for example, the Freie deutsche Hochschule). The FKb continued to invoke the tradition of the Deutscher Künstlerbund, which Spiro himself embodied.78 In its short existence (until the outbreak of war), the association developed a wide range of activities.79 We will only describe here the exhibition organized in November 1938.80 The situation was difficult: most of the cultural organizations founded by exiles in Paris were more or less in a state of paralysis due to external conflicts and inner disagreements in the wake of the failure of the German Popular Front. Furthermore, the appeasement policy in France created a disadvantageous climate for the public entry onto the Parisian art scene of exiled German artists. In the end, as a result of the Munich Pact, the members of the affiliated Oskar Kokoschka Association in Prague were kept from participating by the complicated circumstances of their escape from Czechoslovakia.81 The exhibit Freie Deutsche Kunst was placed under the patronage of the SDS and also supported by the International Association of Writers for the Defense of Culture. It took place from November 4–18, 1938, in the Maison de la Culture, as mentioned above, in the framework of the German Culture Week initiated by the SDS on the occasion of its 30th Jubilee. Presumably, the exhibit was aided substantially by two prominent exiles: the actively anti-Fascist banker Hugo Simon and Georg Bernhard, who until the end of 1937 had been the editor‑in-chief of the Pariser Tageszeitung. Both had been able to salvage their collections, now in Paris, and both had lent artworks for the London exhibit and were in close contact with Westheim and Spiro.82 Since 1933, Simon had been financing most of the cultural events of the Parisian exile community; furthermore, he was the father‑in-law of the sculptor and painter Wolf Demeter, whose bust of Hellmut von Gerlach was shown in the FKb exhibit. Shortly

78 See Roussel 1984 (as fn. 9), p. 183. 79 On the complete activity of the FKb, see ibid., pp. 183–203, and Holz 2004 (as fn. 11), pp. 173–179, 193–194, 197–199, 201–203, 223–240, 253–262. 80 On the exhibit Freie deutsche Kunst, see Roussel 1984 (as fn. 9), pp. 193–196; Inka Graeve, Freie deutsche Kunst, Paris 1938, in: Stationen der Moderne. Die bedeutenden Kunstausstellungen des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland, exh. cat., Berlinische Galerie, Berlin 1988, pp. 338–349; Holz 2004 (as fn. 11), pp. 228–241, 276, 279; Holz/Schopf 2001 (as fn. 11), pp. 146–169. 81 Kokoschka had also become president of the FKb. 82 See Holz’s contribution in this book.

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 Hélène Roussel

after this event, Bernhard married the painter Gertrud Landsberger-Sachs, mentioned in Westheim’s account of the exhibit under the pseudonym of Gert Sax.83 The Parisian exhibit took place in November  1938  – after the London exhibit84 in the New Burlington Galleries from July to August 1938 – but could not compare in scope or resonance, since the means of the FKb were far more limited than those of the London organizers. More than 270 artworks are listed in the London exhibition catalogue85, while in Paris there seem to have been only 100 to 120 works by about 70 artists, and the exhibit proposed mainly an intergenerational and pluralistic display of the current works of exiled artists. In contrast to the London show, the Paris exhibit clearly protested against the anti-modern and repressive developments in the National Socialist art policies. On display were photographs of two works of art that had been cut to pieces by the Nazis: Kokoschka’s Portrait of Robert Freund I and Renoir’s red chalk drawing The Rhône and the Saône.86 As documentation of Third Reich “official art”, the curators showed reproductions of paintings that had been on display at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich – including two watercolors done by Hitler. When the exhibit Freie deutsche Kunst was finally opened on November 4, 1939, it no longer constituted only a protest against Nazi art policies, but also a reply to the London show. Within the practical limitations of the situation and in accordance with the wishes of Gert Wollheim, the FKb undertook to show “that emigrated art was indeed still alive and was continuing the work that in Germany they thought had been eradicated.”87 The exhibit was intended to give the public an aesthetically multi-facetted and politically unequivocal declaration of the “Other Germany” in its fight for legitimacy against the National Socialist state. Artists in exile in other countries were also represented: Bruno Krauskopf in Norway, Walter Trier, Hein Heckroth, and Fred Uhlman in England, Felix Nussbaum in Belgium (Fig. 4), Max Oppenheimer (MOPP) presumably in Switzerland and George Grosz in the USA. Thanks to a most effective presentation, Kokoschka’s cut‑up painting turned out to be a major attraction of the exhibit. Beckmann, who had played an important role in the London exhibit, was also represented, though modestly. Kirchner, who had committed suicide five months before in Davos, was honored, in Westheim’s words, as an indirect victim of Nazi art policies.88 Internationally known

83 Paul Westheim, Rundgang durch die Deutsche Kunstausstellung in der Maison de la Culture, in: Pariser Tageszeitung (PTZ), Nov. 9, 1938, no. 837, p. 2. 84 On the London exhibit, see Stationen der Moderne (as fn. 80), pp. 314–337; Holz 2004 (as fn. 11), above all pp. 199–200, 203–222, 262–263 as well as Holz’s contribution in this book. 85 Holz/Schopf 2001 (as fn. 11), p. 155. 86 In London, Kokoschka’s painting had only been shown to interested journalists. 87 Bundesarchiv Berlin, Eugen Spiro estate, 5, 20, Letter from Wollheim to Spiro, n. d. 88 See Roussel 1984 (as fn. 9), p. 194.



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Fig. 4: Felix Nussbaum, Flüchtling (1) Europäische Vision, (The Refugee (1) European Vision), 1939, today exposed in the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus in Osnabrück, Germany.

artists like Max Ernst, George Grosz, Paul Klee, Man Ray, Anton Räderscheidt, and Eugen Spiro, as well as among others Francis Bott, Josef Breitenbach, Julius Graumann, Edgar Jené, J. D. Kirszenbaum, Hanns Kralik, Robert Liebknecht, Peter Lipmann-Wulf, Heinz Lohmar, Felix Nussbaum, Erwin Oehl, Julius W. Schülein, Fred Uhlman, Gert Wollheim, Johannes Wüsten, and the Austrians Trude Schmidl-Waehner and Viktor Tischler were represented.89 The exhibit also featured woodcuts of Heinz Kiwitz who shortly before had fallen in Spain. Despite Inka Graeve’s attempt to reconstruct the exhibit90 and Keith Holz’s analysis of Breitenbach’s photographs of the show,91 it is still not possible to identify all the artists and works involved, the available sources being too incomplete. For want of an exhibition catalogue, researchers have consulted lists and correspondence – often

89 See Graeve 1988 (as fn. 80), pp. 343–344. 90 Ibid. 91 In Holz/Schopf 2001 (as fn. 11), pp. 146–169.

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 Hélène Roussel

undated and not necessarily complete – from the Spiro estate, as well as critiques in the exile press92 (especially the two by Westheim in the Pariser Tageszeitung93) and in Parisian periodicals.94 Westheim’s final verdict on the exhibit was as follows: “The appeal of the exhibit is its variety. It is just as multi-facetted as healthy artistic creativity typically is when it has not been ‘set on course’ and thus condemned to sterility.”95 This assessment, directed against the Third Reich’s course-setting art policies, could also be seen however, as an indirect commentary on the Expressionism debate that had recently come to an end in the summer of 1938, one suggesting that in the name of Realism, Social Realism would be fixated as the aesthetic norm governing all realms of art and would ultimately mean the repudiation of the avant-garde, even though several participants in the discussion rose to the latter’s defense, especially Ernst Bloch and Klaus Berger.

Artists in Internment, the Underground, and Resistance At the outbreak of war, like all the other German-speaking exiles, artists were considered “undesirable foreigners” and the men were temporarily interned (with the exception of older exiles like Eugen Spiro). A second wave of internment, this time including women, took place in May 1940 with the Wehrmacht offensive.96 After the armistice of June 17, 1940, with large parts of France under occupation and in the wake of Pétain’s collaborative policies, the danger to all those who were being pursued by the Gestapo and to all Jewish exiles increased dramatically. In spite of internment, flight and persecution, artists tried to continue their creative work. The humblest things – from sandwich wrap-paper to match boxes – served as material on which to record conditions in the internment camps.97 In the camp Les Milles, near Aix‑enProvence, wall paintings in the dining room were done, about 350 works: drawings and watercolors by Hans Bellmer, Gustav Ehrlich – referred to as Gus, Max Ernst, Eric Isenburger, Robert Liebknecht, Ferdinand Springer, Wols, and many other artists, among them the painters who had spent their exile at Cézanne’s estate, “Château

92 See their list in Graeve 1988 (as fn. 80), p. 343. 93 Paul Westheim, Die Ausstellung des Freien Künstlerbundes in der Maison de la Culture, Pariser Tageszeitung (PTZ), Nov. 6/7, 1938, no. 831, p. 2, and Westheim 1938 (as fn. 83), p. 2. 94 List in Graeve 1988 (as fn. 80), p. 343. 95 Westheim 1938 (as fn. 83). 96 In the winter of 1939–1940, after war had broken out, the art historian Aenne Liebreich, caught in a seemingly hopeless situation, committed suicide. 97 See Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, Jacqueline Munck (eds.), L’art en guerre. France 1938–1947, exh. cat., Musée d’art moderne, Paris 2012.



German-speaking Artists in Parisian Exile 

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noir” (Werner Laves, Leo Marschütz).98 In the Gurs camp near the Pyrenees, drawings by Max Lingner came into being,99 the Cahier de Gurs by Hans Reichel,100 miniatures by Karl Schwesig, watercolors and drawings by Lou Albert-Lasard, by Anton Räderscheidt (Pl. II) or drawings by the Austrians Karl Robert Bodek and Kurt Conrad Loew.101 But even in the subsequent period, artists who had stayed in France and who, for the most part, were forced to go underground and were living under false identities, kept up their artistic work. Quite a few participated in the Résistance: the painter and graphic artist Doris Kahane, as well as Moses Bagel, Francis Bott, Adolf Fleischmann, Johnny Friedlaender, Simon Guttmann, Friedrich Hagen, Hanns Kralik, Jean Leppien, Max Lingner, Heinz Lohmar, and Heinrich Sussmann. Besides taking part in actual armed conflict and providing information to their fellow combatants, they supported the cause by illustrating flyers and by forging documents. These hard times, difficult also for those exiled artists who survived them, were filled with suffering of all kinds. Hans Hartung, a foreign legionnaire, lost a leg in the fight to liberate France in 1944. Many of these artists’ works were irretrievably ruined and many were lost when their creators took flight. Artists such as Adolf Fleisch­ mann, J. D. Kirszenbaum, Hanns Kralik, Leo Maillet, Anton Räderscheidt, Ferdinand Springer and Wols all endured such losses.

Epilogue Some artists and art specialists managed to escape and find asylum in other countries. Often with the help of the Emergency Rescue Committee led by Varian Fry, artists and art critics like Max Ernst, Eric Isenburger, Richard Lindner, Julius W. Schülein, Trude Schmidl-Waehner, Eugen Spiro, Josef Floch, Viktor Tischler, Klaus Berger, Max Osborn, Max Raphael, John Rewald, and Fritz Neugass, as well as the photographers Robert Capa, Ilse Bing, Erwin Blumenfeld, Josef Breitenbach, Fred Stein, Maria Eisner

98 See also André Fontaine, Les peintures murales des Milles (automne 1940), in: Jacques Grandjonc et al. (eds.), Zone d’ombre 1933–1944. Exil et internement d’Allemands et d’Autrichiens dans le sud-est de la France, Aix‑en-Provence 1990, pp. 285–290; Angelika Gausmann, Deutschsprachige bil­ dende Künstler im Internierungs- und Deportationslager Les Milles von 1939 bis 1942, Paderborn 1997. On September 10, 2012 the Camp des Milles Memorial was dedicated in memory of internment, the Shoah, and collaboration. See the website of the memorial site under www.campdesmilles.‌org (accessed April 2014). On its opening, see inter alia: Un mémorial de la déportation au camp des Milles, in: Le Monde, Sept. ​11, 2012, pp. 13, 17. 99 Gurs. Bericht und Aufruf. Zeichnungen aus einem französischen Internierungslager 1941, reprinted Berlin 1982. 100 42 watercolors from 1941–1942. 101 On Karl Robert Bodek, see www.exilarchiv.de/Joomla/index.‌php?option=​com_content&task=​ view&id=​227&Itemid=​66 (accessed June 2012).

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and Hans Namuth managed to reach the United States. Willy Maywald, Herta Wescher and Peter Lipmann-Wulf (1942), Robert Liebknecht (1943) and Leo Maillet (1944) fled to Switzerland. Walter Reuter and Paul Westheim reached Mexico, where Wolfgang Paalen had already settled before the war; in 1942, Gert Caden fled to Cuba and Gisèle Freund to Argentina. Artists who remained in France were forced to go underground with false identities. Many sought refuge in the more rural southern part of the country: among these were Francis Bott, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, Adolf Fleischmann, Otto Freund­ lich, Henry Gowa, Raoul Hausmann, Georg Merkel, Luise Merkel-Romée, Hans Reichel, Lilly Steiner, François Willi Wendt, Greta Saur, and Gert Wollheim. Others lived withdrawn lives in the larger cities: for example, Albert Flocon and Lotte Rothschild in Toulouse, or Lilly Steiner in Paris. Wols, his preparations for emigration to the United States foiled by the occupation of southern France, found refuge in the small town of Dieulefit, where over 1,500 endangered persons were given shelter.102 For many of the exiled artists, occupied France under the Vichy regime was fatal. Felix Nussbaum and Karl Schwesig were sent from Belgium to France into internment. Nussbaum fled, returning to Belgium, was denounced there in 1944, and was shipped off to Auschwitz with the last transport. Schwesig was deported from France to Germany into forced labor and survived. Johannes Wüsten, sick with tuberculosis, was sent from a Paris Wehrmacht hospital to prison in Germany and died there. Others were deported from France to extermination camps and died in the Holocaust. This frequently happened as a result of a denunciation, as in the case of Hedwig Dülberg-Arnheim, Otto Freundlich, Robert Kohl, Suzanne Markos-Ney, Lotte Rothschild, Charlotte Salomon, and possibly also Luise Strauss-Ernst as well. Leo Maillet was handed over to Occupation authorities by the Vichy police, others were seized directly from internment camps, as in the case of Hermann Lismann, Karl Bodek, Karl Schwesig, and the art historian Erich Lehmann-Lukas,103 or, like Heinrich Sussmann, were arrested as members of the Resistance and deported. Among these artists only Heinrich Sussmann and Suzanne Markos-Ney survived the concentration camps. In contrast, many of these artists who went into hiding had the solidarity of the French people to thank for their survival – mayors, town hall employees, resistance fighters, or whoever managed to supply them with false documents, as well as farmers, doctors, teachers and headmasters, pastors, all of whom and many others offered them aid and refuge in their perilous flight.104

102 See http://wolfgang.doerscheln.com/hugenotten/geschichte/dieulefit.‌php#an06 (accessed July 2012). 103 On his transfer from Le Vernet internment camp to deportation and assassination in Auschwitz, see the account of his daughter Monique Köpke, Nachtzug nach Paris. Ein jüdisches Mädchen überlebt Hitlers Frankreich, Erkelenz 2000. 104 Many thanks to Rudolf Dickmann for his advice in writing this article.

Bénédicte Savoy

Plunder, Restitution, Emotion and the Weight of Archives: A Historical Approach1 On March 31, 1955, ten years after the end of the war, the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union announced its intention to return the artworks that had been removed from the Dresden Painting Gallery in 1945 and transported to the USSR. Two years later, in May 1957, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union also decided to return the museum holdings that had been confiscated in Berlin. The following winter, from early September 1958 to mid-January 1959, hundreds of rail cars containing millions of artworks from Moscow and Leningrad arrived in East Berlin. For cultural life in Berlin and East Germany, this large-scale restitution was an unusually important event: for a whole decade, the special depositories where the Soviets kept the museum holdings from Germany had been totally inaccessible; the return of the artworks was meant to give impetus to the painstaking rebuilding of Museum Island, which had been destroyed by war. From November 1, 1958 until April 1959, the island was the setting for the exhibit Schätze der Weltkultur von der Sowjetunion gerettet (Treasures of the World Cultural Heritage retrieved from the Soviet Union). The exhibit, mounted with clear political intentions, marked the end of the 13‑year exile of German artworks in Soviet depositories. However, it was far from the end of the so‑called “looted-art debate” revolving around the artworks not returned by the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, this debate developed into an affair of state between the then unified Germany and the no longer Soviet Russia. In a caricature by Horst Haitzinger in the Rhein Zeitung of April  17, 1997 (Fig. 5), an oversized Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, is depicted clutching his diplomat’s briefcase, standing in front of a grotesque re‑creation of the Laocoön sculpture that artfully embodies a naked Helmut Kohl in the center and two naked ministers, one on either side. The gigantic snakes they wrestle with are labeled “Pensions”, “Budget”, “Tax Reform”, and “Billion-Mark Deficits”.  – So with all that what do you need our looted art for? the Russian president asks the antique sculpture. What is implied is that anyone who already has a Laocoön (or is able to

1 This contribution is a synthesis of thoughts that have come to mind in the course of writing various articles for publication and through participation in the conference Wie das zweite Exil das erste zum Sprechen bringt. Moskauer Archive und die Künste in Paris 1933–1945 in Moscow. For their inspirational role, I would here like to thank Ines Rotermund-Reynard (Paris), Gilbert Lupfer (Dresden) and Uwe Fleckner (Hamburg). See Bénédicte Savoy, An Bildern schleppt ihr hin und her … Restitutionen und Emotionen in historischer Perspektive, in: Stefan Koldehoff, Gilbert Lupfer, Martin Roth (eds.), Kunst-Transfers. Thesen und Visionen zur Restitution von Kunstwerken, Berlin 2009, pp. 85–102; Bénédicte Savoy, Kunstraub, in: Martin Warnke, Uwe Fleckner, Hendrik Ziegler (eds.), Handbuch der Politischen Ikonographie, vol. 2, München 2011, p. 73–78; Bénédicte Savoy, Kunstraub. Napoleons Konfiszierungen in Deutschland und die europäischen Folgen, Wien 2011.

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Fig. 5: Caricature by Horst Haitzinger, in: Rhein Zeitung, April 17th, 1997.

create one’s own) should forego any further restitution of art treasures. Of course, it is common knowledge that the Laocoön sculpture was not at all one of the art treasures returned to Germany from the Soviet Union – it had been taken from Rome by the French 200 years before, to be returned in 1815 when Napoleon fell from power. But the striking persistence of Laocoön as a figurative reference to the subject of looted art indicates a deep-seated knowledge of such events lurking in the collective unconscious. This is only a recent example of the sustained, and not only visual memory on the part of victims of art theft and the wound of loss that is so slow to heal. The following is not meant to be an account of the looting and restitution of art works as an anthropological constant since antiquity – the subject is far too complex for such an undertaking. Rather, in the short space allotted, I will focus on the debate surrounding looting and restitution and give a brief summary of some of the recurrent issues to which it gives rise.

Right and Revenge: The Long Life of Loss At some time in the eighteenth century B. C., or even in the nineteenth, the Elamite ruler Kutir-Nahhunte I abducted a Babylonian statue of the goddess of fertility and victory, Nanaya, and brought it to his capital. And at some point, after many centuries and a major military campaign, the statue came back to its country of origin. We know this thanks to the Assyrian king Assurbanipal, who retrieved the statue in the seventh century B. C. and memorialized the event in the following inscription: “Nanaya, whose anger raged for 1635 years, Nanaya, who moved away and settled in Elam, a place unworthy of her, entrusted me with the mission of bringing her home.”2

2 Walter Hinz, Das Reich Elam, Stuttgart 1964, p. 10. Cited from: Volker Michael Strocka, Kunstraub in der Antike, in: id. (ed.), Kunstraub – ein Siegerrecht? Historische Fälle und juristische Einwände, Berlin 1999, pp. 9–26, here p. 10. See also J.‑M. Aynard, Le prisme du Louvre AO 19.939 [introd., autograph and transcription of the Assyrian text with French translation facing], Paris 1957.



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Between the looting of the statue and its return to Babylon, no less than 1300 years elapsed:3 an incredibly impressive example of the sustained memory of victims of art theft and of the slow-healing wound of loss. Today, sixty-three years after the end of the Second World War, there are those who believe, perhaps rightly, that we should let the grass grow over some of the atrocities that then took place. But in the case of art looting, sixty years is obviously not sufficient. The wounds do not seem to want to heal. The public focus in Germany, for the last fifteen years, on art looted by the Russians in the Second World War, the constantly recurring controversy over the return of illegally acquired museum holdings previously belonging to Jews, the continual battles over the return of library inventories from Poland, the television programs with public participation discussing these subjects and so on, testify to the fact that cultural goods lost through war arouse collective emotions that are not mitigated by time. On the contrary, instead of mitigation, it would seem that historical distance tends towards rigidity, and rather than rapprochement, towards bitterness and distrust. The looted art of the past – not only that of the Second World War, since increasingly the “displaced objects” of the colonial period, objects that cannot really be subsumed under the term “looted art”, are coming into focus – is certainly the greatest cultural-political challenge of the future, at least of the twenty-first century.4 It is thus all the more surprising that little historical depth has developed in relation to this subject, despite the fact that in the last five years new publications and above all, a series of historical exhibits worldwide (Paris, Stockholm, Moscow, Berlin) have shed new light on the subject.5

3 On this number, see Strocka 1999 (as fn. 2), p. 10. 4 See Hermann Parzinger, Archäologie und Politik. Eine Wissenschaft und ihr Weg zum kulturpolitischen Global Player [Gerda Henkel Vorlesung], Düsseldorf 2012. 5 Pierre Rosenberg, Marie-Anne Dupuy (eds.), Dominique-Vivant Denon. L’Oeil de Napoléon, exh. cat., Musée du Louvre, Paris 1999; Sigrun Paas, Sabine Mertens (eds.), Beutekunst unter Napoleon, exh. cat., Landesmuseum, Mainz 2003; Wilfried Menghin (ed.), Merowingerzeit  – Europa ohne Grenzen. Archäologie und Geschichte des 5. bis 8. Jahrhunderts, exh. cat., Staatliches Puschkin Museum der Schönen Künste Moskau, Berlin/Wolfratshausen 2007; Ann Grönhammar (ed.), Krigsbyte = War-Booty, exh. cat., Livrustkammaren, Stockholm 2007; Isabelle le Masne de Chermont, Laurence Sigal-Klagsbald (eds.), A qui appartenaient ces tableaux?, exh. cat., Musée d’Israël Jérusalem and Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme Paris, Paris 2008; Inka Bertz, Michael Dorrmann (eds.), Raub und Restitution. Kulturgut aus jüdischem Besitz von 1933 bis heute, exh. cat., Jüdisches Museum Berlin und Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt/M., Göttingen 2008. On the historical aspects of art looting, see Christina Kott, Préserver l’art de l’ennemi? Le patrimoine artistique en Belgique et en France occupées, 1914–1918, Paris 2006; Christoph Roolf, Die Forschungen des Kunsthistorikers Ernst Steinmann zum Napoleonischen Kunstraub zwischen Kulturgeschichtsschreibung, Auslandspropaganda und Kulturgutraub im Ersten Weltkrieg, in: Yvonne Dohna (ed.), Ernst Steinmann, Der Kunstraub Napoleons [1916], Rom 2007 (Veröffentlichungen der Bibliotheca Hertziana [Max-Planck-Institut] in Rom), pp. 433–477, online resource: http://edoc.biblhertz.it/editionen/steinmann/kunstraub (accessed April 2014), as well as the lectures in Section 19, Restitution, of the International Committee of the History of Art in Nuremberg, 2012.

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It is well known that in antiquity the looting of ritual and art objects was common practice.6 It is also firmly anchored in the general consciousness that the sometimes brutal, massive, and irrevocable acquisition of the cultural objects of foreign peoples has also led to impressive cultural and historical cross-pollination (not the least in ancient Rome). But it is certainly worthy of note that already in antiquity both the theme of retribution for art theft and that of return – the restitution of the original conditions – played a key role. In Agamemnon, the first part of the Oresteia by Aeschylus of the fifth century B. C., there is a general reference to the dangers to which plunderers of ritual objects and foreign treasures expose themselves. At the beginning of the play, Clytemnestra warns against the fatal consequences that would be wrought on the victors if they were to loot the treasures of Troy: The lords of Troy, tho’ fallen, and her shrines; So shall the spoilers not in turn be spoiled. Yea, let no craving for forbidden gain Bid conquerors yield before the darts of greed. For we need yet, before the race be won, Homewards, unharmed, to round the course once more.7

The message is clear: if the victors do not respect the temples of the vanquished, and if in addition to victory they take spoils, they will be subject to the gods’ revenge. Here the cultural value of the coveted objects is central. The abducted, personified gods inflict vengeance or – as in the above-mentioned case of the goddess Nanaya – entrust the task of retrieval to a powerful mortal. Human time is of no import in such affairs – only the eternal time of the gods holds sway, and the memory of the violation of the sacred is cultivated and carried on from generation to generation. But, one might very well ask, what do such events in antiquity, where the ritual value of the plundered objects is the heart of the issue, have to do with the modern theft of works that have been transported from the capital city of the defeated to that of the victors because of their artistic value, their aesthetic, and certainly also monetary, value? The similarity between these two forms of theft – which at first we might not want to think of in the same way for historical reasons  – becomes clear when we note the iconographic (rather than the discursive) forms of their transmission. In many cases, remembered narratives and emotions are more strongly linked with visual affects and the symbolic content of images than they are with justifications in prose.

6 Strocka 1999 (as fn. 2), p. 20. 7 Aeschylus, Agamemnon, transl. E. D. A. ​Morshead, online resource: http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/agamemnon.‌html (accessed March 2013).



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Fig. 6: Rome, Arch of Titus, c. 82 AD, Forum Romanum (OR: Unknown artist: Spoils of War relief, Marble, 200 × 390 cm, Rome, Forum Romanum.

One of the earliest, most visible, and impressive iconographic records of the ancient practice of art theft is certainly the so‑called Spoils of War relief lining the passageway of the Titus Arch in Rome (Fig. 6).8 This monumental work was created at the end of the first century A. D. to memorialize the conquest of Jerusalem by Emperor Titus in the year 71. The Spoils of War shows a group of life-size soldiers bearing sumptuous plunder marching in procession through an arched monument crowned by tiers of horses. To emphasize the heavy weight of the booty and thus the great value of the plundered objects, the men have been yoked with shoulder poles – eight to a pole. The triumphantly carried objects had previously been displayed in the Temple of Jerusalem and were thus ritual objects: two sacred trumpets, a showbread table, and above all, the seven-branched candelabra, the menorah. Anything having to do with landscape or random detail has been minimized. The plunder is the central visual attraction and the relief can be read as a message: plunder and the arched monument characterize the triumph of Emperor Titus. Some eighteen centuries later, in 1813, during the Napoleonic Era, the iconography of the Titus Arch emerged in the French memory. Dominique-Vivant Denon, known as “Napoleon’s eye,” commissioned a magnificent Sèvres porcelain showpiece vase. It clearly shows the permanent nature of the pictorial semantics of art theft, despite any change there may have been in the function of art or the updated legitimizing

8 See Martin Warnke, Uwe Fleckner, Hendrik Ziegler (eds.), Handbuch der politischen Ikonographie, 2 vols., München 2011.

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rhetoric surrounding the issue. The vase, too, memorializes the arrival in Rome in 1796 of looted artwork from France: the Laocoön and His Sons, the Apollo Belvedere, the Venus de’ Medici, all considered iconic works of antiquity at the time, loaded on low, open carts, pass by obviously impressed observers in bourgeois dress. Between the carts, various groups of men bear further plunder pieces on carrying-poles, the most obvious transporting objects on their shoulders. Books and manuscripts are also being carried in triumph: among these, rolls reminiscent of the Torah. The pictorial reference to the Spoils of War relief on the Titus Arch is unmistakable. With just one exception: whereas the antique procession of plunder is shown passing through a triumphal arch crowned by horses, the modern art plunderers are crossing under an archway with the following inscriptions. On the left we see: “Musée Napoléon”, and on the right, simply “Musée” (Pl. III). The victory of the fledgling institution could not be expressed more unequivocally. The translatio imperii (transfer of rule) has been undertaken in favor of the general, bourgeois public, the translatio studii (transfer of learning), dressed in consequence. The museum has triumphed. Making its way into the collective unconscious on a visual and symbolic level was the motif of triumph and the concomitant humiliation of those who had been despoiled. In that context, whether people were robbed of their religious identity (in antiquity), or of their identity as individuals of the Enlightenment who considered Art as a means of education and advancement (around 1800) is of little import. Furthermore, since the end of the eighteenth century, art had been the object of a secularized religion: the religion of Art, whose temple was the museum. So far as art theft is concerned, since the time of antiquity, works of art, surviving over countless generations, had been valued for their enduring quality far more than for any cultic or educational significance they may have had. This explains the tenacity of the emotions arising from such a loss. Indeed, the theft of artworks and looting of libraries are not just illegal acts, they also inflict emotional wounds that heal only with great difficulty or not at all. Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, professor of philosophy in Leipzig, expressed this fact as early as one hundred years before the Hague Convention in a juridical article of 1798 on the occasion of the French army’s transport of Italian works of art to Paris. His article was entitled, “Is the conqueror of a vanquished people allowed to rob them of works of literature and art? A Human Rights question”.9 When a victor wrests “works of art and literature from a vanquished people,” Heydenreich writes in this text, still very much worth reading today, then in principle he is communicating the following message:

9 Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, Darf der Sieger einem überwundenen Volke Werke der Litteratur und Kunst entreißen? Eine völkerrechtliche Quästion, in: Deutsche Monatsschrift [9] (Aug. ​1798), pp. 290– 295.



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“From now on, you will be less able and it will be more difficult to become a learned man, the models for genius and taste that lead to immortality will be wrested from the noblest of your sons; the beautiful figures of art, which inspire human and amiable feelings throughout the nation, are to remain forever hidden from your gaze.”10

And Heydenreich continues: “And I can do nothing but declare it a crime against humanity if a defeated nation is robbed of its national masterpieces of art. For the nation itself, these are priceless; for their true value allows of no comparison.”11 “[The victor], in doing so, announces the immortality of his hatred and revenge; for as long as the vanquished nation exists, so long will last its shame, in the face of a loss that is irreparable over centuries without end.”12

Administrations and Emotions In the light of this background, it is significant that since the fourth century B. C. there have been cases of spectacular restitutions of art objects removed from their place of origin and returned after many decades, even centuries.13 Thus for example, it took 150 years for the Harmodius and Aristogeiton statue pair, a monument essential to the identity of the city of Athens, to be returned by Alexander the Great after having been abducted to Persia during the Persian Wars.14 Another example: after the Romans took over Carthage in the year 146 B. C., they scoured the city for all the works of art that Carthage had taken from Sicily 300 years before in order to make sure, according to Cicero, that “every Sicilian community would get back its property.”15 What was behind such restitutions is easy to surmise. By returning works of art and ritual objects pillaged in war, the new rulers were seeking to demonstrate their concern for the needs of their subjects – and thus win their loyalty. This more or less politically motivated restitution of stolen cultural property is one of the most enduring constants in the history of art-looting from antiquity to the Napoleonic era and all the way to the twentieth century. Abundant sources, not the least of iconographic nature, testify to this fact. Thus for example, the depiction of the return to Venice of the Bronze Horses of Saint Mark’s, which France had transported to Paris in 1797 and

10 Ibid., p. 293. 11 Ibid., p. 294. 12 Ibid. 13 See Strocka 1999 (as fn. 2). 14 See ibid., p. 13. 15 Cicero, in: C. Verrem 2, 4, 73. Manfred Fuhrmann (ed.), M. Tullius Cicero, Die Reden gegen Verres, latin/german, vol. 2, Zürich 1995. Cited from Strocka 1999 (as fn. 2), p. 19.

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Fig. 7: Apotheosis of Francis I of Austria, allegory of the return of the Horses of Saint Mark’s to Venice in 1815, etching, 37,6 × 48,5 cm, Venice, Museo Correr.

which Austria then returned to Venice in 1815 (Fig. 7). Or this photograph from the summer of 1945, documenting the festive return of evacuated works of art to Florence (Fig. 8). A convoy of American trucks is entering the city. Four trumpeters sound a welcoming salute. The first motor vehicle is loaded with large wooden crates containing artworks that a few months before, the so‑called “art protection division” (Kunstschutz) of the German Wehrmacht –  with whatever intentions  – had transported from Tuscany to Southern Tyrol.16 Italian and American flags decorate the vehicle along with a clearly visible sign reading, Le opere d’arte fiorentine tornano dall’Alto Adige alla loro sede (Florentine artworks returning home from Alto Adige). The original – rejected – suggestion for the sign had been: “Florentine treasures, stolen by

16 See Rodolfo Siviero, L’Arte e il Nazismo. Esodo e ritorno delle opere d’arte italiane 1938–1963, Firenze 1984; Christian Fuhrmeister et al. (eds.), Kunsthistoriker im Krieg. Deutscher Militärischer Kunstschutz in Italien 1943–1945, Köln/Weimar/Wien 2012 (Veröffentlichungen des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte, vol. 29), with bibliography.



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Fig. 8: Festive return of evacuated works of art to Florence, July 21st, 1945, (Unknown photographer).

the Germans, are returned by the Americans.”17 Here, as in the case of the Venetian horses, the role of the rescuer is linked with the motif of restitution; at the same time however, light is shed on the gray area between theft and rescue, responsible salvaging and aggressive acquisition of art treasures in times of war. But what emotional consequences do we find when we examine the restitutions which never took place, especially from the perspective of those (public officials, scholars, etc.) who in the past had to deal with formulating (unsuccessful) claims? It was never a matter of course for art historians, museum officials, or librarians – even one or two hundred years ago – to be involved in current political affairs. And certainly not in a way that would result in their scholarly work having concrete political consequences. The best example of the apprehension an affair of restitution aroused in a prominent scholar is surely that provided by Jacob Grimm. In 1815, he was sent as a Prussian legation secretary to Paris, where he was supposed to reclaim and accept

17 Cited from Ernst Kubin, Raub oder Schutz? Der deutsche Militärische Kunstschutz in Italien, Graz 1994, pp. 128 ff.

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the delivery of manuscripts from the Rhineland and paintings from Kassel. He had been chosen for the assignment, among others, because of his intimate acquaintance with the manuscript department of the Bibliothèque Nationale, where in previous years, he had done research for months at a time. In a letter to his brother, he wrote about his function in the restitution commission in the summer of 1815: “It is personally awkward for me, not only because there is always something distasteful about tracking down and taking away something out of the established order, but because I am now confronting people who have previously been helpful and courteous to me. If they now reproach me for this – and they do so – then my conscience is relieved by the fact that what I am supposed to do has a higher purpose than any obligations incurred by such services: but I do wish that I had not been needed for this task.”18

Already in the years 1814–1816, when the fall of Napoleon made the recovery of stolen property possible, almost exhaustive documentation facilitated the repatriation of painting and antique objects to Germany; the confiscation of rare prints and manuscripts, however, had not been completely documented, and thus there were hardly any returns. The commission responsible for finding such works complained early on of being dependent on chance. For example, the young Prussian commissioner from the Rhineland, Eberhard von Groote, who in 1815 dealt with this issue for Prussia on a voluntary basis, wrote: “It was much easier for the directors to hide the more rare objects and to deny they had them, than for us to search through the catalogues, which completely filled the many compartments of the bookcases, to find what was missing. […] and we would have left empty-handed had good luck and ruse not procured one thing or the other for us.”19

Good luck and ruse on one side, and the uncooperative attitude of the French conservators on the other: from the very beginning, the acquisition of information and the speculation that important evidence was kept inaccessible in France played a central role. It is interesting though, that one hundred years later, during the First World War, this situation arose once again.20 At that time, under the directive of the Prussian

18 Heinz Rölleke (ed.), Briefwechsel zwischen Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, part 1, text, Stuttgart 2001 (Briefwechsel der Brüder Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, Kritische Ausgabe in Einzelbänden, vol. 1.1), p. 461. See Savoy, Kunstraub 2011 (as fn. 1), p. 256 f. 19 Eberhard von Groote, Die Wegnahme der durch die Franzosen geraubten Kunstschätze in Paris. 1815. Aus dem Tagebuch eines Preuß. Freiwilligen, in: Agrippina. Zeitschrift für Poesie, Literatur, Kritik und Kunst [1] (Feb. ​22 – Mar. 24, 1824), pp. 93–146, here p. 134. 20 See Roolf 2007 (as fn. 5); Bénédicte Savoy, Krieg, Wissenschaft und Recht. Die Erinnerung an Napoleons Kunstraub um 1915, in: Osteuropa 56, nos. 1–2 (2006), special issue Kunst und Kultur im Schatten des Krieges.



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Ministry of Culture, many renowned library and museum personnel were researching the art thefts that had occurred under Napoleon. More than a century had passed, but time had erased nothing. A whole generation of museum curators and librarians were devoting themselves enthusiastically to the search for artworks, books and manuscripts presumed to be in Paris. Even today, many institutions west of the Rhine possess comprehensive records and archival estates from the years around 1915 that document this research activity. They show how national myths and attitudes have always marked the debate around the looting of art. These scholars, adhering to an imposing tradition of outstanding erudition, conducted their meticulous research with a double objective. One one hand, carefully considered historic positions and precise, top-secret lists of lost items were to serve as a basis for the reclamations. On the other hand, the investigators – under the directive of the Prussian Ministry of Culture or the so‑called Central Office for Foreign Service (Zentralstelle für Auslandsdienst), a department responsible for war propaganda in Berlin  – were also in charge of drafting countless lectures and articles for general public consumption on the topic of Napoleonic art theft. The materials that came together in the course of these activities now offer a lively picture of the way in which a small, elite group of scholars, museum personnel and librarians, caught between political deliberations and the need to process what had occurred, dealt with this great trauma. Obtaining information was also a methodical challenge. One can easily imagine the conflict of interests – the “victims” wanted to access, and the “perpetrators” to hide information that had been under lock and key for a century. In the German-French case, the problem was to find information that was reliable. Thus for example, the librarian Hermann Degering investigating the French book thefts around 1800 at the Berlin State Library, wrote: “If the relevant files that exist in Paris were accessible to us, we would be able to see much more clearly than is possible today, down to the minutest details, a situation which, due to the patchiness of our source materials, makes us dependent for large areas solely on suppositions and on conclusions based on analogies.”21 Still today, this kind of nagging uncertainty causes the issue of looted art to remain a hotbed of dire legends. Around 1915, the compilation of a German catalogue of losses was not the only interest at stake. There was also the major, fundamental question arousing passions all over Europe  – the supposed struggle of civilization against barbarism. In August  1914, no lesser a figure than the philosopher Henri Bergson declared that the war against Germany was “the war of civilization against barbarism, per se.” In the back and forth of vilification and blame, the German side saw Napoleonic art theft as a paramount example of the inferiority of French culture:

21 Undated account by Hermann Degering, Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Manuscript department, NL Degering, unordered fragments. See Savoy, Kunstraub 2011 (as fn. 1), p. 300.

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“It is inexpressible how ignorance and barbarity raged against the masterpieces of painting in Belgium … When it was decided which Belgian masterpieces would be transported to Paris, the order was given to take down the paintings and pack them. What did the barbarians do upon receiving this order? They leaned a ladder against the painting and cut it into strips with their knives and sabers … Numerous paintings by Rubens were subjected to such mistreatment.”22

So Steinmann wrote in his account of the French confiscation campaign of 1794. On the French side, it was the allies’ re‑appropriation of looted artworks in 1815 in Paris that was an occasion for similar denunciating, anachronistic outbursts. In 1915, for example, the highly esteemed specialist in German studies Arthur Chuquet wrote: “In 1815, those were the demands of that greedy, insatiable Prussia! […] In 1815, the Prussians […] plundered our museums with no inhibitions. […] If it had been possible, Prussia would have stolen even more. Its arrogance was incomparable and its language of 1815 reminds us of its language in 1914.”23

Anyone, be they French or German, reading such reports of the years 1914–1918, will learn more about the First World War than about Napoleonic art looting – just as we, in today’s discussions on looted art, learn more about our mutual compulsions and wounds where conflicts between nations and emotions are concerned, than about objects of the European cultural heritage scattered this way and that across the continent.

Changed Art Geography and the Project of European Civilization Today, preserved in the Berlin State Library, is a fourteenth century manuscript that Jacob Grimm, under the authorization of the Prussian government, secured from the Paris National Library in 1815. On the cover page, the young legation secretary and claims commissioner commented in his own hand: “Manuscript originally from Blankenheim, transported to Paris by the French and finally returned to Prussia. Paris, October 14, 1815. Grimm.”24 On the next to last page of the same manuscript is a depiction of the wheel of Fortuna, the antique goddess of fortune and the personification of fate. Perpetually turning, Fortuna’s wheel tosses humans and objects to and fro throughout the world (Fig. 9). The image is seen in a delicate contour drawing, con-

22 Dohna 2007 (as fn. 5), p. 26. 23 Arthur Chuquet, Les Prusses et le musée du Louvre en 1815, in: Revue des sciences politiques 36 (1916), pp. 264–294, here pp. 291–293. See Savoy, Kunstraub 2011 (as fn. 1), p. 290. 24 [Sächsische Weltchronik], Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Ms. germ. qu. 284, see Hermann Degering, Kurzes Verzeichnis der germanischen Handschriften der preussischen Staatsbibliothek, vol. II, Leipzig 1926, p. 50.



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Fig. 9: [Sächsische Weltchronik] Manuscript that was sent to Paris by Maugérard; Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung, Ms. germ. qu. 284, fol. 197v.

spicuously marked by two red stamps. Above: Bibliothèque Nationale Paris. Below: Royal Library Berlin – two scars that simultaneously make the page into a wonderful allegory for the fate of books and artworks in critical times. The manuscript is special not only for this allegorical value, with which it surely can be credited, but also for the fact that though it was confiscated by the French authorities in the Rhineland, in Blankenheim south of Bonn, it was returned in 1815 not to the Rhineland but to Prussia – to Berlin, the new capital of the province. It is just one example among many of what happened to hundreds of works of art in the cities that went to Prussia after 1814 (in Danzig there are further spectacular cases from this time). Consequently, the restitutions of 1815 in the German-speaking regions were the occasion for often heated discussions on the appropriate way to reconfigure Germany’s cultural landscape – and that of Europe – after the Napoleonic experiment of maximal centralization, in Paris, of Europe’s cultural heritage. The Prussian government assigned no lesser a figure than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to issue a statement concerning the new distribution of artworks that in the course of restitution had been awarded to Prussia. Why Goethe? In the years from 1796 to 1800, he had taken on a prominent position in the German chorus of voices against the removal of artworks from Italy and their transport to Paris. In that context, he had spoken of an act of “ripping out,” a deed he perceived as direct aggression against the intellectual world of the eighteenth century. For Goethe and the enlightened circles of the eighteenth century, Rome was a kind of “capital of the world”, as Goethe called it, a city with a unique international cultural community, where the artworks and antique ruins were thought of as the common cultural heri-

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tage of humanity. This cosmo-political ideal of the eighteenth century was called into question by the appropriation practices of the French: to vindicate their confiscations in other countries, they no longer considered art the property of humanity but represented it rather as a product of liberty. Consequently, in theory, “liberated” France saw itself as the rightful heir to all of Western culture – thus from the German point of view, as the “general leaseholder” of civilization. An absolute antinomy thus appeared between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. In the eyes of the Germans, the barbarians were those who would substitute a new, national model, for European cosmopolitan thinking on art – until then considered the ideal of civilization. On the basis of his previous positions then, Goethe was asked to formulate his opinion on the distribution of the art treasures recovered in Paris by Prussia  – an opinion which was basically a statement that transcended the boundaries of the Rhineland to the issue of whether works of art should be concentrated in one place or spread out over a whole territory. The collector Sulpiz Boisérée commented on this in his diary: “Visited Goethe at noon and had a cheerful, cordial reception. Stein had asked him to write a memoir to Hardenberg on art and antiquarian subjects; he wanted to ask my advice about it. […] The premise will be that works of art and the antiquities should be widely distributed, that every city should receive and retain its own works, with the stipulation that the whole should be overseen by a centralized authority. Let Düsseldorf have some of its things in the original positions they were once displayed in. Why should Munich have it all? Let Cologne, Bonn, and, yes, Andernach, have some, as well! It is wonderful and a great example that the Prussians are returning St. Peter to Cologne.”25 With this attitude, Goethe – and he was not the only one in 1815 who was pleading for a “scattering” – had positioned himself firmly against the spirit of the nineteenth century, which advocated the consolidation of what was then perceived as “national” cultural heritage in just a few monumental museums in Europe’s capital cities. It was a discussion that is highly relevant today in consideration of the holdings of German looted art in far-flung provincial museums of the former Soviet Union.26 As early as August 1815, the patriotic Rheinische Merkur brought the argument to a head: “In art, it is the scattering, the works of art strewn like stars across the heavens that is exhilarating and invigorating, while the aggregation of works only leads to opulence and aesthetic luxury.”27 In 1915, when Fritz Milkau, the then director of the university library in Breslau, heard of German plans to retrieve the manuscripts from Paris, he wrote the following sober

25 Sulpiz Boissérée, Tagebücher 1808–1854, 5 vols., Darmstadt 1978–1995, here vol. I, 1978, p. 224. See Savoy, Kunstraub 2011 (as fn. 1), pp. 251 ff. 26 See Kerstin Holm, Rubens in Sibirien – Beutekunst aus Deutschland in der russischen Provinz, Berlin 2008. 27 Rheinischer Merkur, Aug. 6, 1815, no. 279, p. 2, col. 1. See Savoy, Kunstraub 2011 (as fn. 1), p. 252.



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words to the director general of the Berlin State Library: “I cannot seem to get rid of the idea that war is followed by peace, and that when seen in the larger scale of things, the reconstitution of international communication between libraries is more important than the inconsequential relocation of some manuscript holdings.”28 This courageous position, taken in the context of the heated nationalistic and propagandistic atmosphere of the First World War, is like an echo of Goethe’s famous quatrain Museen, composed in 1816 in the midst of the restitution debate that went on in the years after the Congress of Vienna: “An Bildern schleppt ihr hin und her Verlornes und Erworbnes Und bei dem Senden kreuz und quer Was bleibt uns denn? Verdorbnes!”29

And Victor Hugo reacted with the following words on the plundering of Peking in 1861: “One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the other burned. Victory can be a thieving woman, or so it seems. The devastation of the Summer Palace was accomplished by the two victors acting jointly. […] What a great exploit! What a windfall! One of the two victors filled his pockets; when the other saw this he filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in arm, laughing away. Such is the story of the two bandits. We Europeans are the civilized ones, and for us the Chinese are the barbarians. This is what civilization has done to barbarism. […] I hope that a day will come when France, delivered and cleansed, will return this booty to despoiled China.”30

Whether poetically in 1816 or polemically in 1861, or bureaucratically in 1915, the problems of those who have gone before us are no different from our own.

A Problem of Civilization As is evident to those involved in historical cases of looted art, restitution, and the legends and passions they arouse, the careful and transparent documentation of

28 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Dienstakten III C 1, vol. 23, fol. 45. Letter from Milkau to Harnack, from Brussels, Jun. 12, 1815. See Savoy, Kunstraub 2011 (as fn. 1), p. 297. 29 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Museen, in: Goethes Werke [WA], Weimar 1887–1919, here section I, vol. 3, Weimar 1890, p. 121. (You’re carting pictures left and right/Lost ones, got ones, to and fro/ What’s the object of the flight?/Rotted, ruined tableaux!) [transl. J. A.]. 30 Victor Hugo, Actes et paroles, Œuvres complètes, politique, Paris 1985, pp. 527–528, lettre au capitaine Butler, 25 novembre 1861. Transl.: www.napoleon.org/en/reading_room/articles/files/477511.‌asp (accessed April 2013).

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each individual case is of prime importance. Experience has shown that incomplete documentation of a specific case, or rumors and suppositions about the presence or absence of particular works in the museums or libraries, all create fertile ground for passionate rhetoric, polarized attitudes, and confrontation (see article by Ines Rotermund-Reynard in this volume). This concerns first of all and to a high degree the whole problem of the confiscation of Jewish art collections during the Second World War (under the heading “Provenance”) as it does the question of the cultural objects subjected to so‑called “wartime displacement” in Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War. But increasingly, it also concerns the question of how “Western” museums deal with the objects – archaeological and ethnographic objects in particular – which came into their hands during the colonial era. To give just one example: it took the Berlin museums almost one hundred years after the transport of the Nefertiti bust from Egypt to Berlin – and no less than the pressure of an external, non-museum study – to finally enable public access to the archival documents that traced the presence of the controversial bust so far north of its place of origin.31 A very long time – along with all the political consequences, well covered by the media, that arose from this institutional “silence.” Seen against this background, archives are a kind of central nervous system enabling us to reconstruct the archaeological layers of human lives or works of art. These archives need to be used, and must be useable. Their users should not be, as has been the case so far, mainly provenance researchers, legal advisors and lawyers with their own particular interests, but by all means and far more frequently than until now, historians and art historians, intent on uncovering the complexities of the events and all their implications (cultural, political, economic, emotional, for the history of memory, etc.). Archives should not only be open, but made useable and should be used, so as to further transparency and objectivity in these questions. If they remain closed, or are used only by those who functionalize them for political, legal, or economic ends, the result can be a reopening of old wounds and the triggering of phantom pain among those who have been robbed – even leading to acts of revenge. As mentioned above, the German historiography of the Napoleonic art theft is a case in point. With no access to the French documentation – for decades of the nineteenth century – such a degree of frustration developed that in the First World War the practice of confiscating artworks and books was reignited and took on characteristics of revenge. An uncompromising elucidation of provenances and easy access to all art and archival holdings – including “foreign” property – must be a priority of our generation. This is irrespective of the question as to whether objects should be restituted or not – in many cases (including Nefertiti, looted documents in Moscow, etc.), the answer may very well be that 100 or 200 years of archival, museum,

31 Friederike Seyfried, Die Büste der Nofretete. Dokumentation des Fundes und der Fundteilung 1912/1913, in: Jahrbuch Preußischer Kulturbesitz 46 (2010, publ. 2011), pp. 133–202.



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or library history cannot be reversed as if nothing had transpired, i. e. that in the course of their eventful lives, the objects have acquired a double identity: that of their place of origin and that of their adopted land.

Actively into the Archive The above reflections make clear that art and cultural historians in particular need to recognize the subject of “displaced objects” as an objective, non-emotional focus of research. Until the 1990s, the provenance of an artwork played a central role among art historians and museum officials, but a very abstract one in the sense of a kind of finger exercise for Catalogues raisonnés and the like (history of previous ownership). The “political” history of an artwork, so to speak, was never particularly of interest to museums, auction houses, or art historians, etc.: they never really had to be interested, or, as in the case of West Germany, were concerned mainly with their own losses. In fact, museums and art historians were never really interested in anything but the artist and the present owner, or in the interpretation or exhibition of a work of art. Since the restitution claims of the 1990s however, the material and political history of the holdings has emerged in institutions concerned with art. The pressure to investigate this history comes from without, not from the art world and certainly not from the institutions in possession of the objects in question. In France, for example, it was a provocative cover page of Le Monde that prompted the museum to take action in 1996. It must be recognized that the debate about looted art, restitution, provenance, etc., has genuinely transnational, interdisciplinary dimensions. Historians, and art or cultural historians, should pursue this research actively and in a matter‑of-fact way. But they should also carry out investigations hand in hand with other experts. And perhaps even more important: the approach should be transnational from the outset. Only someone in a position to describe the collective emotions, the construction of identity, and the trauma linked to these issues on the side of the “perpetrators” as well as of the “victims” will be able to make a contribution that does justice to the complexities of the issue. Only those who understand the significance of the Pharaonic past for the newly autonomous Egypt of the 1920s will also understand the meaning, for present-day Egyptians, of restitution claims for Nefertiti. And if one ignores how Nefertiti and Amarna Art were an integral part of the construction of the identity of the avant-garde and of social democracy in the Weimar Republic in Berlin of the 1920s – one will also be unable to understand why for many decades Berlin has stubbornly and awkwardly resisted restitution.

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What Can Be Done? The history of these “displaced objects” is a political, legal and cultural history, one of possession, seizure, confiscation, sale, robbery, purchase, instrumentalization for the construction of identity – but also, frequently, the history of a free and fruitful intellectual acquisition resulting from the material acquisition. Contrary to their wishes, in the last fifteen years “provenance” has become a subject for art institutions, which do not have the necessary expertise for it. Yet the deep cultural and multi-layered implications linked to provenance are always kept in the dark, leading to an often intolerable simplification of history, to public misunderstandings fuelled by the media, a collapse of communication, and more. For this reason, the younger generation of art historians, who in the coming decades will be active on the art market and in museums, need to develop a sensorium for these complex questions. Among others, one way to encourage this would be to have academic training include in its programs “provenance research” and the issue of dealing with “displaced objects” in general. These fields should be a feature of art history seminars, at best in the context of transnational cooperation and from the start, in close collaboration with archives – the very heartbeat of our times. Finally, all the above also depends on the willingness of museums to discover and disclose the provenance of their holdings for the benefit of a public deeply interested in these issues.

Patricia Kennedy Grimsted

“Trophy” Archives in Moscow and the Art Scene in France and Germany under the National Socialist Regime, 1933–1945: A Brief Orientation Two decades after the “top secret” label was expunged from the captured foreign records in Moscow, speculation continues about the archival materials seized during and after the Second World War and their capacity to shed more light on the art scene in France during the National Socialist era. They are still frequently referred to as “trophy” archives, especially in Russia, despite the Hague Convention and the International Council on Archives resolution outlawing seizing archives as trophies. In light of the focus of the present subject, such documentation – along with French archives that were seized – includes personal papers of émigrés from Germany seeking protection for artworks and artists, and also various files of French and German agencies keeping track of the movement of art, artists, dealers, and collectors. Given the lack of adequate related archival finding aids, what follows will suggest a few examples amidst the larger complexes of “twice-seized” or “twice-saved” archives of possible relevance to the art world that came to Moscow from France, along with files from the records of the German agencies that seized them.1 Most of the captured foreign records that came to the Soviet Union after the war were gradually consolidated in Moscow in the top-secret Central State Special Archive of the USSR (Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi osobyi arkhiv SSSR – TsGOA SSSR). This Special Archive (familiarly known as the Osobyi in Russian, or Sonderarchiv in German) was established by the Soviet Main Archival Administration (Glavarkhiv SSSR) under the Ministry of Internal Affairs in March 1946. (Fig. 10) Many of the most sensitive captured records first went for scrutiny to Soviet security or intelligence services, and were transferred only later to the Special Archive.

1 Some of the text below is drawn from Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, F. J. Hoogewoud, Eric Ketelaar (eds.), Returned from Russia. Nazi Archival Plunder in Western Europe and Recent Restitution Is‑ sues, Builth Wells 2007; paper edition, with updated afterword 2013; see www.ial.uk.‌com (accessed April  2014). The first half of this volume updates and summarizes my earlier research regarding archival seizures by various German agencies in occupied countries of Western Europe and their subsequent capture and transport to Moscow by Soviet authorities. The second half of the volume comprises chapters by the archivists who negotiated archival returns to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, together with the Austrian Rothschild archives to The Rothschild Archive in London; included are lists of fonds (collections) returned to each country, their current location, and finding aids. My “Afterword” in the paper edition updates the situation for archives remaining in Moscow and pending restitution negotiations.

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Fig. 10: The Special Archive in Moscow (photo 1994).

Other fonds2 and even scattered files from larger fonds first deposited in the Special Archive and analyzed there for possible security interest, were later dispersed among other repositories. Even today, it would be impossible to follow all of these movements of captured paper or to come up with a reliable total figure for Soviet captured records. We still have no idea how many files may have remained with various security services or other government offices, because even today most have never been publicly disclosed. For example, in the early 2000s, the Russians thought they had returned all the records of the Sûrété nationale, but then another 200 files from that fond turned up and are still pending return to Paris. However, it is unlikely that files relating to the art scene in France would have been a high priority for Soviet security.3 Soviet authorities returned many seized records to their countries of origin, but during the Soviet period, most of the returns were to Eastern Europe. The Khrushchev

2 The word fond as used in Russian (French fonds; German Bestand) refers to a group of records from a single creating agency or collection of papers from a single source. 3 See Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Soviet-Captured Records and the Special Archive, in: Grimsted/ Hoogewoud/Ketelaar 2007 (as fn. 1), ch. 4, pp. 81–104. Earlier Grimsted publications regarding the Soviet captured records are listed in my bibliography available at http://socialhistory.org/en/russia-archives-and-restitution/bibliography (accessed April 2014).



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era after 1956 saw an upsurge in restitution of “trophy” cultural property from the USSR, often as political “compensation.” That was when much of the art the Soviets had plundered from the Dresden Gallery returned home, and with it many books and archives.4 Some returns were acknowledged in print, positively portrayed under the auspices of Communist internationalism as the Soviet role in “helping other countries reunify their national archival heritage.”5 For example, by 1968, “the Soviet government transferred to the Democratic Republic of Germany more than 2 million archival files (from the fourteenth century to 1945), from among the archival materials rescued by the Soviet army after the defeat of Hitler Germany.”6 More voluminous archival returns to the GDR followed in the 1980s, even including most of the German Masonic fonds.7 A few token acts of restitution to France in March 1960, and again in 1966 under General Charles de Gaulle, gave French archivists reason to hope – or at least suspect – that more French records might still be hidden away in the Soviet Union.8 The era of glasnost brought more revelations about the extensive “trophy” cultural treasures that had been “rescued” and transported to the USSR after the Second World War and then relegated to secret repositories for half a century. The “Beautiful Loot” that came to the Soviet Union as “Hidden Treasures” became known in its immensity in the West only in 1991, when Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov broke the story in ARTnews, followed by headlines around the world.9 As in the case of the art, revelations about long-hidden archives produced frontpage news. A Russian journalist, Ella Maksimova first broke the sensational story of captured Nazi records in Moscow with her “Five Days in the Special Archive” (Feb-

4 See the account of the return of the Dresden Gallery, together with an analysis of its “rescue” by Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov (with Sylvia Hochfield), Beautiful Loot. The Soviet Plunder of Europe’s Art Treasures, New York 1995 (British edition: Hidden Treasures), pp. 192–202. The transport to Moscow is described earlier (pp. 125–132). 5 See, for example, E. G. Baskakov, O. V. Shavblovskii, Vozvrashchenie arkhivnykh materialov, spasennykh Sovetskoi Armiei, in: Istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 5 (1958), pp. 175–179. 6 Mikhail Ia. Kapran, Mezhdunarodnoe sotrudnichestvo sovetskikh arkhivistov, in: Sovetskie arkhivy, no. 3 (1968), p. 33. 7 See the report by Wolfram Schmidt, Übernahme von Archivgut aus der UdSSR, in: Archivmittei‑ lungen 39, no. 5 (1989), pp. 179–180, and Uwe Löbel, Neue Forschungsmöglichkeiten zur preussisch-deutschen Heeresgeschichte. Zur Rückgabe von Akten des Potsdamer Heeresarchivs durch die Sowjetunion, in: Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 51 (1992), pp. 143–149. 8 As quoted by Claire Sibille, Les Archives du ministère de la Guerre recupérées de Russie, in: La Gazette des Archives, no. 176 (1997), p. 67. See also: Peredacha dokumentov Natsional’nomu arkhivu Frantsii, in: Voprosy arkhivovedeniia, no. 6 (1960), p. 107. 9 The findings of Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov (with Sylvia Hochfield) first appeared in the West as “Spoils of War: The Soviet Union’s Hidden Art Treasures”, in: ARTnews 90 (Apr. ​1991), pp. 30–41; and “The Soviets’ War Treasures: A Growing Controversy”, in: ARTnews 90 (Sept. ​1991), pp. 112–119. See the same authors’ book Beautiful Loot (as fn. 4) among their other writings on the subject.

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ruary 1990). In her initial interviews, however, TsGOA director Anatolii Prokopenko did not breathe a word about any archives of Western European provenance.10 I found the initial clues concerning the French archives in Moscow in the fall of 1990, when I was searching with a Ukrainian colleague for details about post-war Soviet retrieval of Nazi-plundered Ukrainian archives. Instead, we found Soviet reports from June and July 1945 about the Soviet discovery of French archives in a Gestapo/Abwehr research center in a remote castle in Czechoslovakia. These included orders, with personal notes by Josef Stalin’s security chief Lavrentii Beria, for their transport to Moscow in 28 railroad wagons. My Russian archival colleagues were dubious, but mystified, about their fate. I privately queried a prominent French archivist, only to find the French did not know either, but they did know those archives had not returned to France. Instead of rushing to publish abroad, I offered my story to a Russian journalist friend who had just written a revealing piece about the millions of German trophy books he had discovered rotting under pigeon droppings in an abandoned church outside of Moscow.11 An agreement was just being signed to update my Soviet-period archival directories with a collaborative computerized project in Moscow – the beginning of what is now “ArcheoBiblioBase!” Working closely with Russian archival colleagues, I was careful to avoid scandal through revelations abroad about the French archives that might torpedo my directory project.12 Publication of my story about the French archives in Russia became possible only a year later – after the August 1991 coup.13 A week after Evgenii Kuz’min’s interview with me appeared in early October 1991, TsGOA director Prokopenko confirmed the findings of the “well-known ‘archival spy’ Grimsted” in a follow‑up press interview entitled “Archives of French Spies Revealed on Leningrad Highway”! Prokopenko even suggested that “an agreement with France should be concluded for the gradual return of the archival wealth.”14 Soon afterwards, French journalists picked up the story.15 While it was a couple of years before I was allowed into the archive and able

10 Ella Maksimova, Piat’ dnei v Osobom archive, in: Izvestiia, nos. 49–53 (Feb. ​18–22, 1990), based on an interview with TsGOA director Anatolii Prokopenko. 11 Evgenii Kuz’min, Taina tserkvi v Uzkom, in: Literaturnaia gazeta, no. 38 (Sept. ​18, 1990), p. 10; English edition: The Mystery of the Church in Uzkoye, in: The Literary Gazette International 16, no. 2 (Oct. 1990), p. 20. 12 After refusals from the Soviet Main Archival Administration (Glavarkhiv), the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX) finally signed an agreement to furnish computers to the Division of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The project later continued in collaboration with the Russian state archival agency known as Rosarkhiv. 13 Evgenii Kuz’min, “‘Vyvezti … unichtozhit’ … spriatat’ …‘ Sud’by trofeinykh arkhivov” (interview with Patricia Kennedy Grimsted), in: Literaturnaia gazeta, no. 39 (Oct. 2, 1991), p. 13. 14 See the interview with Anatolii Prokopenko, by Ella Maksimova: Arkhivy Frantsuzskoi razvedki skryvali na Leningradskom shosse, in: Izvestiia, no. 240 (Oct. 9, 1991). 15 See, for example, Thierry Wolton, L’histoire de France dormait à Moscou (interview with Anatolii Prokopenko), in: L’Express, Nov. ​21, 1991, pp. 82–83.



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to examine internal finding aids for myself, the news spread quickly abroad, and the story grew. Yes, there were indeed also archives from Belgium, the Netherlands, and even the Grand Principality of Liechtenstein.16 In July 1992, the Special Archive (TsGOA SSSR) was re‑baptized as the Center for Preservation of Historico-Documentary Collections (Tsentr khraneniia istoriko-dokumental’nykh kollektsii – TsKhIDK). With the 1999 Rosarkhiv reorganization, TsKhIDK was abolished as a separate archive, and its holdings from the former Special Archive became part of the Russian State Military Archive (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv – RGVA). Today, most of the foreign archival holdings transported to Moscow at the end of the Second World War and still in Russia remain in this same building facing Vyborgskaia ulitsa, constructed – ironically enough – by German prisoners of war in the late 1940s (see Fig. 10 and photos of the building in Korotayev interview). Vladimir Ivanovich Korotayev, deputy director of RGVA, who has been in charge of those holdings since 1999, welcomed our colloquium at the start of a memorable visit. As of 2012, the building has been turned over to the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) to the rear, and the remaining foreign “trophy” holdings are being transferred to the main RGVA building down the street. Unfortunately, however, RGVA still lacks an up‑to-date guide to its captured foreign records.17 Coverage of the German-language holdings of the former Special Archive was published abroad already by the end of 1992 – a German translation of the TsGOA registry of fonds in its German Division (i. e. fond numbers starting with 500k), and a short guide the following year.18 These publications are still helpful today, because most of the German records described still remain in Moscow, alas. In 1998, the Russian Duma passed a law forbidding return to Germany of cultural property “displaced as a result of the Second World War.”19 Today the most extensive list of German and

16 See more details in my “Introduction” in Grimsted/Hoogewoud/Ketelaar 2007 (as fn. 1), pp. 2–10. 17 See the coverage on the ArcheoBiblioBase website: www.iisg.nl/abb/rep/B‑8.tab1.‌php (accessed April 2014). 18 For example, Kai von Jena, Wilhelm Lenz, Die deutschen Bestände im Sonderarchiv in Moskau, in: Der Archivar 45, no. 3 (1992), cols. 457–467; Götz Aly, Susanne Heim, Das Zentrale Staatsarchiv in Moskau (“Sonderarchiv”). Rekonstruktion und Bestandsverzeichnis verschollen geglaubten Schriftguts aus der NS‑Zeit, Düsseldorf 1992; George C. Browder, Captured German and Other Nations’ Documents in the Osobyi (Special) Archive, Moscow, in: Central European History 24, no. 4 (1992), pp. 424–445; id., Update on the Captured Documents in the Former Osobyi Archive, Moscow, in: Central European History 26, no. 3 (1994), pp. 335–342. 19 Regarding captured German records in Moscow and related restitution problems, see Kai von Jena, Die Rückführung deutscher Akten aus Russland  – eine unerledigte Aufgabe, in: Klaus Oldenhage, Hermann Schreyet, Wolfram Werner (eds.), Archiv und Geschichte. Festschrift für Friedrich P. Kahlen‑ berg, Düsseldorf 2000, pp. 391–420. Regarding the 1998 law, see below, fn. 24. See the full list of publications relating to captured records in Moscow from different countries listed in the Bibliography of Grimsted/Hoogewoud/Ketelaar 2007 (as fn. 1), and in the ArcheoBiblioBase coverage listed in fn. 17 above.

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Austrian records is found on the unofficial German website “Sonderarchiv,” which includes on‑line German translations of inventories (opisi) of many of the key fonds.20 However, neither that website nor the earlier publications include remaining French and other fonds (mostly below the number 500k). While coverage of the French and other Western European holdings in Moscow was never published, French government archivists were able to purchase copies of most of the Soviet internal inventories (opisi) of the French records at a high price in 1992, but due to pending restitution negotiations, public access to those finding aids in Paris was refused.21 An official list of most (but not all) of the foreign fonds was finally issued in Russian in 2001, unfortunately lacking annotations. Even the digitized copy on the RGVA website has not been brought up to date to indicate those returned to their home countries since 2000.22 The Dutch, Belgians, Germans, and French had all prepared agreements for restitution of their archives in 1992, but France was the only country to succeed that year in signing a high-level diplomatic agreement providing for the return of the French archives. It would be another decade before most of the Western European archives went home.23 France was luckier than most countries in that respect. French trucks sent to Moscow in 1993 and early 1994 brought back approximately two-thirds of the French archives, but then the French trucks sent to retrieve the final batches were sent home empty after the Duma refused to permit more returns in May 1994. Returns

20 The unofficial website “Sonderarchiv” is maintained out of Berlin by Sebastian Panwitz: www.sonderarchiv.‌de. See also the coverage under bibliography in ArcheoBiblioBase, with listings covering holdings from many countries: B‑8: www.iisg.nl/abb/rep/B‑8.tab1.‌php; and the less-complete RGVA coverage on the Rosarkhiv website: www.rusarchives.ru/federal/rgva (all links accessed April 2014). 21 I tried myself to see some of the opisi without success, first at the Archives nationales, and then at the Quai d’Orsay, after their archivists took over the restitution program. There was considerable criticism of the matter among French specialists at the time. See Sophie Coeuré, Frédéric Monier, De l’ombre à la lumière. Les archives françaises de retour de Moscou (1940–2002), in: Sébastien Laurent (ed.), Archives “secrètes”, secrets d’archives? Historiens et archivistes face aux archives sensibles, Paris 2003, pp. 133–148. 22 V. P. Kozlov, V. N. Kuzelenkov (eds.), Ukazatel’ fondov inostrannogo proiskhozhdeniia i Glavnogo up‑ ravleniia po delam voennoplennykh i internirovannykh NKVD-MVD SSSR Rossiiskogo gosudarstvennogo voennogo arkhiva, compiled by T. A. Vasil’eva et al., Moskva 2001, available online (but not updated) at http://guides.rusarchives.ru/browse/GuidebookCard.‌html?id=​123 (accessed April 2014). Typescript file-level finding aids (opisi) are available for all fonds in RGVA, including those already returned to their home countries. 23 See Grimsted/Hoogewoud/Ketelaar 2007 (as fn. 1), ch. 6, which includes English texts of the French-Russian restitution agreements, and lists of the French archives returned, as well as a few that remain in Moscow. See the updated lists in Sophie Coeuré, La mémoire spoliée. Les archives des Français butin de guerre nazi puis soviétique (de 1940 à nos jours), new edition, Paris 2013. See also the French Foreign Ministry website: www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/les-ministres‑et-le-ministere/archives‑et-patrimoine/dossiers‑en-cours/spoliations-1939–1945/article/fonds-russes (accessed April 2014).



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began again only in 2001, after the new 1998 law in its 2000 amended version was passed and the bureaucratic process was established for its implementation. The 1998 Russian Federal Law: “On Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation” however, effectively nationalized the Soviet cultural “spoils of war” seized in Germany and Eastern Europe. It forbade restitution to Germany and left only limited possibilities for return to other countries that were enemies of the NS‑regime, involving payment of “compensation,” storage charges, and other fees.24 Yet there has been much more progress in the “return” of archives than for art, books, and other cultural property. Since 1994, archives have returned home to seven countries  – France (1993, 2001, 2002), Liechtenstein (1996), Great Britain (1998), Belgium (2002), the Netherlands (2002), Luxembourg (2002), and Austria (first shipment in 2009). Negotiations are currently underway for return of the Greek archives and Norwegian Masonic files, as well as a second round of Austrian archives. All were negotiated on a state‑to-state basis through diplomatic channels, except for the Rothschild family archives from Austria to The Rothschild Archive in London (the only return – qua “exchange” – to a private family, in 2001). All were carried out under terms of the 1998/2000 law, although the Liechtenstein return took place before the law was signed, as did the initial French returns in 1993–1994.25 Most of the estimated seven linear kilometers of archives from France that were discovered in 1990–1991 in the top-secret Osobyi Archive have been returned to Paris, but the last shipment home was not until 2002, and some controversial fonds still remain in Moscow. The records returned to France fall into a number of different categories, as is clear in the chart listing French fonds returned appended to the French chapter in Returned from Russia, and on the French Foreign Ministry website.26 Records potentially bearing on the art scene in France and Germany fall into two major categories – those from government agencies and those of private families or individuals. Yet we also must not forget the potential relevance of German records

24 See the latest updated English translation of the Federal Law: On Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation, no. 64‑FZ of Apr. ​15, 1998 (with amendments), transl. Konstantin Akinsha and Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, in: Patricia Kennedy Grimsted (ed.), Spoils of War v. Cultural Heritage: The Russian Cultural Prop‑ erty Law in Historical Context, published as International Journal of Cultural Property 17, no. 2 (2010), Appendix  1, pp. 413–426; available electronically at www.journals.cambridge.org/repo_A79QSVVJ (accessed April  2014). That volume includes a number of articles of relevance to Russian “trophy” cultural property and restitution issues. 25 See details of earlier returns in Grimsted/Hoogewoud/Ketelaar 2013 (as fn. 1), with updates by Grimsted, “Afterword – 2013”. 26 See Grimsted/Hoogewoud/Ketelaar 2007 (as fn. 1), pp. 154–188, with indication of location for the fonds returned and including lists of fonds still in Moscow. See the updated listing on the Quai d’Orsay website (see fn. 23).

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that remain in Moscow – those of German agencies that captured the relevant French records, and those held privately by German Jews involved in the art scene who had found refuge in France in the 1930s. As we extract specific examples, it may also be helpful to understand the broader context of intersecting wartime migration and operations by the German capturing agencies – the “utilization” of French archives. The German capturing agencies usually brought their seized archives to their own home base locations. But then, when British bombing started intensifying in 1943, all that had been brought to Berlin in the earlier years of the war was evacuated to more remote sites  – most of them to the East, which the Germans hoped would be safe from bombing, and safer from capture. To add to the complexity, since captured by the Red Army, Soviet archivists have reprocessed and arranged their archival loot, which also included much of the German archival loot, into specific fonds to reflect their creating agencies. However, those not needed for further “utilization” by Soviet agencies were often given little attention in terms of desirable processing and description. The vast bulk of the French Division of the Special Archive were French governmental records. The largest percentage of them were from French military sources, most of which were transported to Moscow from the German Heeresarchiv, special archive center for captured Western military records in Berlin-Wannsee – Aktensammelstelle West.27 While the German military records remaining in Moscow contain considerable important data, such as German inventories of the French military archives captured during occupation in France, neither the German military records still in Moscow, nor the French military records returned to Paris, contain relevant documentation relating to the art scene in France. More relevant materials from French governmental and private sources may be found among the files collected by the Reich Security Main Office Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), of which two of its seven offices (Ämter) should be singled out.

Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), Amt IV The Red Army found most of the French military intelligence records of the Deuxième Bureau, separated from other military records, mixed together with several large complexes of records of French Government security agencies seized and brought together by the RSHA, Fourth Office (Amt IV). Soviet counter-intelligence officers – SMERSH (literally “death to spies”) – discovered that horde in May 1945 in the remote Czech

27 Heeresarchiv-Aktensammelstelle West, Berlin-Wannsee, Conradstr. 14. See Grimsted/Hoogewoud/ Ketelaar 2007 (as fn. 1), ch. 1, esp. pp. 20–31.



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Fig. 11: The castle in the Czech village Horní Libchava (Oberliebich) where, among other documents, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) hid the stolen French military intelligence records.

village of Horní Libchava (German Oberliebich), not far west of Česka Lípa (German Bömisch-Leipa), then part of the German-annexed Sudetenland. (Fig. 11) Reports of their capture to the Soviet archival agency Glavarkhiv were among the first files I had seen in the fall of 1990 within the recently-opened Soviet-era Glavarkhiv records, which got me started on the whole story of the Soviet-captured records. There were Lavrentii Beria’s personal red-pencilled, signed orders to dispatch a special archival delegation to bring them back to Moscow! Later I learned from other sources –  eventually confirmed by RSHA records in Berlin  – that starting in 1943 the village castle in Horní Libchava had housed the special French Information Center (Auswertungsstelle Frankreich) for German intelligence on France, run by the RSHA Amt IV (Gestapo), which had combined both Gestapo and Abwehr intelligence units. That wartime office started operating in Paris in 1940, but was soon based in Berlin. The impressive RSHA register for seized French archives that had arrived in that Berlin office (August 1940 – September 1942), preserved among RSHA records in the Special Archive, was displayed to us during our colloquium visit. (Fig. 12) The operation was evacuated to the Sudeten village in 1943.28 I have visited the village castle several times and was amazed to find a rather primitive landing strip (still occasionally used today) about 200 meters from the main building, which was linked

28 See more about that facility in Grimsted/Hoogewoud/Ketelaar 2007 (as fn. 1), ch. 2, pp. 33–46.

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Fig. 12: Register of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt Amt IV (Gestapo) for seized French archives, today preserved in the Special Archive in Moscow (Fond 500k/2/215).

by a tunnel to the castle. Among the 28 freight cars that were transporting archives from nearby Česka Lípa to Moscow in July 1945, the most interesting for our present purposes were those carrying the captured records of the Sûreté nationale (TsGOA SSSR, Fond 1). The colloquium paper by Isabelle le Masne de Chermont on the Paul Graupe art dealership that took refuge in Paris in 1937 (see her article in this volume) well demonstrates the type of documentary riches to be found in the French National Security files returned from Moscow. The files from the Sûreté were only a small part of the French records that were found in the RSHA Amt IV center in Horní Libchava (Oberliebich), but reveal considerable personal data from French files tracking foreign émigrés in France. Those files now back in Paris may quite possibly reveal clues about other German artistic émigrés who found refuge in France in the 1930s. However, even after RGVA had returned all the records of the Sûrété nationale that they had held earlier, they received 200 more files from that fond, which had recently turned up in another Moscow office, and those now remain in RGVA, pending return to Paris.

Reichssicherheitshauptamt – RSHA Amt VII. The second RSHA unit of even more interest to our studies was the Seventh Office –  Amt VII  – for Ideological Research and Evaluation (Weltanschauliche Forschung und Auswertung). After its formation in 1941, it took over the archival loot of its predecessor, Security Service (SD  – Sicherheitsdienst) Main Office (Hauptamt), which



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also included some of the archival plunder of the mid-1930s by the Gestapo. While the RSHA is best known for its horrific police, security, and ethnic-cleansing functions in implementation of the “Final Solution,” Amt VII was charged with the parallel and ironic function of preserving the archival and library heritage of those “enemies” for sordid propaganda research and intellectual analysis.29 Most of the personal papers of prominent Jews who either owned Nazi-seized art collections or were otherwise involved in the French art scene (papers that would potentially be relevant to art historians) were found by Red Army trophy scouts across what is now the Czech-Polish border in a remote Silesian village in the late summer of 1945. The main center the RSHA used for its captured archives from all over Europe was the Silesian castle of Wölfelsdorf (now Polish Wilkanów), near Habelschwerdt (now Polish Bystrzyca Kłodzka). That was the final Silesian hideaway for the voluminous archival plunder that Amt VII had assembled during the Nazi regime. The RSHA had managed to destroy many of their most compromising office records, but fortunately most of their archival loot survived, only to be captured a second time by Soviet authorities. I first found documents about its capture among Soviet Main Archival Administration (Glavarkhiv) files in Moscow. Then, quite by chance, a Ukrainian colleague tipped me off to a file about one of the Ukrainian CP trophy scouts who had first found the site and had sent part of the RSHA foreign archival loot to Kiev. Stalin’s security chief Beria also ordered that portion sent to Moscow. While most of the RSHA records of their own wartime operations found both by the Americans and by the Poles after the war are now in the Bundesarchiv in Berlin-Lichterfelde, two large fonds in RGVA comprise SD (Security Service), and Gestapo files (fonds 500k and 501k) that also contribute to this story, as component offices of the RSHA. Some of the files in both these record groups had earlier been turned over to the security services in the GDR, and some had been transferred to other Soviet archives. Among those RSHA files remaining in RGVA are reports of specific SD seizures of numerous important private archives and libraries in Paris. However, many SD reports on the French Communist Party and left-wing French intellectuals brought to Moscow were transferred to the former Central CP archive, and today still remain in its successor, the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI).30

29 See Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, “Twice Plundered” or “Twice Saved”? Identifying Russia’s Trophy Archives and the Loot of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies 15, no. 2 (Fall 2001), pp. 191–244; updated in a Russian edition. 30 I have been able to note specific files transferred and made numerous attempts to gain access, while Kirill Anderson was still director of RGASPI. He informed me that those files were never processed in the former Communist Party Archive. More recently many of them are being made available digitally by RGASPI.

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Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg Some of the archival loot of the RSHA that ended the war in Wölfelsdorf and was then brought to Moscow had first been seized by a rival German agency in Paris, namely the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) (Reichsleiter Rosenberg Task Force, or Operational Staff). The ERR was the main Nazi Party agency founded specifically for looting cultural valuables – especially books and archives – during the war, headed by Estonia-born Alfred Rosenberg, who simultaneous headed the Ministry for Occupied Eastern Territories. In France, the ERR was even better known for its role in the seizure and shipment of important art collections owned by French Jews – and a few from Belgium – that were processed in the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris for shipment to the special ERR repositories for art in Bavaria and nearby Austria.31 Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring was the instigator of that whole operation, from which his personal art collection likewise benefitted.32 Most of the records of those unique ERR art operations, together with the seized works of art – ended the war in those special repositories, where they were found by the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives officers (MFA&A) of the United States Army.33 In 1943, the ERR Special Staff Visual Arts (Sonderstab Bildende Kunst) under Robert Scholtz evacuated from Berlin to the castle of Kogl in Austria, which the ERR also used as one of its repositories for looted art. Füssen was another operation center in Bavaria, as gateway to the castle Neuschwanstein. Other ERR divisions involved with the seizure of libraries and archives as well as major ERR research operations, however, were evacuated to the isolated Silesian city of Ratibor (now Polish Racibórz), south of Kattowitz (now Polish Katowice). Some of the ERR records from the early years of the war held in Berlin were lost in a November 1943 bombing raid, but others were transferred to the Silesian center. In a number of cases in Paris, the ERR Library Staff seized archives from the same individuals whose art collections were seized by their counterpart the Visual Arts Staff. However, many of the archives seized by the ERR already in Berlin were turned over to the RSHA, and so did not remain with the ERR. Apparently the Visual Arts Staff did not take over the archives of families whose cap-

31 Cultural Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg: Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume, at www.errproject.org/jeudepaume (accessed April 2014). 32 See Nancy H. Yeide, Beyond the Dreams of Avarice. The Herman Goering Collection, Dallas 2009; see www.goeringart.‌com. See also the 2012 DHM Göring Database, compiled by Hans-Christian Lohr, at www.dhm.de/datenbank/goering (both accessed April 2014), although so far based only on earlier wartime catalogues up to 1945. 33 See Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Reconstructing the Record of Nazi Cultural Plunder. A Survey of the Dispersed Archives of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), Amsterdam 2011, at www.errpro­ ject.org/survey.‌php or http://socialhistory.org/en/publications/reconstructing-record-nazi-cultural-plunder (both accessed April 2014). See the 2014 revised “Introduction” and other updated sections of that volume under ‘ERR Archival Survey’ at www.errproject.org.



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Fig. 13: The “Martyr’s room” in the Jeu de Paume, Paris, showing modern paintings seized by the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce (ERR). From 1940 to 1944 the Jeu de Paume building was used to store art works looted by the Nazis in France.

tured art was sent to ERR repositories, although they did take some of the art books for their own research. The works of art from France found in Germany and Austria at war’s end were processed for restitution (i. e. repatriation) to their countries of origin under United States Army auspices in the Central Collecting Points in Munich (MCCP) and Wiesbaden (WCCP). As an aid in such processing, MCCP set up a special Document Center, which received much related documentation, most of which is preserved with the MCCP records. Records of restitution efforts from both MCCP and WCCP are now divided between the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz and the United States National Archives in College Park, Maryland. In the latter case, digitized images are now on the Internet site of the vendor Fold3.‌com.34 Those in Koblenz are described in a new Bundesarchiv finding aid already on the web, but the files themselves have still not

34 See the MCCP and WCCP coverage in both Koblenz and NACP in Grimsted 2011 (as fn. 33); the latter coverage is updated to include Fold3.‌com links for those from NACP at www.errproject.org.

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been prepared for Internet access.35 The French records of restitution to individual owners and related claims have recently been opened to the public at the new facility for the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs in La Courneuve outside of Paris,36 but are not available on the Internet, given French privacy laws. Nevertheless, what did come to Moscow were at least some personal papers of some of the same families or individuals whose art was processed in the Jeu de Paume – individuals involved in the French art scene as artists, dealers, or collectors. The ERR was responsible for many of those seizures. Some came through the RSHA Amt VII archival center in Wölfelsdorf. But others that had remained with the ERR and had been evacuated to Ratibor, came via Kiev as part of the ERR records captured by Ukrainians. All of the various French, German, and other archival materials captured by the ERR that came to Kiev, together with those parts of the ERR’s own agency records, were sorted out for transfer to Moscow. Only those of the ERR itself remained in Kiev. After arrival in Moscow in the early to mid-1950s, the various fragmentary foreign (non-ERR) files were joined to other fonds from the same individuals or institutions in the Special Archive. I found lists of the some eighty different fonds sent to Moscow from Kiev among the formerly secret series of Ukrainian archival administration records that remain in Kiev. Most of them were from private individuals, although a few from Jewish communities such as the one in Bordeaux. But I also found that some files that archivists had not identified had been destroyed in Kiev in 1963. Only a few stray documents from the records of ERR French art operations remain with the ERR records in Kiev, although actually the most extensive lists of archives and libraries the ERR seized in the Paris area are now to be found in one of those Kiev files. The digitized Kiev-held records of the ERR –  the largest collection remaining anywhere – are now on the Internet from the Ukrainian state archive (TsDAVO); an English-language finding aid is now in process, but the initial description is available only in Russian.37 Other personal papers captured by the ERR that remained with the captured library collections from Ratibor were then seized a second time near Katowice, with over one million books from the ERR Ratibor center, and shipped to Minsk. Almost all the captured foreign archives that came to Minsk with the books were processed by Belarus SSR archival authorities and likewise transferred to the Special Archive in Moscow in the 1950s. Thus, French personal fonds held in the Special Archive in Moscow combined files from Minsk and Kiev (presumably all from the ERR) as well as

35 See the Bundesarchiv 2009 finding aid for Bestand Treuhandverwaltung von Kulturgut bei der Oberfinanzdirektion München B 323 at http://startext.‌net-build.‌de:8080/barch (accessed April 2014); see Grimsted 2011 (as fn. 33), Section 3.2.1. 36 See the French coverage in Grimsted 2011 (as fn. 33). 37 See the section for Ukraine ibid.



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Fig. 14: Patricia Kennedy Grimsted looking at the German ERR files (fond 1401k) today preserved in the Special Archive in Moscow.

those from Wölfelsdorf.38 The most important shipment with the Ratibor library holdings came to Minsk in a huge convoy of 54 freight cars from nearby Katowice (Silesia) carrying over one million books (from all over Europe) in November 1945. The hundreds of thousands of books the ERR had seized in France and other countries stayed in Minsk, where most of them remain to this day. These include massive collections of French books, seized from predominantly Jewish sources or East European émigrés in France.39 The German ERR files that came to Minsk with the foreign files were much scantier than those that went to Kiev, and were all forwarded to Moscow in 1955. They now constitute the small group of ERR records held in RGVA (Fond 1401k). They contain no documents relating to ERR seizures of books, archives, or Judaica in France or elsewhere in Western Europe, or French art.40 (Fig. 14) Coming back to more details about the French archives that were in Moscow: First, as for those of French provenance, most have gone home since the end of the Soviet Union and the 1992 French-Russian agreement on the restitution of French archives, although some fragments remain. The Russians have not been willing to

38 My chapter on the ERR in Returned from Russia (as fn. 1) describes this whole process in more detail. 39 See Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, The Road to Minsk for Western “Trophy” Books: Twice Plundered but Not Yet “Home from the War”, in: Libraries & Culture 39, no. 4 (Fall 2004), pp. 351–404; also published in Russian. 40 See the brief description of Fond 1401k in Grimsted 2011 (as fn. 33).

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simply hand over those remaining, because they are still anxious to receive more “compensation” from France in terms of files of Russian provenance in France – archival Rossica, as they are often termed. RGVA now retains the finding aids (opisi) for the fonds returned, although as mentioned above, copies of the French opisi were purchased by the French in 1992. RGVA also retains microfilms of selected files that have been returned to their country of provenance; most of those microfilm holdings are indicated in the charts listing returned French fonds in the appendix to the French chapter in Returned from Russia. All of the various categories of French archives are included there, and where possible we included much more complete descriptions and finding aids that have been prepared in France since their return. These fonds are now also listed on the Quai d’Orsay website.41 In closing, it should be emphasized that Soviet agents were only seizing archives, libraries, art, and other cultural treasures in Eastern Europe, including East Germany, in the path of the Red Army. Hence, in terms of materials of French provenance, their seizures would only have been such as had been seized earlier during the occupation by the Germans and that somehow or other had made their way to Germany. So far, we have found no evidence of French art among the trophy collections in Russia, although certainly it is possible that some art sold during the war to German collections could have been seized by the Soviets along with German collections evacuated to the East and thus could have later been brought to the USSR.42 Indeed many private German collections were evacuated from the Berlin area in 1943 to Silesia. Some that were not found by trophy scouts under the Red Army undoubtedly remain in Poland.

Appendix Personal papers of owners of art collections processed by the ERR in the Jeu de Paume, Paris, and other documentation in RGVA relating to the French art scene Relatively few personal or family papers from France were from individuals involved with the art scene, but eight individuals or families can be identified (in addition to several members of the Rothschild family), whose art collections were seized and processed by the ERR in the Jeu de Paume in Paris, and whose archives also came to Moscow. More information about the art that the ERR registered in Paris will be found in the Jeu de Paume Database on the website of the Holocaust Memorial Museum

41 See fn. 23, French Foreign Ministry website. 42 Hector Feliciano in his The Lost Museum suggested that one painting held by the Pushkin Museum came from the Jeu de Paume, but so far Marc Masurovsky has been unable to verify the allegation.



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in Washington, DC, directed by Marc Masurovsky.43 All of the French archives listed below were returned to France. A chart indicating other details and their current locations is published in Returned from Russia, and is also found on the website of the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs (MAEE). Most of those considered to be of German-Jewish provenance remain in Moscow, even though the papers were seized in Paris from German Jews having emigrated to France and been stripped of German citizenship. Most of the papers in the fonds listed do not relate to the art collections of the individuals involved. Nonetheless, these papers may be of interest in tracking down more information about the collectors, and because these twice-captured archives serve to remind us of the extent to which French Jews of various professions and persuasions were robbed of their property and family memories during the Nazi era. Insofar as is known, none of the art from and of these families – French or German – came to the Soviet Union, because most of the art seized went to the ERR art repositories in Bavaria or nearby Austria and was returned to France from the Munich Central Collecting Point under OMGUS. Archives seized by the ERR, however, frequently moved in different directions from artworks or library books, and the few examples cited here concern those that migrated across the continent and were then subjected to a second seizure by the Red Army and Soviet archival authorities after the war.

Archives since returned to France Léon Braunschwicg (1869–1944): a leading French philosophy professor at the Sorbonne. The archive was Fond 279 in TsGOA. Cécile Braunschwicg (1877–1946): wife of Léon Braunschwicg, was an important feminist, an under-secretary of state for Education, and president of the French Union for Women’s Rights. Her archive was Fond 280 in TsGOA. 39 works of art from their collection were processed in the Jeu de Paume. Benjamin Crémieux (1888–1944): author, literary critic, and translator, a resistance fighter during the war, died in Buchenwald. Six art objects were processed by the ERR in the Jeu de Paume. The archive was Fond 279; some microfilms remain in RGVA. Michel Georges-Michel (pseudonym of Georges Dreyfus, 1883–1985): painter and writer. 42 pieces of art were processed by the ERR in the Jeu de Paume. The archive was Fond 227; some microfilms remain in RGVA.

43 Cultural Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (as fn. 31).

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Sylvain Lévi (1863–1935): Orientalist and Indologist, professor at the École normale supérieure and the Collège de France. Three crates of art objects were processed by the ERR in the Jeu de Paume. The archive was Fond 231; some microfilms remain in RGVA. Georges Mandel (pseudonym of Louis Rothschild, 1885–1944): journalist and politician. Resistance figure during the occupation, shot by Vichy militia near Paris. Four art objects were processed by the ERR in the Jeu de Paume. The archive was Fond 216; some microfilms remain in RGVA. Vincent de Moro-Giafferi (1878–1956): French attorney. Seven art objects were processed by the ERR in the Jeu de Paume. The archive was Fond 55. Joseph Reinach (1856–1921): French lawyer, journalist, and politician. When seized by the ERR, the Joseph Reinach Collection was owned by his daughter Julie Goujon (1885–1971). Only three items were processed by the ERR in the Jeu de Paume, but the family claims there were many more. The archive was Fond 217; some microfilms remain in RGVA. Paul Rosenberg (1881–1959): French art dealer who emigrated to the United States. Paul Rosenberg archives from the period 1906–1928 came to Moscow and were returned to Paris, and subsequently to heirs in New York; they are now deposited in the Archives of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).44 Questions remain about the fate of the Rosenberg archives from the crucial period of the 1930s, before his art collections were seized and processed in the Jeu de Paume by the ERR. There is no evidence that any files remain in Moscow, or that the ERR Art group was working with captured archives, but it is possible some were hidden in France, or others destroyed. Rothschild Family: business archives and family papers of many members of the Rothschild family came to Moscow from both French and Austrian branches of the family. Most of those materials have now been returned to the family and are available in The Rothschild Archive in London. Few, if any documents relate to the art collections processed by the Jeu de Paume, or seized and transferred to other Nazi collections during the war and occupation.45

44 See more details at www.moma.org/learn/resources/archives/EAD/PaulRosenbergf (accessed April 2014); see also the recent popular biography of Paul Rosenberg by his granddaughter Anne Sinclair, 21 rue La Boétie, Paris 2012, Eng. trans. My Grandfather’s Gallery, London 2014. 45 See the chart in Grimsted 2011 (as fn. 33), Appendix 1, for a full list of the Rothschild family collections processed in the Jeu de Paume.



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Archives in RGVA concerning German exiles in France related to the art scene August Liebmann Mayer (1885–1944, pseudonym Konrad Woog; alias Henri Antoine): German-born art historian (Darmstadt), Munich museum curator, fled to France in 1936, murdered in Auschwitz on or around March 12, 1944. Four works of art owned by Mayer were processed by the ERR in the Jeu de Paume. A few of Mayer’s papers remain in RGVA, Fond 1399k, 1 opis (inventory), 10 files, 1918–1919, but none from the NS period (see Christian Fuhrmeister and Susanne Kienlechner’s article in this volume).46 Eugen Spiro (1874–1972): Silesian-born German painter, graphic artist, illustrator, and professor, who emigrated to France in 1935, lived in Paris until 1940, then emigrated to the United States in 1941. 138 works of art owned by Spiro were processed by the ERR in the Jeu de Paume. Most of Spiro’s archive that came to Moscow and constituted Fond  644 in TsGOA (42 files) were turned over to the DDR during the Soviet period. Seven files remain in Fond 644k in RGVA, namely clippings and printed items.47 The post-1940 Spiro papers (1940–1972), after his emigration to the United States, are held in the M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, State University of New York at Albany.48 Paul Westheim (1886–1963): German art historian and critic, journalist, emigrated to Paris in 1933, but later fled to Mexico. A major group of Westheim papers (1927– 1940), seized by the Germans in Paris remain in RGVA, Fond 602k, one opis (inventory), 62 files, predominantly from his period in Paris, 1933–1940 (see articles by Ines Rotermund-Reynard and Keith Holz in this volume).49

46 See also the additional archival sources listed in the recent study by Teresa Posada Kubissa, Au‑ gust L. Mayer y la pintura española. Ribera, Goya, El Greco, Velázquez, Madrid 2010, esp. pp. 453–456. 47 An inventory (opis’) of files remaining in Moscow is available at the Sonderarchiv website: www. sonderarchiv.de/fonds/fond0644.‌pdf (accessed April 2014, as well as the following links). 48 See the online finding aid for Ger-086 (2007) at http://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/ ger086.‌htm. 49 A German language version of the RGVA opis’ (inventory) for this fond is available on the Sonderarchiv Internet website at www.sonderarchiv.de/fonds/fond0602.‌pdf.

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German security service archives – RSHA (SD‑Gestapo) Fond 500k – Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), 6 opisi, 3009 files50 Fond 501k – Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt (Gestapo), 3 opisi, 893 files51 Many important files in these fonds are badly arranged and inadequately described, and hence difficult for researchers to use. They really belong integrated with those in Berlin, where the Bundesarchiv has been compiling an impressive database on RSHA records. Among the highlights of those in Moscow are a few documents relating to the Special French Information Center – Auswertungsselle Frankreich, in Berlin. Fond 500k/2/215 – Register of records of receipts in Berlin from France (August 1940 – September 1942), pictured above, but not relating to art. Most important files with SD reports from France from the 1930s and in the early years of the Occupation were moved from the Osobyi Archive to the Central Party Archive (now RGASPI) in the 1950s and 1960s, because they had files on the French Communist Party. They are now being digitized for Internet access. Files in the RSHA records for library and archival seizures in Paris from Russian émigrés by the SD Hauptamt – for example: Pavel Miliukov, whose voluminous papers from Paris are now in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), along with others parts of his papers received from Prague. And Mikhail Ossorgin [Ilin], whose personal papers seized in Paris are now in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI). The SD (Security Service, Sicherheitsdienst) was not involved with art seizures in France, but they may have been interested in some of the individuals who were! Russian documents in RGVA on Soviet seizures in the basements of the bombed out RSHA building in Berlin (1945), part of the library and personal papers, including original music scores, belonging to pianist Artur Rubinstein from Paris, but that seizure did not include any art. Fond 1524k – Materials Transferred from the Pushkin Museum Finally, in relation to looted art during the war in RGVA, mention should be made of a group of the original so‑called Linz Files that were found in the Soviet Zone of Occupation in Germany, which when first brought to Moscow went to the Pushkin

50 See the German translated opisi at www.sonderarchiv.de/fonds/fond0500.‌pdf. 51 See the German translated opisi at www.sonderarchiv.de/fonds/fond0501.‌pdf.



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Museum and were later transferred to the Special Archive, where they remain somewhat hidden away within two opisi and a total of 202 file units. Opis’ 1: now constitutes primarily files from the Wittenberg Archive, 352 units of which were transferred to the GDR, but nos. 1–127 remain (1354–1599, most from the 15th c.). Opis’  2, files 1–16: consists of some important pre-1940 catalogues of the Dresden Gallery, most from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from different divisions of the museum. Opis’ 2, files 17–31: consists of files from the Museum of the Book in Leipzig, no. 31 consisting of a list of books from the Bondi Library.

Sonderauftrag Linz Opis’  2, files 32–64:52 consists of acquisition correspondence for the Linz Museum, followed by some miscellaneous catalogues from museums and private collections, most from Germany and Austria. In addition, for example, no. 37 from Italy; no. 38 from Denmark; and 39 from Brussels; no. 40 for the Koenigs Collection (Netherlands), nos. 41–42 from Hungary; and no. 45 from Breslau museums and libraries. Among other documents in no. 50 are original plans for art storage areas in Altaussee. Copies of most of these materials, acquired by the United States on microfilm are also found in the Bundesarchiv Koblenz (fond B323) and the MCCP series with the OMGUS records (RG 260) in NACP. Of special interest to France, are two files in Opis’ 2, one for a Special Account for France, 1942–1944 (opis’ 2, file 43), and a second on the Adolphe Schloss Collection, 1943–1944 (opis’ 2, file 44), a typed carbon copy of the catalogue.

52 Partial listings for Opis’ 2 are found on the German website www.sonderarchiv.de/fonds/ fond1524.‌pdf.

Lifting the Veil on Moscow’s Secret Archives Vladimir Korotayev, deputy director of the Special Archive in Moscow is interviewed by Kerstin Holm, Moscow correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. A subdivision of the Russian Military Archives, the Special Archive is located at 29 Makarov Street in the northwestern part of Moscow.1 The dull gray, Neo-Constructivist concrete building from the 1960s is open weekdays from 10:00 a. m. to 5:00 p. m. (Fridays to 4:00 p. m.), with the exception of “cleaning day”, the first working day of the month. The windowless storage silo behind it was added in the early 1980s. A policewoman is sitting at the turnstile in the entrance hall identical to that of so many other administrative buildings of that era. Graceful as a gazelle in her short skirt and bulletproof vest, her blood-red fingernails shining with silver sequins, she has no idea how to find the deputy director of the Archive, Vladimir Korotayev, with whom I have an appointment. So I call him on my cell phone, and Korotayev comes downstairs and personally ushers me through the barrier. Since his office on the second floor has been in the process of renovation for some time now, he leads me into the conference room on a diagonal across the way. A yellowed cardboard binder is lying on the table. Kerstin Holm: Mr. Korotayev, how many of the World War II trophy documents which once made up this Special Archive are still to be found under this roof? Vladimir Korotayev: The Special Archive, established in 1946 by the NKVD, the national secret service, was originally planned for a period of only three to five years, until the post-war legal issues had been clarified. It comprised about 1.5 million files, mostly from Germany and Poland. Then the Cold War began and it turned into a permanent fixture. However, during the post-Stalin thaw, many of the documents which had been brought to Moscow were given back to the Socialist sister states of Central Europe, to East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Rumania – all together a quarter million files. Some files were also returned to Austria and France at that time. The big wave of restitution started after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the beginning of the 1990s, 46 death registry volumes of concentration camp prisoners were returned by us from the Special Archive to the museum of Auschwitz. These were originals with more than one million names. Another approximately one million files went to Paris within the framework of a bilateral exchange program. Unfortunately, this took place rather hastily. Actually, included in those files were some splendid intelligence reports from the period between the World Wars. And because of the

1 This address is that of the administrative building. The Central Special Archive (see photos) and its reading room are nearby.

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 Kerstin Holm

Fig. 15: Sketchbook with landscape watercolors found in Hitler’s desk in the Reich Chancellery, conserved in the Special Archive in Moscow.

haste at that time, we only were able to photograph a very small number of them. Later, we returned 1101 files to the Principality of Liechtenstein and 419 to the Rothschilds, both in exchanges: the former for the archive of the Tsarist lawyer Nikolai Sokolov (1882–1924), who documented the murder of Nicholas II and his family and then took part in the retreat of the White Army to Vladivostok; and the latter for the letters of Tsar Alexander II to his morganatic second wife, Ekaterina Dolgorukova. Some things initially stored here were later sent to other Russian archives. For example, the fragment of Hitler’s skull and piece of the sofa on which he shot himself are in the State Archive at 17 Pirogovka. The sword belonging to Puyi, the Japanese puppet emperor in Manchuria, landed in the Military Museum. Puyi was interned during the Japanese military campaign. And our proud collection of Nazi medals can now be viewed in the Anti-Fascists Museum. K. H.: Strange as it may seem, in the Anti-Fascists Museum in Krasnogorsk. Russian visitors admire the Nazi medals almost reverently. People stare in wonder at the variety, at how every branch of service, every subdivision had its own special symbolism, and also at the austere, laconic design. But what are the “hits” for your visitors these days?



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Fig. 16: Vladimir Ivanovich Korotayev, deputy director of the Special Archive in Moscow, holding the briefcase of Walther Rathenau.

V. K.: Most of the orders are for files concerning Jewish organizations, German concentration camps, and Masonic lodges. And of course, for the history of the Third Reich. Among the most spectacular pieces that we have here are Hitler’s guest books, eight diary notebooks written for Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler’s appointment calendar, and the inventory catalogue for the unrealized Führer museum in Linz. All of these items have already been published. Furthermore, we have a sketchbook with watercolors of landscapes, which was found in Hitler’s desk in the Reich Chancellery. The paintings don’t seem to be by Hitler, but then again they are unsigned. They haven’t yet had an expert appraisal. (Fig. 15) Also, the already-published literary estate and even the briefcase of Walther Rathenau, Foreign Minister during the Weimar Republic murdered in 1922, are here with us. By now, we have made copies of the documents and have sent the whole collection to Germany. Incidentally, the Rathenau heirs, who as far as I know live in Switzerland, would be able to apply for the restitution of the originals as family relics. Of course, in accordance with our restitution laws, they would have to pay the costs of conservation. The Rathenau archive was confiscated by the Nazis and is not a legal possession of the Nazi state. (Fig. 16) K. H.: But the Russian papers that you have lying here on the table – they don’t look like war trophies. V. K.: These are copies of protocols of the interrogations of German prisoners of war. Since 1960, the files of the Ministry of the Interior’s Central Administration for Prisoners of War and Internees have been assigned to the Special Archive. For the most part, they contain the prisoner’s vital statistics, biographical details, reports of transfers, sicknesses, repatriation, or his death and burial place. Three million personal files. Some are still classified as secret – in most cases, only because the examination com-

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missions of the secret service and the Ministry of the Interior are understaffed and overworked, I must add. For this reason, they are often pretty slow in getting their work done. I’ve found some extremely interesting testimonies by Wehrmacht soldiers, Soviet prisoners of war who had belonged to Commando Künsberg, assigned by the Foreign Ministry to requisition cultural assets in the regions occupied by Germany. These soldiers, von Ribbentrop’s trophy hunters, were theoretically searching primarily for documents, whereas Reichsleiter Rosenberg’s task force confiscated art. In reality, they were often competing with each other. These still unpublished records testify to the fact that the Künsberg units not only took the library holdings of the Academy of Sciences in Kiev, but they also looted the Kharkov Painting Gallery, as well as taking off with Chinese silk wallpaper and furniture from the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo. Unfortunately, the material has not yet been declassified and still can’t be published. But there are also very extraordinary records of the interrogations of collaborators … K. H.: Are these life stories of soldiers between the two fronts what impress you most in these documents you’ve stored? V. K.: Probably. There were many on both sides who were dissatisfied with their political leaders. Especially interesting are the memories of the German Abwehr-officer Marcel Zink, born in 1901 in Moscow, who wrote his autobiography in Russian during his captivity. Marcel Zink also spoke English and French. He later lived in Riga and Petrograd and studied philosophy in Königsberg. In the 1930s, he came to Germany. After the Germans marched into the Soviet Union, he was active as an interpreter for the Special Task Forces Abwehr, which organized terrorist and sabotage attacks against the infrastructure of the Red Army, employing defectors and recruiting prisoners of war. There were many Russian, Ukrainian, and Caucasian volunteers for this. At the interrogations and in his manuscript, he declared that he had always opposed the German policies towards the Russians. These Special Forces dressed and armed themselves like Soviet military servicemen and partisans – they called it full camouflage – in order to deceive the true soldiers and partisans and kill them. War is war. The way of life and kind of fighting of such Special Forces was relatively free. Somehow these people trusted each other. When in danger, there wasn’t much else they could do. In this way, sometimes friendships came about. Once Zink’s group, led by Colonel-Lieutenant Krakov, took on a new member – a well-educated major general, obviously of nobility, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of Nicholas II. Zink didn’t believe this was true, thought he was making it up. But the man’s intellectual prowess was supposedly extraordinary and impressive – his knowledge of poetry, too. But, no later than the first night, he was shot by Colonel-Lieutenant Krakov. Supposedly he had attempted to flee. The truth of the matter was, Zink thought, that Krakov had been worried that the new member would one day take over his position. In 1954, Zink died in a POW-camp.



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K. H.: It’s amazing how a war can create a bond with a country! An uncle of the German historian Gerd Koenen, Friedrich Wilhelm Bosch, a convinced Nazi, was a Wehrmacht doctor and landed in Soviet captivity in Stalingrad. When, in 1953, he was finally freed and came home he had become a great fan of Russia. As a country doctor in Hesse, he had primarily Russian books filling his shelves. His patients called him the “Russia Doctor.” … But, who filled out all these catalogue cards so painstakingly in pen and ink? V. K.: They’re from the 1960s; shortly after that they started being typed. Every once in a while, among these handwritten cards, I find some that I myself filled out as a young man, in carefully shaped longhand, as was expected. My first time at the Archive was after finishing my philosophy studies. I lived here in the neighborhood, and they needed someone who could answer the questions of the Red Cross, which was trying to get information about the fate of some prisoner of war or missing person. Every day, piles of letters arrived. I would send, if we had it, the biographical data of the person in question, or write back that we couldn’t find anything. The average workload was 54 letters a day. I composed hundreds of thousands of them. At night I would dream about inquiries and letters, inquiries and letters. I remember when in 1991 – when the Soviet Union was falling apart – the then director of the Archive said that now such inquiries would be a thing of the past. But the flood of mail was yet to come. Just last week, an older couple visited the Archive to research the fate of the woman’s father. They were welcomed personally by our director, and we actually found all the files. K. H.: A large part of the trophy documents and papers which fell into the hands of the Red Army when they marched into Germany have to do with the Gestapo, the concentration camps, the Ministries of the Interior, Justice, and Propaganda. These also served the Soviet prosecutors as evidence in the post-war court cases against Nazi war criminals. But also the interrogation records of the prisoners of war made the Special Archive a treasure trove for war criminal trials. V. K.: Yes, especially in the 1960s and 1970s we supplied Germany and Austria with material from the prisoner of war interrogations for trials against “old Nazis” – former Nazis still in responsible government positions. Of course, everything had to be cleared first with the secret services. Their assignments always had top priority. Incidentally, with the help of the interrogation records, long after the war, hidden stocks of weapons and food were found. They belonged to secret Special Forces like Operation Zeppelin, but were sometimes also used by other agent networks. The whole time the KGB just behaved toward the Archive as would a consumer who above all was to be served, and because of whom everything else had to take second place. It made no investment, didn’t train anyone here, didn’t organize any lectures on its own initiative. Only sometimes older secret service agents would be given jobs with us, when for health reasons they could no longer be used otherwise.

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Fig. 17: The shell of the Special Archive, built by Gulag prisoners and initially intended for the Gulag Archive (photo ca.1941).

Fig. 18: The Special Archive (photo ca.1950). German prisoners finished the construction of the building, which finally became the archive of German trophy documents.



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K. H.: You shouldn’t have told me that. In my eyes, you were the bearer of secrets and belonged to a kind of invisible Nibelungen world. V. K.: In reality, the Archive was a microworld, with everyone hectically spinning around inside of it while on the outside no one noticed a thing. Every colleague had to sign a promise never to communicate his archival knowledge to anyone. This general secrecy did not come to an end until the 1990s. When the Archive became accessible, the first thing that happened was that it was stormed by all the scholars in the world. In the 1990s, sometimes there wasn’t a single seat left in our reading rooms. Since then it has become more quiet. Some files have been returned, and many are electronically accessible. But for me, too, it is difficult to find young archivists. They don’t earn much, and there isn’t much funding for publishing… K. H.: … and in fact, a completely different archive should be standing here … and you, in fact, wanted to become a philosopher. V. K.: Yes, even before the Second World War, it had been decided to build a Gulag Archive here. Gulag prisoners had already constructed the shell of the building; only the roof was missing. After the war, German prisoners of war also worked on the building for the trophy documents. That was somehow fateful and symbolic. At that time, by the way, this wasn’t Moscow  – it was the village of Nikolskoye. Cows and chickens wandered around here. Only the complex where this building now stands was fenced off and always dark. I grew up here. As a child, I frequently played with friends around here. We always had to make a big loop around the closed-off area. There was no sign. We thought this place was one of the secret facilities, of which there were many. (Fig. 17/Fig. 18.) I really didn’t want to become an archivist. I loved the philosophy of aesthetics. It was somehow fate. But I still remember today the wisdom of a philosopher from my student days. The gist of it was that there’s one type of person who feels it would be a catastrophe to lose his property and his health. And there’s another kind for whom it would be a catastrophe not to have any worthwhile reason to lose his property and his health. For that person, it would be terrible to live like the first. Of course, there are always fewer of the second type than of the first. But in my experience, and the files attest to it, there must have been more of them around before and during the war than there are among us today.

Isabelle le Masne de Chermont

The Arthur Goldschmidt File in the Archive of the Direction de la Sûreté: French Police Archives Shed Light on Paul Graupe & Cie (Paris, 1937–1939) In 2011, two very timely exhibitions drew attention to the interest of police archives for historians of the contemporary world. The first, organized at the Deutsche Historisches Museum in Berlin and entitled “Ordnung und Vernichtung – Die Polizei im NS‑Staat” (Order and Annihilation – The Police and the Nazi Regime), showed how the police were an essential instrument in the power of the National Socialist regime, notably by implementing the persecution of political and ideological opponents of the Reich.1 A few months later, an exhibit in Paris presented by the National Archives at the Hôtel de Soubise and entitled “Fichés? Photographie et identification 1850–1960” (On record? Photography and Identification 1850–1960), dealt with the identification procedures based on photography that were in use from the mid-nineteenth century up to the Algerian War.2 In both instances, the name files constituted by the police, German and French alike, bear witness to an undeniable skill in gathering numerous diverse and often criss-crossing bits of information on persons we otherwise know little about. The difficulty of gathering a minimum of personal information is an obstacle confronting research today on the provenance of artworks, and last spring this lack of sources was a preoccupation for the research team working on the biography of a Berlin auctioneer during the period between the two World Wars, Paul Graupe (1881– 1953).3 Thus the theme of the conference – what the “exiled” archives tell us about the exile of individuals – was an excellent stimulus for asking what certain French police archives that had transited through Moscow might tell us about Paul Graupe & Cie (Paul Graupe & Co.), created in Paris in 1937. I will therefore focus on what we have learned from one of these archives returned from Moscow, the records of a police service of the French Interior Ministry, the Direction de la Sûreté (Security Directorate). After describing the company under the name Paul Graupe & Cie, the role of the Direction de la Sûreté and the history of its archives, I will illustrate, by means of the file of one of the company’s associates, Arthur Gold-

1 Ordnung und Vernichtung – Die Polizei im NS‑Staat, exh. cat., Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin, Dresden 2011. 2 Fichés? Photographie et identification 1850–1960, exh cat., Archives nationales, Paris 2011. 3 Isabelle le Masne de Chermont, Patrick Golenia (coordination: Bénédicte Savoy), Paul Graupe (1881–1953). Rise, fall and exile of a major art dealer during the Nazi Period, Berlin [forthcoming].

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schmidt, the diversity of information that these archives can provide concerning family origins, professional networks – so important for the art market – and the situation of émigrés in France up to the arrival of the German troops.

Paul Graupe & Cie Paul Graupe was born in 1881 in the German city of Neu Trebbin in the region (Regierungsbezirk) of Potsdam and came from a family of poultry farmers. Slightly handicapped due to tuberculosis of the hip, he was oriented towards the book trades, first with an apprenticeship in the neighboring city of Posen, then with reputable sellers of old books – Breslauer in Berlin and Rosenthal in Munich. In 1907 he set up on his own in Berlin and soon proved his capabilities as a dealer. With a natural business sense and capacity to analyze and react, he took advantage of the development of bibliophilism and the economic uncertainties of the early 1920s, quickly learning how to benefit from fluctuations in exchange rates and trends in currency parities during a period of instability.4 From the 1930s on he also developed an auction business enabling him, as of 1935, to organize large-scale Aryanization sales, such as the Max Silberberg collection, the stock of the Oppenheimers’ Margraf Konzern and the Emma Budge inheritance (in 1937). During the 1930s a great many works passed through his hands, which is why his name frequently appears in the context of the research that has developed in the last fifteen years on the spoliation of art works during World War II. In the spring of 1937, Paul Graupe emigrated to Paris, where he set up Paul Graupe & Cie on the prestigious Place Vendôme and was known mainly for the publication of a catalog intended as an anthology of some of the most beautiful paintings and objects he had sold while still in Berlin. In May 1939 he went to Switzerland, where he lived during the beginning of the war before leaving for New York in the spring of 1941. He returned to Europe after the war and died in Baden Baden in 1953. But what did we know about Paul Graupe & Cie before consulting the archives of the Direction de la Sûreté? Most of our information came from the archives of the Tribunal de commerce de Paris (French Commercial Court) and the Commissariat général aux questions juives (General Commission for Jewish Questions). From these sources we knew that Paul Graupe was 56 years old when he arrived in Paris and had to find a way to earn a livelihood in his profession  – seller of old books and art dealer. To that end, on July 8, 1937, he created an S. A. R.L (Société à responsabilité limitée, LLC) under the name Paul Graupe & Cie, its purpose intentionally broadly defined as: Com-

4 For Paul Graupe’s activity as bookseller, see Chris Coppens, Der Antiquar Paul Graupe (1881–1953), in: Gutenberg Jahrbuch 62 (1987), pp. 255–264.



The Arthur Goldschmidt file in the archive of the direction de la Sûreté 

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merce in old and modern paintings, furniture and art of all kinds, books, drawings, commerce, publication, and in general all industrial, commercial and financial operations directly or indirectly related to the company’s activity or enabling its expansion and development.5 Capital was distributed among five associates: Isidor Riemer, Paul Graupe, Arthur Goldschmidt, Alice Reis and Käthe Simon.6 We also knew the name of another of the company’s collaborators, Ernst Jutrosinski, and had come to be interested in two other persons, Käthe Graupe, Paul’s wife, and Anne-Marie Senkel, who had worked with Graupe in Berlin and who married Arthur Goldschmidt in May, 1939. The files of the Direction de la Sûreté enabled us to fill in broad gaps in what we knew about these different persons, Arthur Goldschmidt in particular. So I will now say a few words about this precious source of information that in the second half of the twentieth century travelled from Paris to Moscow with a stop in Berlin on the way.

The Archives of the Direction de la Sûreté Returned from Moscow In France, the central police administration is under the authority of the Interior Ministry, and has been since 1818. Ancestor of today’s Police nationale, the Direction de la Sûreté was at the time responsible for the surveillance of persons. The legislative decrees of 1934 and 1935 reorganized the Sûreté générale into the Sûreté nationale, which then encompassed the whole of France’s police services, except for the Préfecture de police de Paris, which retained a special status. The Direction de la Sûreté nationale was subdivided into bureaus and dealt with very varied subjects: gambling, criminal affairs, drugs, vice, residence bans, taxes, political surveillance (communists, anarchists, etc.), surveillance of unions, counterespionage, passports, searches for individuals and expulsions. But particular attention was paid to foreigners, who were closely watched between the two wars. Thus the Sixth bureau, in charge of territorial police and foreigners, was responsible for the examination of visa requests, extensions of stay and identity cards, and could also carry out investigations when requested by other services. Its efficiency was the result of extensive fieldwork, a large network of informers and the building up of files as time went on. An essential element of this work was the constitution of name files, their use subor-

5 Tribunal de commerce de la Seine, Registre de commerce (Archives de Paris, D33U3 [1276], fol. 246). The company was registered on August 10, 1937 with the number R. C. Seine 274 381 B. 6 This information is from a small file (9 items) constituted by the Commissariat général aux questions juives (Paris, Arch. nat., AJ38 2859/36504). The amount of capital declared was 200,000 F, or 400 shares of 500 F each distributed as follows: Isidor Riemer (220 shares), Paul Graupe (80 shares), Arthur Goldschmidt (50 shares), Alice Reis (25 shares) and Käthe Simon (25 shares).

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dinate to a central record mentioning other services that might contain useful information. Police files, particularly those concerning foreigners, were of a kind that greatly interested the Reich and especially the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, Central Security Office of the Reich). The RSHA was created in 1939 from a merger of various services, among them the Gestapo, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, Security Service of the Reich) and the Sicherheitspolizei (SIPO, Security Police). It was placed under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich and in charge of carrying out the seizure of documents in all the occupied territories. Thus in France, at the end of June 1940, Captain Wiegand, a German army officer, arrived at the Interior Ministry and found the files of the Sûreté nationale “in perfect order”.7 Transferred to Germany in 1943, they were then deposited for safe-keeping in a château near the city of Böhmisch Leipa (now Česká Lípa in the Czech Republic), where the Germans had also evacuated the archives of the 2nd Bureau, the League of Human Rights, and the French Socialist Party. In early May 1945, the Red Army was ending its advance and the 7th Guards Mechanized Corps commanded by General Korchagin informed Moscow that it had found archives of the French Interior Ministry there, information considered important enough to justify the despatch of Soviet archivists on the spot. Some weeks later, the archives were transported to Moscow to be conserved in the Special Archives. They were then reclassified by subject, to correspond to the types of investigations that could be useful to the Soviet government and administration.8 The Sûreté’s archives were returned to France beginning in 1994 and are now conserved at the National Archives.9 In size, they represent approximately 6 linear kilometres (3.73 miles) of documents and consist of a Fichier central (Central File, 300 linear meters) containing 2.5 million cards corresponding to 1.5 million names, 600,000 individual police files and 55,000 files dealing with requests for identity cards and passports. Since 2003, it has been possible to consult the archives freely,

7 See Paul Paillole, Notre espion chez Hitler, Paris 1985, pp. 207–208, quoting Treff Lutetia Paris (München 1973), by Oskar Reile, Lieutenant-Colonel in 1940 in the counterespionage section of the Abwehr. 8 For the history of the archives of the Direction de la Sûreté, see Frédéric Monnier, Sophie Coeuré, Gérard Naud, Le retour de Russie des archives françaises. Le cas du fonds de la Sûreté, in: Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire, no. 45 (Jan. – Mar. 1995), and Dominique Devaux, Les archives de la Direction de la Sûreté rapatriées de Moscou, in: La Gazette des Archives, no. 176 (1997), pp. 78–85. More generally on archives transferred to Germany and then to the Soviet Union: Sophie Coeuré, La mémoire spoliée. Les archives des Français, butin de guerre nazi puis soviétique, Paris 2007, p. 267, and Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, F. J. Hoogewoud, Eric Ketelaar (eds.), Returned from Russia. Nazi Archival Plunder in Western Europe and Recent Restitution Issues, Builth Wells 2007 (with an introduction revised in October 2010). 9 The archives of the Direction de la Sûreté returned from Moscow were first conserved at the Centre des archives contemporaines in Fontainebleau; they were transferred in 2012 to the new site of the Archives nationales, in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine.



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in application of the 1997 law on archives, which stipulates a common time limit of 30 years and a reserve limit of 60 years for dossiers involving information of a private nature. To consult the archive, it is recommended simply to contact the archivists, who indicate whether a dossier under a particular name exists. One should have on hand the exact patronymic as well as any possible orthographic variations of it and the date of birth in case of possible homonymy.10

The Arthur Goldschmidt File at the Direction de la Sûreté In the summer of 2010, a search generously carried out at our request by the National Archives enabled us to establish the list of the Sûreté’s name files that could be of use to us: besides that of Paul Graupe, they found mentions of two of his associates, Käthe Simon, who had been one of his collaborators in Berlin, and Arthur Goldschmidt. They also located files on Käthe Joski, Paul Graupe’s wife, on Anne-Marie Senkel, Arthur Goldschmidt’s second wife, on Harry Goldschmidt, Arthur’s brother, and finally Ernst Jutrosinski, who had been Graupe’s employee in Berlin.11 Much to our surprise, Paul Graupe’s dossier contained less information than any of the others: only one note, established by the Customs police at Jeumont, indicating the entry into France on 17 January 1923 of “Graupe Paul, 42 years of age, bookseller, coming from Berlin and going to Paris, Hotel Mirabeau”. A single page of typewritten onion-skin paper that looked as if it had been crumpled before being returned to the file – a reminder that the incompleteness of these files can be cause for suspicion, due to their having been reclassified in Moscow. Indeed, it seems unlikely that Paul Graupe’s file should contain so little information, in particular no mention of his requests for visas or of other procedures linked to residence in Paris. The card under his name in the Central File indicates that his file was requested several times for investigations conducted by different services. Arthur Goldschmidt’s file turned out to be more fruitful. As he appears very rarely in bibliography, we had very little information on this associate of Paul Graupe & Cie when we began our research. In an article devoted to Graupe in the 1987 Gutenberg Jahrbuch, the Belgian professor Christian Coppens only noted that he was a collab-

10 For an initial presentation of the archives and useful practical information see: Archives nationales, fiche de recherche 103: Le “fonds de Moscou” aux Archives nationales at www.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/chan/chan/pdf/103-fonds-moscou.‌pdf (accessed April 2012). 11 Call numbers of these dossiers in the Archives nationales: 19940448 art 282 dos 23868 (Arthur Goldschmidt), 19940448 art 282 dos 23729 (Harry Goldschmidt), 19940449 art 6 dos 584 (Paul Graupe), 19940558 art 90 dos 7813 (Käthe Joski, épouse Graupe), 19940455 art 117 dos 10208 (Ernst Jutrosinski), 19940474 art 232 dos 22036 (Anne-Marie Senkel), 19940474 art 285 dos 27176 (Käthe Simon).

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orator of Graupe.12 Christian Nebehay mentioned him briefly in his book on the art market published in 1983 and full of colorful anecdotes, expressing admiration for his disconcerting ease in appearing in public in the company of young persons as amusing to listen to as pleasant to look at.13 Then the recent interest in spoliation in the artistic world and in particular the litigation in connection with the future of the Gutmann collection led to an investigation of the role Arthur Goldschmidt might have played in a transaction concluded in February 1941 with Karl Haberstock,14 a buyer for the museum Hitler was planning to create in the city of Linz. But that was all we knew. Nor had archive sources revealed much more information on Arthur Goldschmidt. The dossier constituted by the Commissariat général aux questions juives during the Occupation indicates that he was one of the shareholders and managers of Paul Graupe & Cie, with fifty shares, and that in the spring of 1940 – that is, before the entry of the Wehrmacht into France – he was interned in a regroupment camp as a citizen of an enemy power. A look at the dossier compiled by the French police allowed us to add quite a bit to these elements. Most of this file had been constituted on the occasion of two administrative procedures: the first undertaken in 1935 and 1936 to obtain a two-year visa renewal from the French authorities, and the second in 1940 to obtain an identity card corresponding to the status of “stateless”, for which Arthur Goldschmidt had to provide details on how he had spent the year 1939. In this dossier we also found a police report on an altercation that had taken place at the Biarritz Casino in the summer of 1938.15 Finally, as is often the case, we found a very useful recapitulation card stating name, first name, filiation, profession and address. The card also bears an identification photograph, which in many cases allows us to see the face of a person we are researching and perhaps recognize it later on in other photos found elsewhere.

12 See Coppens 1987 (as fn. 4). 13 Christian M. Nebehay evokes Paul Graupe and Arthur Goldschmidt in his book Die goldenen Sessel meines Vaters. Gustav Nebehay (1881–1935), Antiquar und Kunsthändler in Leipzig, Wien und Berlin, Wien 1983, pp. 228–231. 14 See Howard J. Trienens, Landscape with Smokestacks. The Case of the Allegedly Plundered Degas, Evanston 2000, pp. 42–43. 15 A report of the Hendaye police station, conserved in the name file of Anne-Marie Senkel, gives a detailed report on this incident in which Goldschmidt was involved and which cost him entry into gambling houses.



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The Family Milieu Some procedures required information on filiation. For Goldschmidt, information on his family was noted with precision on this same recapitulation card, where we learn that his father, Meier Goldschmidt, was born in Frankfurt in 1865 and his mother, Selma Cramer, in Würzburg in 1868. This card turned out to be of precious use to us: the name Goldschmidt is in fact so common that until then it had been difficult to locate the right Arthur in the right context. Thanks to these indications, we discovered the nature of his role in the art market. In fact, Arthur belonged to a family of dealers in Frankfurt. His grandfather, Selig Meier (1829–1896) and his brother Jacob Meier (1824–1864) founded the J. S. Goldschmidt company, which owed much of its success to the confidence of the rich collector Mayer Carl von Rothschild.16 Jacob died prematurely in 1864, but Selig worked until his death in 1896. Their children and grandchildren continued to work under the same company name, Jacob’s son Julius in particular, and Meier Selig, Arthur’s father. In addition, the daughters’ marriages contributed to an extension of their business relations: In 1876, Hélène, one of Arthur’s aunts (1858–1942), married Léon Tedesco, a Parisian art dealer. In the 1930s, the company had offices in Frankfurt, Berlin, London and New York. Arthur’s brother Harry had come to Paris at the beginning of the century and exercised the profession of broker. In a milieu where confidence was built up over years, even generations, and where family networks played an important role, Arthur Goldschmidt was a valuable addition to Paul Graupe & Cie. And for us, he was now not only the charming young man in delightful company described by Nebehay…

Arthur Goldschmidt and the Parisian Art Market In addition to information of a family nature, the French police archives can also provide useful information on the professional networks of the persons concerned: on visa or I. D. card requests it was required to name a person who could serve as guarantee. The most well-known example of this in the artistic world is Picasso’s request for an identity card in 1918, where he gave as references Ambroise Vollard, an art dealer, and Georges Braque, an artist.17 In 1935, in support of his request to the French authorities for the renewal of a two-year visa, Arthur Goldschmidt gave the names of three well-known Parisian art dealers, two of whom, Seligmann and

16 Mayer Carl von Rothschild belonged to the Neapolitan branch of the Banque Rothschild, which closed shortly after the disappearance of the Kingdom of Naples in the context of Italian unification in 1861. 17 See Pierre Daix, Armand Israël, Pablo Picasso. Dossiers de la Préfecture de Police 1901–1940, Paris 2003.

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Duveen, owned galleries internationally. The Arnold Seligmann  & Cie gallery was founded in 1912 by Arnold Seligmann and was located Place Vendôme. In addition to its own reputation, it enjoyed the prestige attached to all the Seligmann galleries since the creation in 1880 of a first Parisian shop by Jacques Seligmann (1858–1923), Arnold’s older brother. Joseph and Henry Duveen, of Dutch origin, opened a gallery in London in 1879, then in New York in 1886, then in Paris, place Vendôme, in 1907. It was their son and nephew, Joseph Duveen (1869–1939) that Goldschmidt mentioned in support of his request. Joseph had considerably broadened the scope of the gallery’s activities: with the support of renowned experts, notably Bernard Berenson, he played a major role in the building up of American private collections and was ennobled by the Queen of England in 1933. Thus the persons Arthur Goldschmidt gave as references were present on the art market at its highest level. The third name cited by Arthur was that of Edouard Jonas, son of an antiques dealer and gallery owner also on Place Vendôme. The mention of references went beyond a simple formality and could lead to further investigation. Thus in January 1936, the Préfecture de Police noted: “M. Edouard Jonas, 3 place Vendôme, in business relations with M. and Mme. Goldschmidt18, in the antiques business in Berlin, offers his guarantee; Arnold Seligmann, 25 place Vendôme, and Duveen, 25 place du Marché Saint-Honoré, consider Goldschmidt to be an honorable man, but refuse their guarantee.” When in turn Käthe Simon, Paul Graupe’s collaborator in Berlin, requested a visa in August 1938, she also gave Arnold Seligmann as a reference, and as a second name, a Parisian dealer, François Kleinberger19, a Jew of Hungarian origin, owner of a gallery in Paris with a branch in New York he had opened in 1927. His professional network was thus also that of the art market. The relations of Jutrosinski, the bibliographer of the Paul Graupe company in Berlin, appear to be of another nature. The names he cites in support of his request for recognition of his refugee status in 1936 are linked with the world of books: the writer and critic Pierre Jean Jouve, his ex‑wife Andrée Jouve, whom he had divorced in 1925, and a bookseller on the rue de Tournon, Marie-Rose Thomas. Jutrosinski also mentions an influential person in the German emigration in Paris, the journalist Leopold Schwarzchild, whose personal links with the Graupe couple we know about from other sources: it was he who pronounced the eulogy at the funeral of Käthe Graupe,20 who died in New York in 1945, recalling that it was the Graupes who had made it pos-

18 Arthur Goldschmidt was married at the time to Marthe Mitterhauser, born in Cologne in 1896, and who he had married in April 1924 in Berlin. 19 On Kleinberger, and particularly on his archives, see Geneviève É. Tellier, Léopold II et le marché de l’art américain. Histoire d’une vente singulière, Bruxelles 2010. 20 Leopold Schwartzschild, Käthe Graupe. Eine Gedenkrede, New York 1945.



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sible for his wife Vally to make a precipitous departure from Berlin in February 1933 to escape the interrogations following the burning of the Reichstag. This information, limited by time to what could be gleaned from files related to Paul Graupe & Cie, convinced us that more systematic searches could contribute to greater knowledge of the networks innervating the art market during that period.

The Internment of Arthur Goldschmidt in 1939 The last dated document in the Goldschmidt dossier is a letter of January 16th 1940, in which he requests a change of identity card and gives a number of facts concerning his situation during the year 1939. We learn that Goldschmidt had been stripped of German nationality through the collective decree of 14 April  1939, which however, in the eyes of the French authorities, did not exempt him from conformity with the provisions introduced at the start of the war stipulating that all German nationals over 17 and under 55 years of age were to present themselves at regroupment centers. Goldschmidt, born October 3rd 1891, was 47 years old on the first of September 1939, date of France’s entry into the war: thus on the 13th of that month he went to the Parisian regroupment center at the Yves de Manoir stadium in Colombes, and three days later was sent to the Villerbon regroupment center in the center of France. On September 15th, Anne-Marie Goldschmidt, whom he had married on May 8th of that year and who had also lost her German nationality due to marriage, gave her passport and her husband’s to the Swedish legation, which represented German interests in Paris. At the end of September, Anne-Marie Goldschmidt obtained an appointment with the Prefect of Loir‑et-Cher to request the liberation of her husband, but was unsuccessful. She had to await the setting up of a permanent inter-ministerial Screening Commission composed of representatives of the Chief of Staff and the Foreign Affairs and Interior ministries, charged with the detection of possible enemy agents among those interned. The fact of having been stripped of German nationality was obviously a favorable point for Goldschmidt: on October 22, 1939 he left the Villerbon camp where he had spent a little over a month and returned to Paris, residing in a flat rue Fabert on the esplanade of the Invalides. With this information we came to understand the delicate situation of Paul Graupe & Cie in September 1939: while Graupe was still in Switzerland, where he had gone in August for his usual summer holiday, Goldschmidt was interned in the Loi‑etCher. Moreover, the archives of the Commissariat aux questions juives tell us that the company was sequestered on 17 October 1939 due to the fact that certain shareholders were German nationals. Thus the study of the name file constituted by the Direction de la Sûreté made it possible for us to significantly consolidate what we knew about Arthur Goldschmidt – to establish that he belonged to the third generation of a family of antique dealers

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from Frankfurt, that he was well placed in the international art market and particularly with dealers active in France, that he had been stripped of German nationality and nonetheless interned by the French authorities at the beginning of the war. We also gleaned other scattered bits of information: about his arrival in France at the beginning of the month of May 1937 – at the same time as Paul Graupe – his successive addresses, at the Plaza Athénée in Paris, there too the same as Paul Graupe, but also in Mayfair Court, in London. The file in the name of Arthur Goldschmidt’s brother Harry, born May 14, 1890, showed that the latter had lived in Paris from 1907–1914 and married Fanny Stein­ decker, daughter of a well-established Parisian banker, that he had returned to Frankfurt during World War I, had come back to France in October 1931 and exercised the profession of art broker, but had been unable to obtain French naturalization. In 1935, he seemed to be well-off and traveling a great deal, living at the Elysée Park Hôtel on the Champs-Élysées after the divorce with his wife, with whom he had a son, Walter Selig, born in Frankfurt in 1915 and naturalized French in 1936. This information enabled us to broaden our use of other sources, both bibliographic and archival. * Last but not least, the return to Paris of the Sûreté archives has made it possible to link them up with a number of other archives useful for the history of the exile and of spoliations: those of the Préfecture de police, of Counterespionage, of French consulates abroad, of the Commissariat général aux questions juives, and of post-war restitution services (Office des biens et intérêts privés, Commission de récupération artistique). The fact that the Sûreté archives are open to the public and that detailed inventories are available facilitates multiple searches, both in the archives themselves and by correspondence. In a communication in October 2010 in Strasburg, Sylvie Le Clech, director of the Fontainebleau archives, noted that in the last ten years, 300 persons of 28 different nationalities had already consulted them, requesting the communication of some 5,000 files, 70 per cent of the research concerning name files, in particular on Spanish émigrés.21 These archives are invaluable for research in political history – dealing with the Communist party in particular, with foreign communities in France, with social history, history of the press or of the police. They are vital for all those doing research on the history of their family at that time, and there is no doubt but that these archives returned from exile have a great deal more to tell us about yesterday’s exiles.

21 See Vincent Laniol, Alexandre Sumpf (eds.), Saisies, spoliations d’archives et de bibliothèques et logiques de restitution au XXe siècle, Rennes 2012.

Keith Holz

“… not my most beautiful but my best paintings …”:1 Oskar Kokoschka’s list for London Letters and documents in the Paul Westheim papers (File  602–1) provide a wealth of information that has begun to transform scholarship on the German artworld in exile and within Nazi Germany. This essay considers one intriguing episode documented in Westheim’s papers, namely, Oskar Kokoschka’s proposal to exhibit certain of his paintings in the 1938 London exhibition Twentieth Century German Art (8 July– 27  August  1938). Westheim’s correspondence also allows us to station Kokoschka’s efforts to represent himself in London within a geographically dispersed network of colleagues and friends who collaborated to send art to London for this exhibition. The recipient of these letters was the German-Jewish art critic and publisher Paul Westheim (1886–1963), who since fleeing Berlin in August 1933, lived and worked in Paris where he presided over reporting on the visual arts in the German exile press. The largest group of letters are those authored by his dearest friend and trusted con­ fidante, the German art historian Dr. Charlotte Weidler (1895–1983). Weidler had worked since 1925 with Westheim on the editorial team of Das Kunstblatt, the art magazine Westheim had founded and edited.2 After the Nazi accession to power in 1933, Weidler continued to reside in Berlin-Wilmersdorf with her mother and sister until late 1939 when she boarded a ship for the United States.3 Similarly, Westheim’s papers document the activities and concerns of Kokoschka (1886–1980) who resided in Prague and Ostrava [Mährisch-Ostrau] from October 1934 to October 1938. First in Czechoslovakia, and later in Britain, Kokoschka became the public voice and face

1 “Deshalb freue ich mich ja auch über die Gelegenheit weshalb ich nicht meine schönsten sondern meine besten Bilder aussuchen will.” Nov. ​24, [1937], letter from Kokoschka to Westheim, Special Archive, Moscow, Westheim papers, File 602-1-7:73 (from now on Westheim papers). This and the following translations are those of the author, unless otherwise indicated. 2 Weidler’s letters to Westheim have been studied, edited, and are currently being prepared for publication by Ines Rotermund-Reynard, editor of this volume. The author wishes to thank Dr. Rotermund-Reynard for the tips, suggestions, and discussions she has generously shared with me about the materials in the Westheim papers. I also thank the German Historical Institute, Moscow, which enabled this research through a short-term grant awarded to me in 2010 to conduct research at the Russian State Military Archives. 3 Ines Rotermund-Reynard, Erinnerung an eine Sammlung. Zu Geschichte und Verbleib der Kunstsammlung Paul Westheims, in: Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch 28 (2010), pp. 151– 193; and ead., Geheime Netzwerke – Charlotte Weidlers Briefe an den Kunstkritiker Paul Westheim (1933–1940), in: Burcu Dogramaci, Karin Wimmer (eds.), Netzwerke des Exils. Künstlerische Verflechtungen, Austausch und Patronage nach 1933, Berlin 2011, pp. 261–276.

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of several organizations of exiled German artists by nomination of his peers. During the London exhibition’s planning phase, Kokoschka pressed its organizers to confront contradictions he discerned in their cultural political choices. Throughout 1937 and 1938, he remained in contact with his long-time champion, Westheim, who two decades earlier had published the first monograph and a high-profile article on Kokoschka.4 Communication from Kokoschka to Westheim between fall 1937 and fall 1938 often transpired through marginal notes the artist added to the letters Weidler posted to Westheim from Prague or from other cities outside of Germany. Weidler traveled to Prague as part of her job to select contemporary artworks for inclusion in the annual Carnegie International of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Travelling around Europe by rail across and beyond German borders, Weidler always sought out Kokoschka when visiting the Czechoslovak capital. Westheim’s Moscow papers allow for a more specific discussion of the role of these persons in the London exhibition planning. In the following essay, I analyze these documents and particularly his choice to exhibit a certain mix of his older and recent paintings as a means to bring into focus Kokoschka’s timely reformulation of his public identity. Art history has scrutinized the exhibition Twentieth Century German Art at the New Burlington Galleries, London, in summer 1938. Cordula Frowein published groundbreaking research in the early 1980s concurrent with Hélène Roussel’s foundational study on the Paris Freie Künstlerbund. Frowein’s studies led to key publications by Helen Adkins and recollections by Max Beckmann collector Stephan Lackner for the 1988 Stationen der Moderne exhibition, followed by my own reckoning with the exhibition in Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague and London: Resistance and Acquiescence in a Democratic Public Sphere.5 Most recently, Lucy Watling has published additional, fresh research that expands knowledge of the Swiss dealer Irmgard Burchard’s role in the exhibition.6

4 Paul Westheim, Oskar Kokoschka, in: Das Kunstblatt 1, no. 10 (1917), pp. 289–304; and id., Oskar Kokoschka, Potsdam 1918. 5 Cordula Frowein, The Exhibition of 20th Century German Art in London 1938 – eine Antwort auf die Ausstellung “Entartete Kunst” in München 1937, in: Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch 2 (1984), pp. 212–237; Hélène Roussel, Die emigrierten deutschen Künstler in Frankreich und der Freie Künstlerbund, in: ibid., pp. 173–211; Cordula Frowein, Ausstellungsaktivitäten der Exilkünstler, in: Kunst im Exil in Großbritannien 1933–1945, exh. cat., Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst/Orangerie Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin 1986, pp. 35–48; Helen Adkins, Stephan Lackner, Exhibition of 20th Century German Art, in: Stationen der Moderne. Die bedeutenden Kunstausstellungen des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland, exh. cat., Berlinische Galerie, Berlin 1988, pp. 314–337; and Keith Holz, Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague, and London. Resistance and Acquiescence in a Democratic Public Sphere, Ann Arbor 2004, pp. 175, 205, 207, 216, 221. 6 Lucy Watling, The Irmgard Burchard Tableaux. An Anti-Nazi Dealership in 1930s Switzerland, in: Eva Blimlinger, Monika Mayer (eds.), Kunst sammeln, Kunst handeln. Beiträge des Internationalen Symposiums in Wien, Wien 2012 (Schriftenreihe der Kommission für Provenienzforschung 3), pp. 233–242.



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Each of the above studies mined the correspondence and Freie Künstlerbund minutes among the papers of former Berlin Secession member, the painter Eugen Spiro. Beginning with the founding of this exiled artists’ league in Paris in Fall 1937, Spiro served as its chairman (Vorsitzender). Among Spiro’s papers, most of which were available until the early 1990s at the former Zentralstaatsarchiv der DDR, Potsdam, and subsequently at the Bundesarchiv, Berlin, are numerous letters and documents prepared by Westheim in his capacity as the artist league’s secretary. The German army had confiscated the papers of both Spiro and Westheim in Paris in 1940 and transported them to German-occupied Czechoslovakia for storage. In 1944–45, the Soviet Red Army recovered these looted Spiro and Westheim papers and by 1946 they were housed at the newly formed, and secret, Special Archives, Moscow. In the 1950s the Russians restituted the papers of almost all of Spiro’s files to East Germany, whereas Westheim’s papers remained in Moscow. Only since 1999 have the Paris papers of Westheim (and the few remaining files of Spiro) been available for study at the Russian State Military Archive, Special Archives, Moscow.7 Before unpacking the engagement of Kokoschka, Weidler and Westheim in Twentieth Century German Art, a few comments upon the broader scope of Westheim’s papers related to that exhibition and to related activities of exiles fleeing central Europe to the United Kingdom deserve mention. The following are among the most noteworthy materials. Numerous letters of 1938 from Theo Balden in Prague document this exiled artist’s repeated, desperate entreaties to Westheim to aid in the rescue of the Praguebased German exiles of the Oskar-Kokoschka-Bund.8 After months of anxious handwringing amid escalating danger, between December 1938 and March 1939, some twenty-one exiled artists were eventually flown to England with heroic support from Roland Penrose and other Britons and exiles. Together they would comprise the Artist’s Refugee Committee of Hampstead.9 Thanks largely to the foresight and timely

7 Rotermund-Reynard 2010 (see fn. 3), p. 165; and Sebastian Panwitz, Die Geschichte des Sonderarchivs Moskau, in: Das Sonderarchiv des Russischen Staatlichen Militärarchivs. Forschungsberichte von Stipendiaten des DHI Moskau, Moskau 2008 (Bulletin des Deutschen Historischen Instituts Moskau, no. 2), pp. 11–20. 8 On exiled visual artists in Prague and their escapes to England, see: Keith Holz, Responses from Bohemia to Entartete Kunst, 1937–1938, in: Exilforschung Ein internationales Jahrbuch 10 (1992), pp. 30– 49; id., Exiled Artists Look Back. Between the Tunnel Vision of Antifascism and the Constraints of Appeasement, in: Uměni 48, nos. 1/2 (2000), pp. 55–68; and Holz 2004 (as fn. 5), pp. 48–97, 148–171, 226–228. 9 On this topic, and especially on Fred Uhlman, see: Charmian Brinson, Anna Müller-Härlin, Julia Winckler, His Majesty’s Loyal Internee: Fred Uhlman in Captivity, London 2009; and Anna MüllerHärlin, Fred Uhlman’s Internment Drawings, in: Shulamith Behr, Marian Malet (eds.), Arts in Exile in Britain 1933–1945. Politics and Cultural Identity, Amsterdam 2005 (The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, vol. 6 [2004]), pp. 135–163, and Anna Müller-Härlin, ‘It

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purchasing of tickets by his fiancé Olda Palkovská, Kokoschka managed to escape Prague on 17 October on a flight to London via Rotterdam. Also among Westheim’s Moscow papers are more than fifty letters to Westheim from Fred Uhlman, the exiled German-Jewish attorney who, first in Paris, then London, reinvented himself as a self-taught painter. Uhlman’s letters address the Free German League of Culture that was founded in December 1938, the behind-the-scenes operations of Twentieth Century German Art, his career as a painter, Westheim’s family members, Uhlman’s father in Berlin, and collectors of modern German art in England.10 Additionally, among Westheim’s Moscow papers are important letters from and/ or about Herbert Bayer, Otto Freundlich, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Thomas Theodor Heine, Edgar Jene, Paul Klee, Alfred Kubin, Jacques Lipschitz, Heinz Lohmar, Franz Masereel, Ludwig Meidner, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Felix Nussbaum, Fritz Schiff, and Karl Schwesig.11 Beyond documenting Westheim’s network that spanned the dispersed German exile communities, his papers reveal the nature of his engagement with persons across the international worlds of art, publishing, and of his personal life as well. Particularly evident in his Moscow papers is documentation of the roles three extraordinary women (in addition to Weidler) played in the realization of Twentieth Century German Art: Lady “Peter” Norton (1891–1972), Irmgard Burchard (1908–1964), and Dr. Edith Hoffmann (1907–living in Jerusalem!). Before attending to the actions Kokoschka took from the continent with Weidler and Westheim’s assistance, a brief overview of the roles these three women played to help realize this exhibition will develop a crucial context in which to situate all of their achievements.12 In 1936, Lady Norton founded one of London’s earliest avant-garde galleries, the London Gallery, with the help of Roland Penrose. In response to Entartete Kunst’s Munich opening she came up with the idea to mount an exhibition in London with the title “Banned Art.” However, by late December 1937, she exited the project in order to accompany her husband to his new diplomatic post with the British Embassy in Warsaw. At this time, she turned the exhibition project over to a small, informal alliance of London and Zurich art dealers (Henry Ginsbury, Herbert Einstein, and Irmgard Burchard). Together, but with Burchard shouldering most of the day‑to-day work, they saw the exhibition project through to fruition, initially at least with the help of

all happened in this street, Downshire Hill’: Fred Uhlman and the Free German League of Culture, in: ibid., pp. 241–265. 10 For correspondence between Uhlman and Westheim and their activities, see letters in Westheim papers, File 602-1-9:31–50; File 602-1-20:1–16. 11 See also: Rotermund-Reynard 2010 (as fn. 3), p. 189, fn. 82. 12 In the lecture “Clandestine Performances: how four women realized the art exhibition Twentieth Century German Art, London 1938”, sponsored by Kappa Pi at Western Illinois University, February 1, 2012, I addressed the roles these four women played in this exhibition.



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major, but increasingly frustrated, assistance from Paris-based Westheim. His Moscow papers document the senior editor’s ongoing exasperation with Irmgard Burchard, the relatively young, former Der Sturm gallery assistant and small time modernist art dealer from Zurich. Weidler shared no respect for what she and Westheim regarded as her – “the wild hen[’s]” – bungling of relations with collectors, fund raising, publications and rights, shipping and framing technicalities.13 Burchard’s development of the exhibition in a commercial direction also triggered Westheim’s alarm and jealousy as he learned of the financial rewards she was reaping from her work, especially when Westheim compared reports of her income with the relatively modest fee he had contractually accepted. For Westheim and Weidler, reaping significant personal profits from the pilloried art seemed ethically out of synch with the more altruistic aims of their and the organized artists of the German emigration’s politicized (antiNazi) understanding of this exhibition. Apart from the bold and conspicuous roles played by Lady Norton and Irmgard Burchard, another, even less acknowledged figure whose work for Twentieth Century German Art proved critical was the art historian Edith Hoffmann. The Czech-Jewish daughter of Czechoslovakia’s cultural attaché to Germany (in Berlin until late 1938), Camill Hoffmann (a poet, author, translator, who had also worked with Westheim to translate Kokoschka’s plays into Czech in 1917), Edith Hoffmann had fled Germany in 1934 to London and by 1937 was working for the Burlington Magazine as personal secretary to editor Herbert Read. Based on letters from Hoffmann and Read in Westheim’s papers, it would be fair to call Hoffmann the voice of Herbert Read auf deutsch, at least in letters to Westheim. Moreover, Edith Hoffmann, like Weidler, participated in the key and dangerous role of rescuing artworks from Germany with the plan and pretense of exhibiting such artworks in London. Other sources have recently confirmed what is only suggested in Westheim’s papers, namely, that Edith Hoffmann was instrumental in the recovery of modernist artworks from the sequestered Berlin private collection of former Reichskunstwart Erwin Redslob and possibly that of Bern­ hard Kohler.14 Specifically, Westheim’s papers document that around Easter 1938, Edith and her mother Irma Hoffmann – enabled by their diplomatic immunity – were involved in retrieving endangered modernist artworks from private collections in Germany, mostly, it seems, from Berlin.15 Artworks transported out of the country as exhibition goods would have been exempt from the exorbitant and punitive “flight from the Reich tax” [Reichsfluchtsteuer] the German government levied against emi-

13 For Weidler to Westheim letters disparaging Burchard as “das wilde Huhn”, see Westheim papers, May 3, 1938, File 602-1-3:34–35; May 11, 1938, File 602-1-3:43; Jan. ​25, 1939, File 602-1-3:50. On Westheim’s disparagement of Burchard, Westheim papers, e. g. Dec. 8, 1938, carbon copy of Westheim’s letter to Gerhard Seeger, File 602-1-11:246, 247R. 14 Letter by Edith Hoffmann to Paul Westheim, Apr. 8, 1938, Westheim papers, File 602-1-16:17–23. 15 Ibid., File 602-1-16:23; and email from Yonna Yapou-Hoffmann (Edith Hoffmann’s daughter) to the author, Jun. 12, 2011.

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grants leaving the Reich. Twentieth Century German Art was transformed to function as a mechanism to covertly rescue modernist artworks from private collections in Germany. Future research into this exhibition will benefit by regarding it not only as a public platform (the key, perhaps normative, way art history has considered art exhibitions), but also as a mechanism to covertly rescue private collections from Germany, including Westheim’s own.16 Turning from the extensive evidence that Westheim’s Moscow papers offer to decipher the wide-ranging planning that went into this ambitious exhibition, the remainder of this essay turns to a more focused set of questions. What do Westheim’s papers specify about how one highly recognized artist – Oskar Kokoschka – curated his own work for representation in this exhibition? What does his selection of particular artworks suggest about his self-conception, his identity even, in the wake of the defamatory exhibition Degenerate Art opening in Munich? And how might materials among Westheim’s papers inform current interpretation of certain of his artworks? And lastly, how were Charlotte Weidler and Paul Westheim involved in helping Kokoschka in his (ultimately unsuccessful) effort to show a particular ensemble of paintings in London? By mid-March 1938, the Paris-based Freie Künstlerbund had chosen Kokoschka to be its honorary president. He had already lent his name to the exiled German visual artists in Prague, the Oskar-Kokoschka-Bund, and would later assume the presidency of the Artists’ Section of the London-based Free German League of Culture. He took his role as public spokesman for the German artists in exile seriously. Kokoschka, Westheim and other members of the Freie Künstlerbund had witnessed –  and from March 1938 also criticized – the London committee’s retreat from its anti-Nazi political line. Points of contention between the London committee and the Freie Künstlerbund had included the London committee’s abandonment of the initial anti-Nazi title for the exhibition “Banned Art.” They also noted with alarm the committee’s removal of Thomas Mann from the list of its honorary patrons (the London committee stated it would have no Jews or emigrants on its list of patrons), as well as the decision to include a sculpture by Georg Kolbe, an artist who by 1938 was availing himself of the favors of the Third Reich. In a letter of 24 November  1937 to Westheim from Wittkowicz (near Ostrava), where he stayed as the guest of industrialist and art collector Emil Korner, Kokoschka

16 Among the evidence documenting the utilization of this exhibition to transport sizeable numbers of artworks out of Germany and continental Europe to London, is a letter from Fred Uhlmann (London) to Paul Westheim in which he refers to ca. 350 works of modern art sent by the Freie Künstlerbund, Paris, to London. Uhlmann also reports on the missteps and questionable financial dealings engaged in by Irmgard Burchard. The art shipped to London included works by Corinth, Liebermann, Marc, and Kokoschka. Undated summer or fall 1938 letter, Westheim papers, File 602-1-9:48, 48R, 49. In addition to forthcoming articles by this author, the dissertation in progress by Lucy Watling on the exhibition Twentieth Century German Art holds tremendous promise.



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Fig. 19: 24 November 1937, letter from Oskar Kokoschka (Prague) to Paul Westheim. Detail of Kokoschka’s list, Special Archive, Moscow, Westheim papers, File 602–1–7: 73R.

listed the paintings he wanted to exhibit in London. (Fig. 19) Close attention to this list, and to the paintings enumerated tell us a lot about Kokoschka’s effort to give shape to his identity through art, and also suggest much about his relationships to the paintings’ owners and sitters. Kokoschka’s list reads: 1. I would like to exhibit my largest picture. ca. 160 x 190, with 3 figures that are built up as in a Romanesque fresco, thus [heavier]. (for sale!) 2. Kestenberg, partly because of the color and because of the face. 3. My self-portrait is and after the illness (huge? Striking) and this must definitely appear in the catalogue as: Self-portrait of a degenerate artist 4. A Prague landscape, the best and the space = [a]nd [still] most striking illusionistic effect is that of Dr. Palkovsky Prague IV. Na Valech 32, this one definitely. (Upon my wish this will also be for sale by the owner, if the price can be set high enough.)17

17 1. Ich möchte mein grosstes [sic!] Bild ausstellen. 160 × 190 circa, mit 3 Figuren die gebaut sind wie auf einen romanischen Fresco, so schwerer. (verkäuflich!) 2. Kestenberg, teils wegen der Farbe und wegen dem Gesicht 3. mein Selbstporträt ist und nach der Krankheit (riesig? Eindringlich) und dies muss unbedingt im Katalog heißen: Selbstportait eines entarteten Künstlers 4. Eine Prager Landschaft, die beste und der Raum = [u]nd Illusionswirkung [noch] verblüffendste ist die von Dr. Palkovsky Prag IV. Na Valech 32, diese einmal unbedingt. (Dies wird vom Besitzer auf meinen Wunsch auch verkäuflich sein, wenn der Preis hoch genug angesetzt werden kann.) Letter by Kokoschka to Westheim, Nov. ​24, [1937], Westheim papers, File 602-1-7:73. Kokoschka compiled a similar list that also begins with these four paintings in his letter to Edith Hoffmann, Nov. ​24, 1937, Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Handschriftenabteilung, Estate Oskar Kokoschka, abridged in: Olda Kokoschka, Heinz Spielmann (eds.), Oskar Kokoschka, Briefe III 1934–1953, Düsseldorf 1986, pp. 58–59; see Patrick Werkner, Gloria Sultano, Oskar Kokoschka: Kunst und Politik 1937–1950, Wien/Köln/Weimar 2003, p. 143, fn. 79.

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It merits asking, to what extent does this list –  prioritized in the order Kokoschka wished the works included – amount to the artist’s timely effort to curate his identity for an audience in the democracies beyond the continent? Much of what follows will argue that the four particular works he selected betray a great deal about how Kokoschka faced up to who he was, and who he thought he needed to become for those who relied upon him, at the moment he reckoned with his new pilloried status as a “degenerate” artist. Also, and not immediately discernable from the list alone, is the question of how any of these paintings might have constituted a publicity bomb, designed to explode in the face of the English exhibition organizers. For in the same letter to Westheim, the artist wrote: “And one has to rub the noses of these castration obsessed guys abroad in it, these kill-joys. For that reason, I’m happy too about the opportunity because I want to seek out not my most beautiful but my best pictures.”18 By February 1938, Kokoschka and Westheim’s opinion of the London organizers was reaching a low point that did not bode well for ongoing cooperation. Kokoschka had been initially asked by Burchard and Lady Norton to serve as the exhibition’s foremost and featured artist. But problems with Kokoschka had come to a head by late (26) March 1938, when Herbert Read, in his capacity as the exhibition’s public chairman, wrote to Westheim, who was continuing to gather artworks in Paris for shipment to London. Read expressed concern that erotic art could run afoul of British censorship on grounds of “indecency” or “obscenity,” and cited a recent exhibition of D. H. Lawrence paintings closed by the London police.19 In his response to Read, Westheim suggested that including German art with erotic content might instead be a plus. Rather than avoid conflict, Westheim proposed that the London organizers might actually invite police intervention considering that public controversy might increase publicity as had been the case with the recently censored Paris exile agitprop exhibition Fünf Jahre Hitlerdiktatur exhibition of February 1938.20 Interestingly, the first artwork Kokoschka wished to exhibit at New Burlington was a large canvas that he heavily revised in spring 1938 in his Prague hotel room, Die Quelle. (Fig. 20) Kokoschka’s biographer and friend Josef Paul Hodin later referred to it as “the mysterious composition called THE FOUNTAIN or NYMPH AT THE SOURCE.”21 In spite of being the largest canvas Kokoschka worked on between the wars it has received

18 “Und man sich diese mit dem Kastrieren besorgten Kerle im Ausland den Flaumachern unter die Nase reiben. Deshalb freue ich mich ja auch über die Gelegenheit weshalb ich nicht meine schönsten sondern meine besten Bilder aussuchen will.” Letter from Kokoschka to Westheim, Nov. ​24, [1937], Westheim papers, File 602-1-7:73. 19 Herbert Read to Westheim letter (English), Mar. 26, 1938, Westheim papers, File 602-1-17:15. 20 Westheim to Read letter (French), Mar. 30, 1938, Westheim papers, File 602-1-17:16. See also Holz 2004 (as fn. 5), pp. 179–188; and Keith Holz, Wolfgang Schopf, Im Auge des Exils. Josef Breitenbach und die freie Deutsche Kultur in Paris 1933–1941, Berlin 2001, pp. 122–145. 21 Joseph Paul Hodin, Oskar Kokoschka. The artist and his time, London 1966, p. 195.



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Fig. 20: Oskar Kokoschka, Die Quelle (The Fountain/The Source), oil on canvas, 150 × 165 cm, Kunst­ haus Zürich.

Fig. 21: Photograph of a temporary state of Die Quelle, photographed by Charlotte Weidler, Prague, March 1938, ca. 7 × 9 inches, Special Archive, Moscow, Westheim papers, File 602-1-59: 3.

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relatively little attention in the literature.22 Initiated in Dresden in 1921–1922 as Jacob, Rachel und Leah, Kokoschka repeatedly transported it with him and subjected it to revisions.23 In March 1938, upon one of Charlotte Weidler’s numerous visits to the artist in Prague, she photographed the canvas in his suite at the Hotel Juliš. To Westheim, she wrote: “Kokoschka has painted wonderfully. The big composition ‘the fountain nymph’ is once more entirely reworked. The picture is magical and is one of the masterpieces. As he still continues to work on it a while, hopefully I can photograph it when it is finished.”24 A few days later, on 28 March, Weidler described the painting in more detail to Westheim in a postcard she posted in Berlin-Charlottenburg: “My dear: as printed material, I send you today a picture by O. K. (Fig. 21) It is not yet completed, he works and works a lot on it. I have only taken the photograph in order to give you an idea. It is not suited for reproduction under any circumstances. I had the copy [print] made quickly. The color values aren’t right and the depth is missing. The woman at the left is entirely dark, a hearty red. The middle figure [is] very transparent, light and pale. The self-portrait even deeper. A wonderful green. But magical indeed is that which the quickly made exposure doesn’t reveal, the mountain landscape. When the picture, which is very important for O. K., is completed, then I’ll take a new one.”25

Kokoschka appears to have repainted The Fountain to this provocative state immediately after Herbert Read had assured Westheim that censorship of politically-­directed

22 A key reason for this canvas’ neglect is that Kokoschka did not consider it finished. In 1949, the artist chided Alfred Barr for including it in his current Museum of Modern Art exhibition recalling that he had instructed Curt Valentin that it was not to be exhibited as it was “not finished,” and that it had only come to the United States upon the offer of Homer St. Gaudens to transport it there to safety on the eve of the artist’s escape from Prague. Letter from Kokoschka (Pittsfield, MA) to Alfred Barr, Aug. ​ 18, 1949, Museum of Modern Art, Department of Painting and Sculpture Study Center, Artist’s File: Oskar Kokoschka. 23 Hans Maria Wingler, Oskar Kokoschka. Das Werk des Malers, Salzburg 1956, p. 327, no. 313; Hodin 1966 (as fn. 21), p. 195; Johann Winkler, Katharina Erling, Oskar Kokoschka. Die Gemälde 1906–1929, Salzburg 1995, p. 98, no. 166; Werkner/Sultano 2003 (as fn. 17), p. 165, plate V. 24 “Koko hat wunderbar gemalt. Die grosse Komposition ‘quelle nymphe’ noch einmal ganz überarbeitet. Das Bild ist zauberhaft und ist eines der Hauptwerke. Da er noch eine Weile daran arbeitet, kann ich es hoffentlich photographieren, wenn es fertig wird.” Undated [March 1938] letter of Weidler to Westheim, Westheim papers, File 602-1-2:60r. 25 “Mein Lieber: ich schicke Dir heute als Drucksache ein Bild von O. K. Es ist noch nicht fertig, er arbeitet noch sehr daran. Ich habe die Aufnahme nur gemacht, um Dir einen Begriff zu geben. Zur Reproduktion ist sie unter keinen Umstanden geeignet. Die Kopie habe ich schnell machen lassen. Die Farbenwerte stimmen nicht und die Tiefe fehlt. Die Frau links ist ganz dunkel, ein herzliches Rot. Die Mittelfigur sehr transparent, licht und hell. Das Selbstbildnis wieder tiefer. Ein wunderschönes Grün. Zauberhaft ist noch aber was hier auf der schnell gemachten Aufnahme nicht kommen kann, die Berglandschaft. Wenn das Bild, das für O. K. sehr wichtig/ist, fertig ist, nehme ich es neu auf.” Postcard of Weidler (Hans) to Westheim, Mar. 28, 1938, Westheim papers, File 602-1-3:8r, 8. If Weidler took another photograph it remains unknown to the author.



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art did not exist in England.26 The canvas stages three figures in the foreground seated before a wooded mountain landscape: a female figure resembling Olda at left, a young unmistakably male nude, and at right an older man resembling Kokoschka with his right arm extended behind the center figure grasping the barrel of an upright rifle. Most striking  – and perhaps contributing to the “magical” Weidler discerned in this state – is the masturbating, bare-chested nude sitting askew with parted legs stroking “his” looming penis with one hand while keeping “his” vacant gaze trained on the viewer. Separated by this sexualized and emphatically androgenous figure, the Olda and Oskar figures look on. The Olda figure is seated upright and in profile with her hair tied back. She wears a dress and her fingers interlock over one knee. Her leg overlaps and touches the reclining youth’s calf, and her gaze appears fixed on the assisted bodily eruption exploding just beyond her knees. Through a few strokes of Kokoschka’s brush, Jacob and Leah’s beautiful and young Rachel was transformed – transgendered perhaps – to perform as Oskar and Olda’s self-stimulating boytoy, at least for the moment Charlotte Weidler dropped by Kokoschka’s improvised studio at the Hotel Juliš with camera in late March 1938.27 Significant interpretive issues are clearly raised by Kokoschka’s revisions to this painting and remain the focus of ongoing study. Key for our purposes, however, is to note that the canvas was never shipped to London, and thus elicited no response there. But making sense of Kokoschka’s renewed defiant impulse merits discussion. The figural reworkings of this canvas seem to have been an insider matter Kokoschka shared with a few friends that included Weidler, Westheim, and Olda. Kokoschka would soon – in May 1938 – write scathing letters to Read objecting to the New Burlington Galleries’ capitulation to British appeasement politics that he also threatened

26 Read to Westheim letter, Mar. 26, 1938, Westheim papers, File 602-1-7:15. 27 According to Hodin 1966 (as fn. 21), p. 195, the central figure is the same model that appears in the canvas Sitzende (Aktstudie), 1937. Edith Sachsl (1908–2011), a fashion designer from Prague, was likely the model or inspiration for both of these key figures. Heinz Spielmann notes that Sachsl had accompanied Kokoschka to Prague, yet they broke up shortly thereafter. As early as 8 February 1935, letters indicate that Kokoschka felt constrained and annoyed by her continual presence and demands. She was to quit Prague for Paris by late 1937. Kokoschka’s ongoing concern for her is apparent by his designation that the expected proceeds be given to her from the projected sale of his monumental canvas Portrait of Tomaš G. Masaryk. Kokoschka/Spielmann 1986 (as fn. 17), p. 281. For example, in letters to Alfred Neumeyer (Mills College), Kokoschka encouraged him to find a buyer for it to assist Edith Sachsl with funds needed to acquire a visa to the United States or United Kingdom. See also: Kokoschka to Helen Briffault, Feb. 8, 1935, in: Kokoschka/Spielmann 1986 (as fn. 17), p. 14. In the final version of The Fountain (fig. 2), the foreground area between Olda and the middle figure’s legs adds a large bird looking up to Olda. The center figure is repainted with female breasts and a large open palm screening her recessed groin area. As the classical myth of Leda and the Swan refers to the rape of Leda by Zeus disguised as a swan, more questions multiply about Kokoschka’s inclusion of a large, long-necked bird at Olda’s feet, and at the side of the central nude, than can be addressed here. The author is preparing an article on this canvas and its many iterations.

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Fig. 22: Oskar Kokoschka, Portrait of Leo Kestenberg, 1926/1927, oil on canvas, 127 × 102 cm, Neue National­ galerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preußischer Kultur­­besitz.

to publish in the British newspaper press.28 Kokoschka’s principled antics toward the London committee contributed to this largest of Kokoschka canvases, as well as the other three, never being exhibited in London in 1938. As President of the Paris-based Freie Künstlerbund, he joined with artist Gert Wollheim at this time to demand that New Burlington not exhibit their art. But the London organizers chose not to honor the Künstlerbund’s prohibition. Instead, they opted to borrow artworks to exhibit from private collections beyond the control of the exiled artists. In Kokoschka’s case, and what must have felt like a further slap in the face, works by his hand were included, but not the ones he had requested. When the exhibition opened, nineteen works, a few portraits and landscapes on canvas, but mostly early watercolors and pen and ink drawings, borrowed from London collections, represented Kokoschka in the exhibition.29 Moreover, the London organizers demoted Kokoschka from being the featured artist of the exhibition and replaced him with the less politically outspoken Max Beckmann.

28 Kokoschka’s threat to publish exposés in the British newspaper press (here the Manchester Guardian), includes: To the committee of the Exhibition “Twentieth Century German Art”, in: Westheim papers, File 602-1-7:30–32, mimeograph, undated [ca. March – May 1938]. 29 Twentieth Century German Art, exh. cat., New Burlington Galleries, London 1938, pp. 23–25, nos. 103–121.



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The next artwork on Kokoschka’s list, Portrait of Leo Kestenberg, 1926–1927, gives further clues about how the artist wished to be regarded in England.30 (Fig. 22) Like Kokoschka, the pacifist, pianist and music educator Leo Kestenberg (1882–1962) had fled to Prague shortly after the Nazi accession to power: Kestenberg from Berlin, Kokoschka from Vienna. By early 1938, the two refugees were each contemplating their next station of exile (Kestenberg would move to Tel Aviv). The two had met in 1916, when Kestenberg was an editor with the Paul Cassirer Verlag, responsible for publishing the short-lived, illustrated wartime periodical, Der Bildermann, to which Kokoschka contributed. Kestenberg had recommended to Cassirer that the dealer add Kokoschka to his stable of artists. Kokoschka continued to admire, and in many ways identify with, the German-Jewish Kestenberg. They remained life-long friends and shared many views concerning cultural and educational politics.31 This portrait was painted in Berlin when Kestenberg was on the ministerial council of the Prussian Ministry for Science, Art and National People’s Education (Volksbildung) and responsible for music education. Kestenberg was an advocate for the Volksschule (adult evening education) movement, especially in the field of music education. By the mid-thirties and throughout the war Kokoschka also had resumed his passionate interest and advocacy for the Volksschule movement and his belief that it could foster strong democracy. He advocated for educational policy reforms based on educating a broad, not merely elite, sector of the populace. Kokoschka also argued for the importance of teachers to develop all of the senses of their students, particularly the visual, and not merely verbal and text-based faculties. As scholars have often discussed, these issues were foregrounded in his Portrait of Tomáš G. Masaryk of 1935–1936.32 As with the monumental Masaryk portrait, Portrait of Leo Kestenberg features vignettes arrayed around the sitter to reference attributes of the sitter’s life and identity: for example, above left his wife plays an open piano, and below a worker stands lifting a heavy load (presumably accenting Kestenberg’s solidarity

30 Leo Kestenberg, 1926–1927, oil on canvas, 127 × 102 cm, Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz. 31 Kokoschka knew Leo Kestenberg (1882–1962) from his years at Der Sturm. Kestenberg was director of the Paul Cassirer Verlag during World War I, and had recommended to Paul Cassirer that he take on Kokoschka as one of his artists. When this portrait was painted, Kestenberg was on the ministerial council of the Prussian Ministry for Science, Art and Continuing Education and responsible for music education. Winkler/Erling 1995 (as fn. 23), p. 133, no. 234. Kestenberg had fled to Prague within months of the Nazi accession to power and would remain there until he emigrated to Tel Aviv in 1938. It appears that this canvas remained in his personal collection and was transported to Tel Aviv. Website of the International Leo Kestenberg Society: www.‌leo-kestenberg.com/music-educator/ index_ang.‌cfm (accessed May 2012). 32 The literature on this painting is extensive. A few relevant accounts, include Holz 2004 (as fn. 5), pp. 73–75; Oskar Kokoschka 1886–1980, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London 1986, p. 318, no. 82; Werner Haftmann, Oskar Kokoschka. Exil in der Tschechoslowakei und in Grossbritannien, in: Oskar Kokoschka. Emigrantenleben. Prag und London 1934–1953, exh. cat., Kunsthalle, Bielefeld 1994, p. 31.

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Fig. 23: Sketch explaining Self-Portrait of a Degenerate Artist in letter dated “6.XII” [1937] from Kokoschka to Westheim, Special Archive, Moscow, Westheim papers, File 602-1-7: 51R.

with workers). Behind his head is a view of the ministry building where Kestenberg then worked, and a sketch of Berlin’s Volksbühne building to the right.33 Kokoschka’s listing of this portrait before his Self-Portrait of a Degenerate Artist strongly suggests his ongoing identification with a fellow exiled cultural worker of considerable notoriety and influence who Kokoschka had portrayed with clenched fists and confident determination fulfilling his professional role and pursuing his ideals about music education reform in the democratic Weimar Republic. The artist’s idea to relate the two at New Burlington Gallery would also have provided British audiences with clues about how to see and interpret the next work on his list, his new self-portrait. Although the well-known Selbstporträt eines entarteten Künstlers was listed here and printed in the London exhibition catalogue, British photographer Ewan Phillips’ numerous installation photographs do not record it.34 (Pl. IV) Moreover, it registered no comment in the extensive British press coverage of the exhibition. It is possible that the London organizers anticipated too much public discussion of a canvas provocatively titled Self-Portrait of a Degenerate Artist, and never installed it. When Kokoschka described the newest state of the self-portrait to Westheim – with words

33 See also: Hodin 1966 (as fn. 21), p. 109, and pp. 169–170. 34 Responding to an inquiry to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, the librarian forwarded a list compiled in 2004 of the numerous stamps and stickers on the painting’s backing board. The earliest of these texts is from Kokoschka’s 1948 exhibition in Boston. On this basis, it cannot be determined if the canvas or stretchers bear a stamp or sticker from New Burlington Galleries 1938.



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accompanying this explanatory sketch of December 193735 (Fig. 23)  – there was no suggestion of the supercharged provocation he would soon rework into The Fountain. Kokoschka’s description to Westheim is worth reviewing at length: In the course of December I came to the Self-Portrait (that really could offer a novel type of portrait if people today did not have saucers over their eyes and Nazi stupidities in their skull, and the others but merely fear of this stupidity, that infects. Two completely different halves of the face are employed, one young, ascending to the front, enthusiastic, the other old, descending into the depths and looking downward, skeptical – both so invisible without being connected by a nose, that this alone would already be a work of art by Cezanne [sic.], who only composes with expressive characteristics, and […] only employs optical means such as provided by color. But now the head is big and approaches one like a film shadow and the sketch of the arms and landscape as in the baroque, forces the beholder to imagine himself in the position I want, without his knowing it. Long live Chinese perspective and down with Japanese flatness! All painters who have ever interested me, who have brought me to seeing/out of love v. Eyck, Memling, R. v. d. Weyden, Patinir, Breughel, Rembrandt, Piero de la Francesca and a thousand others have loved the Chinese[;] if I think of my first landscape and my last one from Prague and most things in between, as nothing else than an echo of the Chinese ones, the wall disappeared in the picture, moving behind the canvas. If one reverses the picture of a painter who paints flat, it remains a certainty that the size of the canvas is proportional to what he painted on the front. With a painter of depth it is the illusion, that the entire world lies hidden behind it.36

35 Letter from Kokoschka to Westheim, Dec. 6, [1937], Westheim papers, File 602-1-7:51. As this letter refers to having painted the self-portrait over the course of December, and also wishes Westheim a happy new year, it is likely Kokoschka misdated it, with its actual date being closer to Jan. 6, 1938. 36 “Im Verlaufe des Dezembers kam ich//von dem Selbstporträt (das wirklich eine neuartige Ankommung von Porträt bieten könnte[,] wenn die Leute heute nicht statt der Augen Glaspatzen und Nazidummheit im Schädel hätten, die andern aber bloß Angst vor dieser Dummheit[,] die infiziert. Zwei vollkommen verschiedene Gesichtshälften, eine jung, aufsteigend nach vorne, schwärmerisch, die andere alt, in die Tiefe und nach unten abfallend, skeptisch ‑- beide so unsichtbar ohne Nase verbunden[,] dass dies allein schon ein Kunststück eines Cezannes [sic!] wäre, der bloß mit Ausdrucksfaktoren baut, und […] nur optische Mittel[,] wie sie die Farbe bietet, verwendet. Jetzt ist aber der Kopf groß und geht auf einen zu wie ein Filmschatten und die Skizze der Arme und Landschaft wie im Barock zwingend für den Beschauer[,] dass er sich in die von mir gewollte Position hineindenken muss ohne es zu wissen. Es lebe die chinesische Perspektive und nieder mit der japanischen Flachheit. Alle Maler[,] die mich jemals interessiert haben, zum Sehen gebracht haben/aus Liebe v. Eykk, Memling, R. v. d. Weyden, Patinier, Breughel, Rembrandt, Pierre de la Franzia und tausend andere haben die Chinesen geliebt und meine erste Landschaft Denk du mich und meine letzte Prager und das meiste dazwischen ist nichts anderes als Echo der Chinesen, in die Wand verschwindend im Bilde, hinter die Leinwand gehend. Wenn man einem Flachmaler das Bild umdreht, so bleibt die Sicherheit, dass es der Größe der Leinwand proportional ist, was er vorne hingemalt hat. Bei einen Tiefenmaler ist die Illusion, dass die ganze Welt versteckt dahinter liegt.” Westheim papers, File 602-1-7:51 and 51R.

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In 1938, Kokoschka had more to say about his achievements with perspective in a letter to the painting’s owner, Emil Korner: In the Self-portrait of a Degenerate Artist I’ve used only my own private perspective. That’s why you can go for a walk on this face like a fly, like a Chinese in a painted landscape; and if you wish, you can be transformed in this painting and hold fast to your nose like a newborn innocent child if danger threatens to destroy you in the whirlpool of life. And this, my very own or (let’s say) the Chinese or Van Eyck perspective, I have realized here for the first time in the most accomplished way – better than in all my previous landscapes, better than my imitators could do, because one can only learn Cavalier’s perspective, which is a mechanical process; but not mine, because it’s the expression of my whole being and only I can express my being as such.37

Kokoschka’s lengthy explanations remain mute regarding timely political events of which he was well aware. Instead the artist positions his painting within centuries-long, and globally inclusive, pictorial strategies shared by Asian and Western painters, even at this moment when extraordinary political pressures threatened to define him completely. In the context of Kokoschka’s then activist cultural-political activities, his thinking about “art in art for art’s sake” categories and in terms of autonomous functions and traditions is striking, if not incongruous. Kokoschka had just had approximately 574 artworks confiscated from German museums in the Entartete Kunst campaign.38 In the context of that insidious deaccessioning, his art’s autonomy must have seemed like a feature well worth stressing to underscore the difference between his art and Germany’s bid to deprive artists and their artwork of autonomy. His address of the picture’s privileging of (Chinese) perspectivalism over (Japanese) flatness provides further clues to the binary logic that permeates this portrait. What Kokoschka rendered so emphatic in this drawing, was picked up on by Edith Hoffmann in her 1947 monograph. She pointed to the crooked lips and “a deep vertical line between his eyebrows [that] contributes considerably to the strained expression of the face. Instead of softness, dreaminess, veiled emotions there is now a virile note of a somewhat scarred but brutal strength.”39 Hoffmann suggestively proceeded to link the heightened sense of plasticity (implicitly set against flatness), with the interest Kokoschka had developed for showing two aspects of one personality in one canvas. She argued that Kokoschka approached this two ways: as he does here with

37 Oskar Kokoschka 1986 (as fn. 32), p. 318, no. 82; cited and translated with no original or reference. 38 Although the numerical scope was unknown to Kokoschka, we now know this included 509 graphics (many different impressions of the same image), 33 drawings, 27 paintings, and five watercolors. This list continues to be revised by the Forschungsstelle “Entartete Kunst”, Freie Universität Berlin, http://emuseum.campus.‌fu-berlin.de/eMuseumPlus?service=​RedirectService&sp=​Scollection&sp=​ SfieldValue&sp=​0&sp=​6&sp=​3&sp=​SdetailList&sp=​0&sp=​Sdetail&sp=​0&sp=​FI (accessed November 2012). I thank Christoph Zuschlag for sharing unpublished tables that previously totalled a different number of confiscated artworks by Oskar Kokoschka. Email from Zuschlag to author, Aug. ​14, 2008. 39 Edith Hoffmann, Kokoschka. Life and Work, London 1947, p. 215.

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two aspects combined in one figure, or as in the 1932 Double-Portrait of Trudl, where two guises of the same person are represented as two discrete figures in the same composition. Hoffmann pressed her binary reading even further by relating these recent paintings to his earlier double representations of man and wife in his plays and paintings.40 Had she known of Kokoschka’s March 1938 reworking of The Fountain, with its flagrantly androgenous central figure, she might have opted to reckon with its two guises, squeezed in between this double portrait of Olda and Oskar. In the Self-portrait of a Degenerate Artist, the right half of Kokoschka’s face is plunged into shadow and downcast. This dark side coincides with Charlotte Weidler’s reports of Kokoschka’s depressed and paranoid state in late 1937. (Weidler reported to Westheim that Kokoschka was extremely depressed, and because of his fear of Nazi agents he wished to ­ ratschek.”)41 The receive mail at his Hotel Juliš residence under the name “Prof. Otakar K other side of his face is illuminated and punctuated with what Hoffmann called “[T]he fierceness of the staring eye […].” Hoffmann also linked the agency of this staring eye to a virility she saw reinforced by the multi-point stag in the background.42 About a decade later, Kokoschka would expand upon (and adjust) his reading of the painting for his friend the art writer J. P. Hodin, who paraphrased the artist: “The portrait has two faces. .. the sick and the sound. If you step back the face becomes poor, sallow, and thin – then it smiles again. Here [on the left] … you see how angry he is, whereas here, on the right side, he seems contemplative, almost sad.”43 The sickness Hodin reported was Kokoschka’s bout with a nearly fatal kidney infection that hurled him into the hospital in November 1937 when living in Ostrava. Striking in these successive descriptions of this self portrait is Kokoschka’s unabashed embrace of three-dimensional, plastic, pictorial space, and his diminished estimation of pictorial flatness. The advantages of perspectival space animate his accounts, while he remains mute about flatness during a period in the practice and criticism of contemporary painting when flatness was increasingly acknowledged, and in many quarters codified and celebrated, as the touchstone of authenticity in modernist painting. It may not be reading too much into Kokoschka’s refutation of flatness to claim that this had a lot to do with his increasing rejection of the School of Paris and the acclaim its leading painters (especially Picasso), were attaining relative to his neglect. The fourth and last painting on Kokoschka’s list is Prague, View from the Villa Kramař, also known as Malá Strana from the Villa Kramář. (Pl. V) It is one of the first of the sixteen known cityscapes he painted of Prague, canvases that in retrospect are

40 Ibid., p. 217. 41 Undated letter from late 1937 or early 1938 from Charlotte Weidler (Prague) to Westheim, Westheim papers, File 602-1-2:60. 42 Hoffmann 1947 (as fn. 39), p. 215. 43 Cited in Oskar Kokoschka 1986 (as. fn. 32), p. 315, no. 82.

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often regarded as a series.44 He explained to Westheim that he chose this one because the space and illusionistic effect were the best, a feature complimentary to the perspective of the Chinese (or van Eyck) which Kokoschka claimed for the Self-Portrait of a Degenerate Artist as well. Also informing his choice to send it to London, would have been the landscape’s readiness for shipping, having been recently exhibited in Vienna in the Kokoschka exhibition organized by his friend, the artist Carl Moll, at the Österreichischen Museum für Kunst und Industrie (May–June 1937). Beyond pragmatic concerns or Kokoschka’s claims about illusionistic space, other factors may have subtended his selection of Prague, View from the Villa Kramář for self-represention in London. By 1938, the canvas and his memory of its origins would have resonated with extraordinary personal significance to Kokoschka. He had painted it in winter in the garden of the Villa Kramář on Prague’s Lesser Side. To stay warm, Kokoschka took coffee breaks at the nearby house of the attorney and occasional art collector, Dr. Karel B. Palkovský. It was there that he met Palkovský’s teenage daughter Olda (1915–2004), thus beginning the delicate, and to some, scandalous courtship that led to their marriage in a London air raid shelter in 1941. (She was nineteen, he forty-eight when they met, twenty-six and fifty-five when they married.) Whatever illusions of the brush and revived perspectival tactics this canvas might have offered viewers, Kokoschka’s thoughts about this particular Prague cityscape in late 1937 would have been bound up with the endangered status of his young partner’s family estate, and his fond memories of the halcyon setting of its production. Thus, although none of these canvases were exhibited in Twentieth Century German Art,45 to reflect now on this previously lost list as a group of paintings that constitutes an ensemble, opens up several insights into how Kokoschka wished to project his selfhood and art to the audience he imagined in London. Each of the canvases reasserted key public stances and attitudes partly at play in his earlier paintings. Had the overtly sexed state of The Fountain ever seen the light of a gallery it would have reminded viewers that Kokoschka still had that “scourge of the bourgeoisie” [Bürgerschreck] juice coursing through his veins, the embattled avant-garde posture he had struck for the public in pre-war Vienna which had proved effective to launching his career and marketing

44 Jan Tomeš, Kokoschka. The Artist in Prague, London 1976, p. 30, no. 5: Prague from the Villa Kramář. Tomeš dates this as painted in the late autumn of 1934, and the reproduction as photographed in the Jan Štenc printing house in January 1935. It was formerly in the Prague private collection of Mrs. M. Müllerová, according to Hoffmann 1947 (as fn. 39), p. 273, and Wingler 1956 (as fn. 23), p. 290, who both use the alternative title Malá Strana from the Villa Kramář. 45 This Prague cityscape did appear in conjunction with the exhibition as a reproduction in Peter Thoene, Modern German Art, Harmondsworth 1938, pp. 64–65. Most reproductions for this book were loaned to “Thoene” (Peter Merin, a. k. a. Oto Bihalji-Merin) by Charlotte Weidler, e. g.: letter from Peter Merin [Zurich] to Charlotte Weidler, Apr. ​12, [1938], Westheim papers, File 602-1-7:75.

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his art.46 Through its scale and psycho-sexual thematics, the canvas resumed concerns broached in the large Bride of the Wind painting of 1913–1914, specifically his working through the traumatic loss of his relationship with Alma Mahler through pictorial iterations that also included the notorious doll.47 To speak to its type or genre in a general way, The Fountain entailed the integration of a few major figures within a landscape, a hybrid genre he experimented with throughout his career and that would comprise many of his most ambitious compositions throughout the interwar years. Prague, View from the Villa Kramář would have brought back fond memories of his first encounters in winter 1934–1935 with Olda. This canvas was further linked to the origins of his career, specifically to his former friend and early backer Adolf Loos (1870–1933). For in 1937– 1938, this cityscape was hanging in a house in Prague that Loos had built in 1929 for the painting’s owner Dr. František Müller, and where Loos’ sixtieth birthday party had been celebrated in 1930. In Kokoschka’s selection of Portrait of Leo Kestenberg we find the artist recalling a moment in another ongoing friendship. Seeing these portraits of the two men together in exhibition would have prompted viewers to look into the commonalities in cultural-political outlook and commitment shared by Kokoschka and his sitter. To have been able to witness the Kestenberg portrait in proximity to The Fountain and the Self-Portrait of a Degenerate Artist, viewers would also have recognized Kokoschka to be reanimating his own achievements, heritage, and cultural political investments from the Weimar Republic (The Fountain was initiated in 1921–1922, Kestenburg painted in 1926–1927). By listing the Kestenberg in proximity to the new Self-Portrait of a Degenerate Artist, Kokoschka made the comparison unavoidable and set himself in accord with the progressive educational and cultural policies of the former Weimar Republic, even while representing the artist of 1937–1938 as the sovereign and defiantly free victim of the intolerant policies and actions of National Socialist Germany’s cultural politics. Taken together, the four canvases proposed by Kokoschka to Westheim comprised an ensemble meant to offer visual representation for London gallery-goers of a free-thinking, living artist commited to retrieving and sustaining an idealized legacy of modern democratic ideals, civil society, and progressive, tolerant cultural values that had flourished before 1933, but were then under attack in central Europe. Specifically, Kokoschka’s selection of these four canvases may be productively regarded as

46 As recently as 1936, Kokoschka had again publicly recalled this provocative early career posture from Vienna. See “Der Bürgerschreck Kokoschka”, von einem Interviewer, in: Die neue Weltbühne, no. 11 (Mar. 12, 1936), pp. 335–339. On the marketing of Kokoschka as a martyr, see: Robert Jensen, Selling Martyrdom, in: Art in America 80 (Apr. ​1992), pp. 138–145, 175. 47 Die Windsbraut, 1913–1914, oil on canvas, 181 × 221 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel. A compelling reading of Kokoschka’s episode with the doll fashioned for him by Hermine Moos and several paintings related to its thematics is Bonnie Roos, Oskar Kokoschka’s Sex Toy: the Women and the Doll Who Conceived the Artist, in: Modernism/Modernity 12, no. 2 (Apr. ​2005), pp. 291–309. Roos’ article openly draws upon the research of Lisa J. Street, Oskar Kokoschka’s Doll: Symbol of Culture, diss., Emory Univ. 1993.

this artist’s renewed insistence in paint that he had once held an integral place within official, social, and interpersonal networks under systematic attack since 1933. Considered together, these four canvases also made clear that he continued to fight for a better world with the help of similarly minded supporters and intimates, even as he and his fellow exiles and friends forged new networks to face emerging dangers and safeguard their then precarious existence.

Ines Rotermund-Reynard

The Art Historian Charlotte Weidler: a Lost Voice Speaks from the Moscow Special Archive On July 5, 1931, a certain “Sandy” wrote from Paris to the German-American art dealer Israel Ber Neumann in New York: “Had a visit a month or so ago from Frau Dr. Weidler who is working on a volume for the Carnegie Inst. on modern American painters + sculptors (…) She said she was also going to lecture in America on modern Art. I suppose you know her?”1 Sandy went on to chat about drawings and an exhibit of his works in the Galerie Percier in Paris. He was hoping his friend Neumann would stop by to see him on his forthcoming trip to Europe. Sandy’s writing was a chaotic scrawl, a mixture of English, French and German, in some places unreadable. A glance at the photo of his

Fig. 24: Alexander Calder in his studio, rue de la Colonie, in the 13th arrondissement of Paris (ca. 1931), photographed by Marc Vaux.

1 Alexander Calder to Israel Ber Neumann in his letter of July 5, 1931 from Paris, 14 rue de la Colonie, Paris 13ème, in: I. B. Neumann papers, Archives of American Art.

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Fig. 25. The art historian ­Charlotte Weidler, passport photo from 1931.

Parisian studio suggests its resemblance with his convoluted style of writing. Knotted metal wires, bizarre wire portraits, paper cutouts, various wooden objects piled one on top of the other on his desk and shelves. Who would have guessed that from this disparate accumulation of material there would one day emerge the monumental works of one of the most important sculptors of the twentieth century? In fact, this certain “Sandy” was none other than the American artist, Alexander Calder. (Fig. 24) Calder had come from New York to live in Paris in 1926, arriving as an illustrator and unknown artist, painting in a realistic style – when he left the French capital in 1933, he was an artist of international renown.2 Was it the book Sandy’s “Frau Dr. Weidler” was working on that launched Calder’s fame? Hardly. So far as we know, it was never published. Instead of writing a book on modern American artists, Weidler embarked on a trip to Africa, and once there, crossed the desert on her own, studying the Tuareg culture. This adventurous researcher, who had studied not only art history, but archaeology and philosophy as well in Vienna, Berlin and Paris, took over a thousand photographs of the Berber tribes between the Niger Crescent and Lake Chad.3 Yet on her return, she published only a short article with few illustrations, “Tuareg and

2 See Joan Simon, Alexander Calder. Les années parisiennes, in: Alexander Calder. Les années parisi­ ennes 1926–1933, exh. cat., Musée nationale d’art moderne/Centre Pompidou Paris, Whitney Museum of American Art New York, Paris 2009, p. 15. 3 This information was provided by Yris Rabenou-Solomon, Charlotte Weidler’s friend and the executor of her will.



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Tibbu: Male Veils and the Rights of Mothers” – on the emancipated role of women in these cultures.4 (Fig. 25) The trip was only a short deviation from her principal activity. Since 1924, Charlotte Weidler had been working as a curatorial advisor for the Carnegie Institute with the mission of finding artists from Northern Europe to exhibit in their annual international art shows in Pittsburgh.5 Her active role in the world of modern art has unfortunately been neglected by scholars. Paul Ortwin Rave, in his study Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich, first published in 1949, placed her simply in the category of “patroness of the arts” during the Weimar Republic, though he does, if somewhat condescendingly, mention her crucial role in the renewed reception of German contemporary art in the United States after World War I: “[…] it was not until 1925 that the United States again entered our horizon, when due to the ‘kind activeness’ of Dr. Charlotte Weidler, German artists were once again able to exhibit and achieve recognition in various cities such as New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and St. Louis.”6 A more recent comprehensive study of the art policies of the Weimar Republic also refers to Weidler’s decisive role in bringing the latest in German art of that period overseas. “After the first cooperation was a success,” writes the author Kratz-Kessemeier, “a further collaboration took place in 1929–30 between Prussia and the Car­ negie Institute when the Beckmann self-portrait, acquired by the Ministry of Culture in 1928, was presented in the Institute’s exhibition in Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and St. Louis.”7 Charlotte Weidler died in New York in 1983. Shortly afterwards, the Smithsonian Institute, holder of the Carnegie Institute archives, published Letters from Germany, containing a number of her letters to the Institute in the 1930s.8 From the very beginning, her letters drew attention to the dangers inherent in National Socialist politics. In fact, one of the reasons she is relatively unknown today is that in order to promote and above all, to protect modern German artists, she was forced to work behind the scenes.

4 Charlotte Weidler, Tuareg und Tibbu. Männerschleier und Mutterrecht, in: Koralle (Feb. ​1933), pp. 480–484. 5 See Marsden Hartley et al., Letters from Germany, 1933–1938, in: Archives of American Art Journal 25, nos. 1/2 (1985), pp. 3–28, here p. 13. 6 Paul Ortwin Rave, Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich [1949], edited by Uwe M. Schneede, Berlin 1987, p. 30. (Unless otherwise indicated, translations of quotations are by J. A. in collaboration with the author.) 7 Kristina Kratz-Kessemeier, Kunst für die Republik. Die Kunstpolitik des preußischen Kultusministe­ riums 1918 bis 1932, Berlin 2008, p. 574. 8 See Hartley et al. 1985 (as fn. 5).

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The Art Critic Paul Westheim Back to Sandy. In March 1929, Alexander Calder traveled from Paris to Berlin to prepare his exhibit at the Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf. On this occasion, he met the art critic and editor of the Kunstblatt, Paul Westheim. (Fig. 26) In his journal, Westheim recounts: “Calder portrayed everyone who came to the club to see and be seen on the back of a coaster. […] Suddenly, he came up with the idea of doing a wire-sculpture of me. That’s not something someone like me could refuse […] But who didn’t show up the next morning, neither at 9, nor at 10, not at all – Calder. I thought he must have just forgotten, until an acquaintance called and told me he’d seen an amazing portrait of me in the Calder exhibit at Nierendorf.”9 Calder’s wire-portrait of Paul Westheim went on to become part of a large art collection that the critic assembled over the years. Westheim was friends with many artists – Oskar Kokoschka, George Grosz, Max Pechstein, Otto Dix and Wilhelm Lehm-

Fig. 26. Otto Dix, Portrait of Paul Westheim, lithograph, 1923.

bruck among others. In his articles in the Kunstblatt, he promoted the Expressionists in particular. When he left Germany in 1933, fleeing the National Socialists, he had to leave his art collection behind in Berlin. The portrait of him by Calder is considered lost; I was unable to find even a reproduction of it.10 As early as 1930–31, Das Kunstblatt clearly repudiated the rising fascism of the Nazi Party and its art policies, then becoming public. Westheim, who as both a Jew and a promoter of Modernism felt personally threatened, left Germany for France in the summer of 1933 by way of Switzerland. After several months he again became active in publishing. From December 1933 to August  1939 he was permanently employed

9 Paul Westheim, Legenden aus dem Künstlerleben, in: Das Kunstblatt 15 (1931), p. 246. 10 An inquiry at the Calder Foundation, New York, brought forth no new information. The author is grateful to the late Terry Erskine Roth of the Calder Foundation for her efforts.



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as an art critic for the Pariser Tageblatt and its quasi-successor the Pariser Tageszei­ tung, the only German language daily newspaper in Paris, published from 1933 until the beginning of 1940. Well known to the Nazis as a promoter of avant-garde art and fighter for artistic freedom, Westheim – simultaneously with Bertolt Brecht and Erika Mann – was stripped of his German citizenship on June 8, 1935.11 Despite his active commitment to the struggle against National Socialism, he was held captive as an “undesirable foreigner” in various French internment camps, as were most German and Austrian exiles, among them Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt and Lion Feuchtwanger. After his release, Westheim was able to emigrate to Mexico, where he embarked on a second career as an art historian and specialist in pre-Hispanic art. Although back in the 1930s, living in a hotel on Rue d’Odessa in Montparnasse and later, when he moved to the quieter sixteenth arrondissement, it is probable that nothing was further from his mind than early Mexican art.12 In his first years of exile, the focus of Westheim’s public activity was the struggle against Nazi art policies. In sarcastic, derisive tones, he reported on the new “court art” decreed by the National Socialists. In his analyses, he exposed the so‑called “new style” with its photographically precise brushwork as being no more than regression to a figurative style, its true‑to-nature replication of reality having nothing to do with true realism, on the contrary, projecting illusory worlds which could easily be exploited for Fascist purposes. He also reported on the dismissal of museum administrators, on the curtailment of artistic freedom, on artists who were being driven away and others who often enough had come to surprisingly quick arrangements with those now in command.13 But how did Paul Westheim manage this? How, miles away in Paris, was he able to see behind the scenes and describe the goings‑on in German museums? For years, scholars were unable to shed light on this question.14 Tanja Frank, who was the first to publish a selection of Westheim’s anti-Fascist art criticisms in

11 List 4, June 8, 1935, published in the Reichsanzeiger, no. 133 (June 13, 1935), in: Gesamtverzeichnis der Ausbürgerungslisten 1933–1938, compiled and edited by Carl Misch, Paris 1939, p. 6. 12 In 1935 and 1936, Paul Westheim lived in a small flat on Rue Jouvenet and later, until his second internment in the summer of 1940, on Rue Charles Tellier, both situated in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. 13 See Paul Westheim, Hitler-Kunst. Das Lieblingsbild des Führers, in: Pariser Tageblatt, Mar. 3, 1934, no. 81, issue 2, p. 2. 14 In my articles on this subject, written after researching the Moscow archives, I reveal inter alia how Paul Westheim received this information. See Ines Rotermund-Reynard, Erinnerung an eine Sammlung. Zu Geschichte und Verbleib der Kunstsammlung Paul Westheims, in: Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch 28 (2010), special issue: Gedächtnis des Exils. Formen der Erinnerung, edited by Claus-Dieter Krohn and Lutz Winckler in collaboration with Erwin Rotermund, pp. 151–193; see also Ines Rotermund-Reynard, Geheime Netzwerke – Charlotte Weidlers Briefe an den Kunstkritiker Paul Westheim (1933–1940), in: Burcu Dogramaci, Karin Wimmer (eds.), Netzwerke des Exils. Künstlerische Verflechtungen, Austausch und Patronage nach 1933, Berlin 2011, pp. 261–276; see the French version

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the 1980s, suggested quite rightly that he may have had connections with “colleagues still in Germany.”15 Lutz Windhöfel, author of Paul Westheim und Das Kunstblatt, met Westheim’s second wife, Mariana Frenk-Westheim, in Mexico in the 1980s. According to Windhöfel, she told him that Westheim had completely lost contact with Germany, “with the exception of that one mysterious person who supplied him with information concerning Hitler’s art and cultural policies.”16 I too was fortunate enough to meet Mariana Frenk-Westheim in Mexico before she passed away in 2004, and to take advantage of her broad first-hand knowledge for my dissertation on Westheim’s French and Mexican exile.17 Mariana Frenk-Westheim spent her whole life promoting Westheim’s work, and in the 1990s, sold his papers from the year 1941 until his death in 1963 to the Berlin Academy of Arts, where they are accessible today. When he died, Westheim believed that everything from his Paris years, 1933–40, had been destroyed when the Germans invaded France. A few letters and documents preserved in the Berlin Academy of Arts remained, allowing a backward glance into those years and the possibility of at least a tentative, very rudimentary reconstruction. Thus it was important to speak to someone who had known Westheim personally, in the effort to give life to a biographical narrative.

Communicative and Cultural Memory In the words of anthropologist Aleida Assmann, this meant appealing to the “bearers of communicative memory”.18 Assmann differentiates between communicative – oral, everyday memory – and cultural memory: the bearers of communicative memory are our contemporaries; their temporal boundaries usually consist of three to four generations. Though the life experiences and stories handed down are accessible in terms

of this research subject by Ines Rotermund-Reynard, “Tu peux vraiment être heureux d’avoir quitté cette folie!”. Le critique d’art Paul Westheim pendant son exil en France, in: Anne Grynberg, Johanna Linsler (eds.), L’irréparable. Itinéraires d’artistes et d’amateurs d’art juifs, réfugiés du “Troisième Reich” en France, Magdeburg 2013, pp. 123–173. 15 See Tanja Frank (ed.), Paul Westheim. Karton mit Säulen. Antifaschistische Kunstkritik, Leipzig/ Weimar 1985, p. 340. 16 See Lutz Windhöfel, Paul Westheim und Das Kunstblatt. Eine Zeitschrift und ihr Herausgeber in der Weimarer Republik, Köln/Weimar/Wien 1995, p. 26. 17 See Ines Rotermund-Reynard: “Dieses ist ein Land, in dem ein Kunstmensch leben kann.” Der Kunst­kritiker Paul Westheim im Prozess der Akkulturation während der französischen und mexikan­ ischen Emigration 1933–1963, diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales Paris and Freie Univ. Berlin 2007 (microfiche-edition 2012). The author is currently writing a biography of Paul Westheim in the context of a research project at the University of Cologne. 18 Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik, München 2006.



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of time, they are subject to the changing interpretation of each teller. Communicative memory is thus characterized by its instability – fragmentary and without closure, it is contingent on a horizon of emotional memory. In contrast, cultural memory is no longer linked to a contemporary group of individuals and its specific context. The bearers of cultural memory are libraries, archives, museums. “Cultural memory is conveyed by writing, images and objects, signs and symbols. Their temporal horizon is potentially unlimited, it transcends the individual and generational link with time and encompasses the whole of history available to knowledge.”19 For researchers, communicative memory concerning Paul Westheim was limited to the stories and remembrances of his contemporaries in the last stage of his exile, the Mexican period. Through the opening of the Moscow Special Archive, documents which until then we assumed to have been destroyed suddenly came to light, enabling us to add to and reconstruct chapters of Westheim’s biography previously, little or not at all known.

Stolen, But Not Destroyed But how did these documents find their way to Moscow? In 1940, under the orders of Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the German task force ERR confiscated the property of exiles and their organizations in Paris. However, documents belonging to political opponents were too important to destroy, containing as they did precise information about exile networks. The Nazis therefore transported them first to Berlin, then in 1943 – after the first British bombing raids on the German capital – further east, to German-occupied Czechoslovakia. The papers of opponents to the Nazi regime, among them those of Paul Westheim, were presumably in the Wölfelsdorf Palace in Silesia (see the article by Patricia Kennedy Grimsted in this volume) in the possession of the Nazis. Later, towards the end of the war they were confiscated by the Red Army and transported to Moscow.20 In 1946, the Central State Special Archive of the USSR was created. Until 1990, the existence of this archive was kept strictly secret, its documents accessible only to members of the secret service, the MGB, and its successor the KGB. In 1992, the

19 Lutz Winckler, Gedächtnis des Exils: Erinnerung als Rekonstruktion. Vorwort, in: Krohn/Winckler 2010 (as fn. 14), pp. IX ff. 20 See Sebastian Panwitz, Die Geschichte des Sonderarchivs Moskau, in: Das Sonderarchiv des Rus­ sischen Staatlichen Militärarchivs. Forschungsberichte von Stipendiaten des DHI Moskau, Moskau 2008 (Bulletin des Deutschen Historischen Instituts Moskau, no. 2), pp. 11–20, here p. 12. See also Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, F. J. Hoogewoud, Eric Ketelaar (eds.), Returned from Russia. Nazi Archival Plunder in Western Europe and Recent Restitution Issues, Builth Wells 2007; paper edition, with updated afterword 2013, see www.ial.uk.‌com (accessed April 2014).

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Special Archive was opened to researchers for the first time. Since 1999, its files have been part of the Russian State Military Archive, where they are available to any interested person. Paul Westheim’s recently discovered personal archive contains cultural and political information of the greatest historical importance  – correspondence with artists such as Felix Nussbaum, John Heartfield, Jacques Lipchitz, Franz Masereel, Max Pechstein and Otto Freundlich, manuscripts, information on so‑called “degenerate art” and exhibitions by the opposition. Otto Freundlich was one of the artists actively involved in the Freier Künstlerbund (Union of Free Artists) organized to protest the repressive art policies of the Nazis. He was a friend of the art critic Westheim and corresponded with him during the time both were fleeing as the German army advanced into France.

Echoes of the Dead The German-Jewish painter Otto Freundlich, who in 1908 lived in the Parisian artist colony, the Bateau-Lavoir, along with Picasso and George Braque, became an exile in France in 1933, at which time it was impossible to return to Germany. Four years later, he wrote to Paul Westheim, thanking him – in his very personal, profound and philosophical way – for his review in the Paris exile press of an exhibition of his artworks: “Recognition is a fine and beautiful thing, but when it recognizes the essence of goodness in the artist’s efforts, its value is beyond the beautiful – it is what gives meaning to our work and to our search for knowledge, what enables our work to bear fruit. For our work needs to be given recognition in order to bear fruit; only by combining act and knowledge can there be unity and community.”21 Freundlich’s artworks speak the language of social utopia. His figural, constructivist style is meant to express a humanist ideal of a collective societal fabric. With his kaleidoscopic colors, he hoped to create a universally understood language that would bring together all of humanity. It was Freundlich who had the idea for the “Street of Sculptures” between Paris and Moscow to promote human solidarity. In his words, it would be “a pathway of brotherhood and human solidarity”.22 Unfortunately, Otto Freundlich’s official recognition was to come in 1937–38, when the Nazis chose his sculpture Der neue Mensch for the cover of their exhibition catalogue for the project to stigmatize modern art as “Degenerate Art”. (Fig. 27) Like other German nationals, Freundlich was interned in France at the beginning of the war, but was released thanks to the intervention of Picasso, and then fled

21 Otto Freundlich to Paul Westheim in a letter of July 15, 1937 from Paris, 38 Rue Denfert-Rochereau, Central Special Archive, Moscow, Westheim papers, File 602-1-11:85–86. 22 See the documentary film by Gabi Heleen Bollinger, Der Plan des Bildhauers, Saarländischer Rundfunk, Mar. 9, 2013, http://sr-mediathek.‌sr-online.de/index.‌php?seite=​7&id=​17244 (accessed April 2013).



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Fig. 27: Catalog cover of the travelling exhibition “Degenerate Art” showing the sculpture of Otto Freundlich, Der neue Mensch (The New Man). Organized by the Nazis in several German cities during 1937–38, its aim was to stigmatize modern art.

to a village in the Pyrenees. The voices in the last letters between Freundlich and Westheim tell of a time of displacement, hiding and waiting. But they also reveal that to the very last, these refugees communicated with each other on the subject to which they had dedicated their lives – the world of art. Westheim wrote to Freundlich in February 1941 from Cassis, a small port in the south of France: “We are scattered all over the world and each of us bears his own heavy burden of cares […] This summer, I lost everything as we fled, absolutely everything, and even the clothes on my back […] are not my own.”23 The exchange of artworks continued uninterrupted even in these dangerous times, and is of particular interest to us. Freundlich was dependent on the financial support of friends and acquaintances and sent his works in gratitude. He also wanted to send Westheim a painting, but the latter responded: “It’s so very nice of you to want to send me a painting. As happy as it would make me, I ask you please not to do so at the moment. I wouldn’t even have a place to hang it, or a valise to keep it in.”24

23 Paul Westheim to Otto Freundlich, Feb. 5, 1941 from Cassis, in: Joël Mettay, Edda Maillet, Otto Freundlich et la France, un amour trahi, Perpignan 2004, p. 129 (author’s transl.). 24 Ibid.

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As mentioned above, late in 1941 Paul Westheim was able – at the last minute – to leave his “waiting room” in the south of France for Mexico. Otto Freundlich was denounced in his village in the Pyrenees, arrested by the French police collaborating with the German occupation army in February 1943, and deported. He perished in the Sobibor concentration camp.25 His unfinished composition, presumably left behind in his studio in 1940, and today in the Musée Pontoise near Paris, exemplifies the defeat of these exiled artists in their attempt to use their own weapons in the fight against National Socialist tyranny. (Pl. VI) In the opening article, Hélène Roussel described the broad spectrum of the German-speaking art scene in Paris. The more well-known artists –  among them Max Ernst, Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp – had long since become Parisians or taken on French citizenship. Others, such as Gert Wollheim, Eugen Spiro, Heinz Lohmar, and Robert Liebknecht, son of Karl Liebknecht, were less well known. But the Nazis had derided their art in Munich and it was obvious that the architecture of the official German pavilion at the 1937 World Fair already spoke the language of an aggressive power takeover. These representatives of a “different Germany” became actively involved in the Freier Künstlerbund (see articles by Hélène Roussel and Keith Holz in this volume). With limited financial resources, they presented a number of their works in the exhibit Freie deutsche Kunst (Free German Art) in November 1938 in the Maison de la Culture Rue d’Anjou in Paris, unfortunately hardly noticed by the French. For other artists, barely managing to eke out a living with various handicrafts, it was no longer possible to exhibit. Felix Nussbaum, who had fled to Belgium and who Westheim mentioned in a travel account in the Pariser Tageszeitung, wrote to the latter in June 1939: “My dear Westheim, I received your newspaper with great joy and am quite proud to have been mentioned in such flattering terms in your travel accounts – and that in this way I can see that my spirit has still not been broken by time. – Many, many thanks. – Otherwise, I am painting plates – in short, everything that is breakable […].26 This postcard with Nussbaum’s words, preserved in the Moscow Archives, is probably one of the last written testimonies of this German-Jewish painter, deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and gassed to death. (Fig. 28)

25 The author would like to thank Dr. Katja Richter for pointing out that it was not in the Lublin-Maj­ danek camp that Otto Freundlich was murdered, as is usually assumed in research literature, but in the concentration camp Sobibor. This information is the result of research by the film director Gabi Heleen Bollinger in collaboration with Leo Kornbrust (as fn. 22). 26 Felix Nussbaum to Paul Westheim, postcard from Brussels, June 20, 1939, Special Archive, ­Moscow, Westheim papers, File 602-1-4:80R.



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Fig. 28: Felix Nussbaum, Selbstbildnis mit Judenpass (Self-Portrait with Jewish Identity Card), painted in Bruxelles, around 1943.

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“Scattered all over the world …” In der ganzen Welt verstreut …, wrote Westheim. Indeed, at the time it was the exiles themselves who were scattered all over the world, and still now, decades later, like a second exile, it is their works and documents. And to give a voice to the first exile we need access to the second. In the words of Bénédicte Savoy, archives are a kind of “central nervous system,” enabling us to reconstruct the archaeological layers of human lives or works of art. Without unrestricted access to these documents, entire patches of a life or work of art remain in the dark. The whole paradox of the twice-stolen archives now in Moscow is their being at once amputated and also highly authentic. Systematically and brutally pilfered by the Nazis from Parisian apartments, they were given makeshift classifications by these same plunderers. How many hands must they have passed through? Was it already at this point that manuscripts, letters, and written documents in general were separated from art works and photos? There are no traces of intentions at this stage. In what state were these stolen documents when they fell into the hands of the Russians towards the end of the war? We know for a fact that after the material was transported to Moscow, language students were assigned to sort the documents, most of them in German. Today’s researcher is faced with an inventory carried out by Russian archivists who were not trained for the job and who, pressed for time and with little material means, devised a temporary classification which still exists (see the interview with Vladimir Korotayev by Kerstin Holm in this volume). Yet, strange as it may seem, this twice-seized, twice-saved archive, by its very content, displays a rare sort of authenticity. Whereas in the normal course of events, artists, writers, and/or their heirs have time to go through their possessions and prepare them for posterity, the Russian Special Archive holds an extraordinarily unusual cultural memory. Virtually wrested from their owners’ hands, the Moscow archives offer a random snapshot of the living situation of the exiles in Paris at that time. Order lies side by side with disorder; scraps of paper –  at first glance irrelevant – phone bills, notes and memos – between the manuscript of a novel and letters discussing art. And it is just this strange mixture, this haphazard mosaic of intimate, everyday, artistic, epistolary and literary documents that makes this accumulation of material so real. Hidden away for decades, its voices resound like distant echoes from another time and place, echoes ringing with the emptiness of all that has been lost, all those traces of life that, rumbling their way from one exile to another were erased forever by the act of spoliation.



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A File With No Name I would now like to return to Charlotte Weidler, whose role has recently been distorted in the media due to non-objective, doubtless uninformed opinion,27 and whose authentic voice can now be restored thanks to the opening of the Moscow Special Archive. In the papers of Paul Westheim in Archive 602 we find page after page of letters and postcards written by one and the same person, who the Russian archivists were unable to identify. As a result, those letters were placed in a file with no name. Thus we discover that in the years 1933–1940, Westheim received hundreds of letters and postcards, typescripts and manuscripts from Berlin, Prague, Zurich, Basel, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Italy, signed either “L” or “Lotte.” In another file, we find a pile of letters from Berlin, signed by a certain “Brother Hans”. Yet we know the critic had no brother by the name of Hans. Even more mysterious is the fact that the letters from the brother were not addressed to Paul Westheim but to one “Paul Lambert”, at the same address as Westheim. Only by comparing both the handwriting of the letters and their writing style does it become clear that the “unknown” person was always the same: when mail was sent from Berlin it was the fictitious brother Hans who was writing to the fictitious Paul Lambert, but when the mail came from outside Germany, the unknown person unveiled herself – she was a woman by the name of “Lotte” – Charlotte Weidler. Charlotte Weidler’s position at the Carnegie Institute gave her the financial capability to leave Nazi Germany frequently on business trips. She was constantly traveling, meeting with artists, viewing collections, giving lectures, negotiating with museum directors. No sooner had she crossed the German border, than she reported back to her friend Paul Westheim fresh news concerning the state of cultural policies

27 Charlotte Weidler’s name has been mentioned in numerous recent Internet postings, as well as journalistic or non-scholarly publications in the context of restitution claims. See Stefan Koldehoff, Holger Liebs, Hehlerware, Heuchelei und eine Handvoll Dollar (Nov. ​16, 2006), at http://sz.de/1.894033 (accessed April 2014); Ralph Jentsch, Machtlos. Wie eine große deutsche Kunstsammlung in alle Welt zerstreut wurde, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, Dec. 21, 2007, p. 12; id., Alfred Flechtheim und George Grosz. Zwei deutsche Schicksale, Bonn 2008; Monika Tatzkow, Paul Westheim, in: Melissa Müller, Monika Tatzkow (eds.), Verlorene Bilder, verlorene Leben. Jüdische Sammler und was aus ihren Kunstwerken wurde, München 2009, pp. 29–43; Stefan Koldehoff, Otto Dix im Lagerhaus und Heckels “Geigerin” bei Christie’s. Eine Kunst-Geschichte ohne Happy-End – Paul Westheim und Charlotte Weidler, in: id., Die Bilder sind unter uns. Das Geschäft mit der NS‑Raubkunst, Frankfurt/M. 2009, pp. 37–54; www.artnews. com/2011/11/17/momas-problematic-provenances (accessed March 2013); www.lootedart.com/web_ images/pdf2/Summons%20and%20Complaint%20%2800587939%29.PDF (accessed February 2013). Charlotte Weidler has been accused of selling paintings from Paul Westheim’s collection after his death. However, in most of the publications criticizing her for this, the period of the 1930s and 1940s has been omitted. The material from archive 602 in the Moscow Special Archive sheds light on the intense relationship between Westheim and Weidler during this period. In another article, I have attempted to review the complicated history of Westheim’s art collection on the basis of the Moscow material. See Rotermund-Reynard 2010 (as fn. 14).

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Fig. 29: Assortment of letters sent by Charlotte Weidler to her friend Paul Westheim during the period of 1933 to 1939. Whenever she stayed outside Nazi Germany (see the letterheads from various European hotels), she informed him of National Socialist cultural policies. All these letters are preserved in the Special Archive in Moscow, Westheim papers, File 602. Fig. 30: Assortment of various exile newspapers in which Westheim published his articles ­concerning National Socialist cultural policies between 1933 and 1939, all based on information Charlotte Weidler sent him.

in the Third Reich. She was, so to speak, the critic’s secret agent. Her detailed and highly authentic first-hand reports of those calamitous years were the material from which Westheim forged his “anti-Fascist art critiques” he then published in the Paris exile press. (Fig. 29/Fig. 30) In a letter from Prague, she writes about her political engagement: “Unfortunately, no one besides me dares send regular and systematic news out of the country […] Such a cowardly bunch we have here! And the fact is, the only way things can ever get better is if every single one of us fights, as much as possible […] Maybe some traveler to Germany will get suspicious and start to disbelieve these Potemkin villages. I never want to have to regret that I didn’t do anything against this barbarity, this inhumanity, this cruelty – that I just stood by and watched.”28

28 Charlotte Weidler in a letter from Prague to Paul Westheim in Paris, Aug. ​18/20, 1937, Special ­Archive, Moscow, Westheim papers, File 602-1-2:167 ff.



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The Rembrandt Affair With the so‑called “Rembrandt Affair”, the Weidler-Westheim team landed a journalistic coup. On January 9, 1938, Charlotte Weidler reported to Westheim on a conference of Berlin museum officials. On this occasion, “party-member Hansen” had given a lecture in which he contended that not only modern art, but the art of the past should be cleansed in accordance with “Aryan” principles and that the works of the “Jewish ghetto-painter Rembrandt” should be banished from German collections. The museum directors protested vehemently. Weidler, summing up Hansen’s absurd discourse as if she herself were speaking, wrote to Westheim: “We have at last cleansed the museums of modern art of cultural Bolshevism, it is high time that the museums of old art be cleansed of everything that does not correspond to the National Socialist spirit […] And thus it is high time the works of the Jewish ghetto-­ painter Rembrandt disappeared from the collections. There was such an outcry that he was not able to continue […] 8 museum directors, led by Robert Schmidt of the Schloss Museum, then Count Schenk zu Schweinsberg and others rose and stormed out of the room in protest […]”29 Paul Westheim reacted immediately. On January  17, 1938 he published in the Pariser Tageszeitung the article Auch Rembrandt, auch Grünewald ‘entartet’ (Rembrandt, Grünewald, also “degenerate”).30 The account contained the exact information provided to him by Charlotte Weidler. Taken up by the foreign press as well, it caused a scandal and led to proceedings within the party that resulted in Walter Hansen’s expulsion from the NSDAP.31 A second reason for Charlotte Weidler’s untiring commitment concerned her personal relationship with Paul Westheim. Her letters testify to this hopeless German/ German-Jewish love affair, which seems to have fallen apart under the stress of years of Nazi terror, forced exile, and the final separation during the war. Yet despite political and financial difficulties, Charlotte Weidler frequently visited Westheim in Paris. Thea Sternheim, who gives detailed descriptions of the artistic and intellectual scene in Paris during the 1930s, reminisces about a meeting with Weidler

29 Charlotte Weidler in a letter (city not indicated) to Paul Westheim in Paris, Jan. 9, 1938, Special Archive, Moscow, Westheim papers, File 602-1-2:256 ff. 30 Paul Westheim, Auch Rembrandt, auch Grünewald “entartet”. Aus den Geheimnissen eines Schulungskurses für Museumsdirektoren, in: Pariser Tageszeitung, Jan. ​17, 1938, no. 583, issue 3, p. 2; the article was published in the Nouvelles d’Allemagne in French, Mar. 1, 1938, no. 308. 31 Paul Westheim published more extensive articles on the subject in Die neue Weltbühne 34, no. 4 and no. 11 (1938), which because of their wide distribution, produced a broad echo. In the context of the exhibit Degenerate Art Walter Hansen had not acted according to Party policies, was dismissed from his duties in early 1938, and at the end of 1939 expelled from the NSDAP, though he was reinstated in 1940. See Anja Heuss, Walter Hansen. Ein gescheiterter Prähistoriker als NS‑Kunstpolitiker, in: Jahresschrift für mitteldeutsche Vorgeschichte 85 (2002), pp. 419–432.

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in December 1938: “In the late afternoon, I again met Charlotte Weidler, who was trembling with agitation at the thought of returning to Germany. I love this woman, so clairvoyant and feeling, from the bottom of my heart […] So far, not all Germans are Himmlers and Görings!”32 Since all the letters that Westheim wrote to Charlotte Weidler between 1933 and 1940 must be considered lost, her letters live on today as a monologue. Weidler’s life would surely have been in danger in Hitler’s Germany if her relationship with the German-Jewish art critic had been discovered. In all likelihood, she destroyed his letters as soon as she had read them. As she recounts, the Gestapo searched her flat, which she shared with her mother and her sister, many times. Her April 1938 letter sent from Zurich to Paul Westheim in Paris makes clear the considerable danger she and her family were in: “[…] They searched my flat again. Of course, all kinds of denunciations, charges being pressed by the Reichspressekammer, my Aryan background couldn’t be confirmed, due to Russian origin, there needed to be an investigation whether perhaps there was evidence of Jewish origins and then –  the most dangerous of all  – they were ‘checking’ your past connections in Berlin, colleagues, etc. and in this way came upon me. This can get bad […] This time they were looking for letters etc. Didn’t find anything, of course […] Now they want to know whether I had seen you in Paris and why I stayed there so long with no money. Whether maybe I had earned money in Paris […] Then I was told they had more on me, that legal proceedings against me had been initiated and that when I get back I must immediately come to the Gestapo. Well, I know what that means. Once such ‘proceedings’ have started, they start wearing you down, out of one court case grows the next one, and if it doesn’t turn out differently, it goes on like that for years. I’m going to fight this. How, I’m not sure. I can’t flee, can’t just stay here. Switzerland would throw me out. How do I get a residence permit. In the case that they confiscate my passport and I have to see how to get over the border without one, what kind of papers do I need there in France? […] The Gestapo tends to arrest relatives or to put them under pressure if someone flees in time. They would immediately freeze my mother’s pension etc. Since I can’t take them both with me, I can’t endanger them. There’s one way out that is a possibility for women. A sham marriage […] This is the only thing that can save me, then they won’t touch my relatives. As so‑called marriage goods, I would also be able to get books, paintings etc. out, free and without problems. Then nothing would be lost […]”33

The Secret Codes of the Art Collection Charlotte Weidler risked her life not only by providing Westheim with behind the scenes secret information concerning National Socialist cultural policies, but also by

32 Thea Sternheim, Tagebücher III 1936–1951, Göttingen 2011, p. 110 (entry of Dec. 14, 1938). 33 Charlotte Weidler in a letter from Zurich to Paul Westheim in Paris, Apr. 9, 1938, Special Archive, Moscow, Westheim papers, File 602-1-2: 37–39.



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trying to safeguard his art collection. As is very clear in her letters, during the critical years between 1933–39 she did everything she could to save his works, declared “degenerate” and outlawed by the Nazis, which meant getting them out of the country or if need be, at least in part, selling them. Westheim himself had commissioned her to sell part of his collection as a way of obtaining some income as a penniless exile in Paris. In her letters from Berlin, she writes in cryptic terms about her attempts to offer the paintings to intermediaries for sale, referring to art dealers as “fabric salesmen” and to the works themselves as “fabric patterns”.34 To track down the whereabouts of Westheim’s collection of artworks, one often needs to find the key to decode the secret language Weidler used in her Berlin letters. A postcard sent on December 9, 1937 to Westheim under the alias ‘Paul Lambert’ makes this clear: “My dearest: Brigitte has gone on her honeymoon after all. She insured her baggage for 700 Marks. So that’s all in order now.”35 On close scrutiny, these seemingly banal lines turn out to contain important information. A comparison of Weidler’s words with the artworks in Westheim’s collection reveals the truth underlying this coded honeymoon departure. In fact, Westheim owned a sculpture by Gerhard Marcks titled Brigitte.36 Along with his indemnisation claim in the 1950s, he enclosed a reproduction of it, though on that occasion he did not mention that in the 1930s he had commissioned Charlotte Weidler to sell it. Nonetheless, it was highly probable that she meant she had been able to sell Brigitte for 700 Marks. Our assumptions were in fact confirmed by Westheim’s own records. In another file of the Moscow partial archive we find his own handwritten notes, and among them numerous pages recording income and expenses in the years 1937–39. Here we find the entry categorized as income: “Marcks 700  M”, proof that he had indeed received the money for this artwork in Paris.37 Another letter of Weidler’s makes it clear that in his absence she helped him enrich his collection and sell some of these artworks. In a letter from Prague in January 1938, she tells how she went to see their mutual friend Oskar Kokoschka and how Kokoschka offered to provide Westheim with artworks that could be sold so as to give him some income: Koko would like to help you and prove his friendship to you by giving me some drawings for you. I am supposed to sell them for you along with the others. They are wonderful pieces. 2 very impressive heads, and then some full figures. 5 in all. I think it’s so very nice of him to want to

34 Charlotte Weidler in a letter (probably from Berlin) to Paul Westheim in Paris, Mar. 9, 1935, ibid., File 602-1-2:13. 35 Charlotte Weidler in a postcard from Berlin to Paul Westheim in Paris, Dec. 9, 1937, ibid., File 602-1-2: 174. 36 See a reproduction of the sculpture Brigitte by Gerhard Marcks in: Das Kunstblatt 14 (1930), p. 262. 37 See handwritten notes by Paul Westheim referring to his income and expenses in the years 1937– 1939, Special Archive, Moscow, Westheim papers, File 602-1-6.

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help you. He would like, as I too, you not to have the feeling that you are alone and abandoned. When I’m back in Berlin I’ll photograph the drawings before sending them off and send you the photos so that you can at least get something out of all this […]38

These documents give an idea of the complex history of Westheim’s art collection and underscore the central problem of provenance research: the fragile, sometimes uncertain and piecemeal nature of the material on which it is often constructed. The letters of Charlotte Weidler to Paul Westheim show the difficulty of determining the original, definitive state of a collection. Particularly in the 1930s, artworks changed hands among the victims of National Socialism, were traded and sold, given away, disguised as false loans in order to be transported tax-free out of the country for special exhibitions or to be hidden in museums. The actors in this art market were often acquaintances of those who were forced to flee, and they took great risks for the sake of saving artworks declared “degenerate” in Germany or in order to help friends who had been driven away to survive financially by selling their works. Thus, in attempting to reconstruct the lives of these artists and their art collections, if we disregard the complexity of relationships and exchanges that existed at the time, we risk confronting a vague, over-simplified view of the historical situation. On the other hand, if we listen only to the discourses of communicative memory, we need to bear in mind that the process of remembering is always associated with the question of authenticity. For Aleida Assmann, an “essential aspect of remembering” is the “constant re‑coding of the pre-conscious into the conscious, of the sensory into the verbal and the pictorial […].”39 She compares the process of remembering with the process of translating, in the sense that “the operation of the translation of memories” always means “changing, relocating, and postponing.”40 The opening of File 602 of the Moscow Special Archive has added a whole new chapter to the biography of Paul Westheim as we have known it up to now. Not only can we hear the true voice of Westheim’s onetime companion and colleague Charlotte Weidler, but others have also begun to speak – artists, friends, forgotten family members. However difficult it may be for bearers of communicative memory, researchers are also beholden to cultural memory – the discourse of the archive. In the work of reconstruction, the words of one witness are set alongside those of another, alongside documents, paintings, objects, and where ambivalences occur and dissonances sound, when new questions arise and others remain open, they can only be accepted as such, at least for the time being.

38 Charlotte Weidler in a letter from Prague to Paul Westheim in Paris, Jan. ​31, 1938, Special Archive, Moscow, Westheim papers, File 602-1-2:249. 39 Assmann 2006 (as fn. 18), p. 124. 40 Ibid.

Christina Feilchenfeldt

THE PAUL CASSIRER GALLERY (1933–1945): Berlin – Amsterdam – London The Paul Cassirer Gallery, Berlin, before 1933 In the fall of 1898, Bruno and Paul Cassirer opened an art salon and publishing house on Victoriastrasse 35 in Berlin’s Tiergarten district. At the opening exhibition, the Cassirers featured paintings and drawings by Edgar Degas and Max Liebermann together with sculptures by Constantin Meunier from Belgium. This show established a completely new type of exhibition in Germany. The sale of French Impressionist works together with German art and various other European schools of art became the hallmark of the Cassirer salon and secured a unique position for this gallery in the Berlin art scene. After Paul Cassirer’s separation – both private and professional – from his cousin Bruno in 1901, he received the most influential collectors of Impressionist art in his salon. In providing them with masterpieces from this movement, he was unequalled by any other art dealer in the Weimar Republic.1 Following Paul Cassirer’s suicide in January 1926, the two remaining partners, Dr. Walter Feilchenfeldt and Dr. Grete Ring, managed the affairs of the company in Berlin, while the German art historian Dr. Helmuth Lütjens took care of the branch in Amsterdam. According to Max J. Friedländer, Grete Ring was the gallery’s art historian, Walter Feilchenfeldt was its financial genius, and Helmuth Lütjens its good conscience. (Fig. 31) Friedländer’s characterization, which has been passed down by word of mouth, would prove to be exceptionally accurate over the course of the following years, which were defined by inflation, war, and emigration. The correspondence available today between Grete Ring and Walter Feilchenfeldt, as well as that between Ring and Friedländer, offers deep insight into the characters of the correspondents and reflects the problematic financial situation they faced after 1933.2 It became increasingly difficult for Feilchenfeldt – as a Jewish immigrant without a work permit – to support his family during the war years in Switzerland. Grete Ring, too, had to establish a new career after her emigration to England in 1938. By founding a new branch of the Berlin gallery, Paul Cassirer Ltd., at the elegant new address 11  Cleveland Row in London’s St. James,’ she managed to do so. The

1 Bernhard Echte, Walter Feilchenfeldt, Kunstsalon Bruno und Paul Cassirer. Die Ausstellungen 1898– 1901, vol. 1, Wädenswil 2011 (Quellenstudien zur Kunst, vol. 4), pp. 15 ff. 2 The correspondence referred to here can be found at the Walter Feilchenfeldt Archive, Zurich, and with the exception of a few letters, remains unpublished.

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Fig. 31: Grete Ring, Helmuth Lütjens, Walter Feilchenfeldt, Crossing to Dover in 1935, photographed by Marianne Breslauer (who married Walter Feilchenfeldt in 1936).



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new branch was meant to ensure the continued existence of the Cassirer Gallery after Hitler’s rise to power, and Feilchenfeldt had also originally intended to emigrate to England with his family. However, the early birth of his son Walter in January 1939 ruined his plans. He and his wife Marianne were caught in Switzerland when war broke out on September 1, 1939: their planned move to London would now be impossible. Helmuth Lütjens, who, since 1923, had been the business manager of the Amsterdam branch, Paul Cassirer and Co., at Keizersgracht  109 –  and was a German of non-Jewish descent – applied for Dutch citizenship in June 1937. It was a full two years before he received his new passport, only shortly before the start of the war. Lütjens’ status as a Dutch citizen made it possible for him to continue to do business officially; thus, he and his family remained fairly untouched by the displacements and atrocities of the war. However, all the company’s business correspondence fell victim to the shortage of firewood during the German occupation of Holland. The remaining archival material from Victoriastrasse 35 did survive the war in Holland and is now kept at the Paul Cassirer Archive in Zurich.3 Walter Feilchenfeldt was born in Berlin on January 21, 1894. In 1919, after studying economics and philosophy, he began his career as a trainee at the Paul Cassirer art gallery and publishing house. According to his own account, Feilchenfeldt was already specifically interested in art history during his time at university.4 In 1922, he moved from the Cassirer publishing house to the gallery, where he met Grete Ring, who held a doctorate in art history and had left her position at the Berlin National Gallery one year earlier. At this point, she was already active as a freelance art journalist and had been recommended by Max J. Friedländer to take over the scholarly writing and editing of Cassirer’s auction catalogues. Grete Ring was born on January 5, 1887 in Berlin, to Victor Ring, the vice president of Berlin’s Kammergericht (Superior Court of Justice). His wife, Margarete, was a sister of Martha Liebermann, wife of the famous painter Max Liebermann. Prominent collectors such as Oskar Huldschinsky and Eduard Arnhold, both of whom were clients at the Cassirer Gallery, were frequent visitors at Grete Ring’s parents’ upperclass home. Her family granted her wish to pursue higher education and in 1906 Grete Ring began her studies in art history, archaeology, and philosophy at Berlin University. In 1913, she received her doctorate under the supervision of Heinrich Wölfflin

3 The archival material currently consists of five acquisition and sales books from the years 1903–1919 and 16 boxes of index cards. In addition, 83 record catalogues from auctions at and in collaboration with Paul Cassirer between 1916 and 1936 as well as 25 photo albums with depictions of works sold from 1927 to 1935 survived the war. See also www.walterfeilchenfeldt.ch/HTML/Archiv.‌html (accessed March 2012). 4 For an extensive overview of the life of art dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt, see Christina Feilchenfeldt, Walter Feilchenfeldt. Verleger und Kunsthändler, in: Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, Julius H. Schoeps, Ines Sonder (eds.) in collaboration with Anna-Carolin Augustin, Aufbruch in die Moderne. Sammler, Mäzene und Kunsthändler in Berlin 1880-1933, Köln 2012, pp. 272–291.

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in Munich.5 Wölfflin is said to have been less than thrilled by his former student’s later professional move into art dealing. He pointedly expressed his opinion in the following critical remark about Grete Ring’s new occupation: “Well, you spend your time buying pictures from people who don’t want to sell them and then selling them to people who don’t want to have them. You didn’t learn that from me.”6 In 1924, Feilchenfeldt and Grete Ring became partners at the gallery. The following three years were some of the most successful in the company’s history but ended abruptly with the crash of the world economy on Black Friday in October 1929. Earlier that same year, Feilchenfeldt had succeeded in acquiring the prominent collection of Paul Gallimard, the Parisian publisher, en bloc. The works, numbering around eighty, included numerous masterpieces: ranging from Bonnard to Zurbaran, there are nine paintings by Renoir (the largest group of works by one artist), four by Toulouse-Lautrec, five by Corot and Daumier, to name but a few, and the highlight, Edouard Manet’s large-format painting Le Linge of 1875.7 Feilchenfeldt took out a loan of over half a million Goldmarks from the Koenigs Bank in Amsterdam, which he used to purchase the complete collection. For tax reasons, he had agreed to the publisher’s heirs’ request not to begin selling the pieces until the following year. In October 1929, the American stock market collapsed, triggering the global economic crisis. Several smaller sales could still be made, but Feilchenfeldt had to wait until 1935 to sell Le Linge, when Albert Barnes finally bought it for his collection in Merion near Philadelphia. As Marianne Feilchenfeldt later recalled, Barnes took delight in emphasizing that he had acquired the picture “below cost”. For Feilchenfeldt, the sale to Barnes meant the preliminary end of his economic struggles and in light of this he accepted the low return.8

Emigration from Germany: Paul Cassirer, Amsterdam and Paul Cassirer Ltd., London At the time of Le Linge’s sale, Walter Feilchenfeldt was no longer living in Germany fulltime. While the art dealer continued to visit his hometown sporadically until 1937, he had

5 Rahel E. Feilchenfeldt, Grete Ring als Kunsthistorikerin im Exil, in: Ursula Hudson-Wiedenmann, Beate Schmeichel-Falkenberg (eds.), Grenzen Überschreiten. Frauen, Kunst und Exil, Würzburg 2005, pp. 131–150, here p. 132. 6 Marianne Feilchenfeldt, Grete Ring. Kunsthistorikerin  – Kunsthändlerin (1887–1952), in: Corre­ spondances. Festschrift für Margret Stuffmann zum 24. November ​1996, Mainz 1996, pp. 200–204, here p. 200. 7 Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein (eds.), Edouard Manet. Catalogue raisonné, vol. 1, Lausanne/Paris 1975, p. 196, no. 237, illustr. 8 Marianne Feilchenfeldt, Bilder meines Lebens. Erinnerungen, Wädenswil 2009 (an edition of the publication originally published privately in 2001, with the addition of an index), p. 154.



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changed his place of residence to Amsterdam in 1933. Immediately after experiencing the massive disturbance by the “Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur” (Militant League for German Culture) of a collaborative auction hosted by the Flechtheim, Paffrath, and other galleries, he decided to leave the country and emigrate to the Netherlands.9 Initially from Amsterdam and then later from several Swiss addresses, he began to transfer his clients’ artworks to various exhibitions, financially securing their owners’ emigration. The St. Peter Hotel in Zurich became an important contact point for Feilchenfeldt in the 1930s. He also found an ally in St. Gallen’s mayor, Konrad Peter Naegeli, who later advocated for the required “Toleranz Aufenthaltserlaubnis” (Toleration Residence Permit). Naegeli also made it possible for Walter Feilchenfeldt’s parents‑in-law, the renowned Berlin architect Alfred Breslauer and his wife Dorothea, to enter Switzerland in 1939 shortly before the start of the war, and obtained residence permits for both of them. In those years, Naegeli played a life-changing role in the lives of many immigrants. Fritz Nathan, an art dealer from Munich, received a Swiss residence and work permit immediately after leaving Germany thanks to Naegeli’s intercession and the help of the collector Oskar Reinhart from Winterthur. As early as 1926, when the St. Gallen Art Museum acquired the prominent Sturzenegger painting collection, Naegeli had put Nathan in charge of supplementing the collection with appropriate works.10 Consequently, the art dealer was already well known to the Swiss public authorities when he emigrated to St. Gallen in 1936. He received the coveted papers that same year, without the usual long waiting period.11 Walter Feilchenfeldt, too, had done business with Naegeli before the war and in 1936 had sold him two landscape paintings by Corot and Sisley as additions to the Sturzenegger collection.12 In a letter of March  21, 1939, Naegeli laments the departure to Amsterdam of several items on loan from the St. Gallen Art Museum. These included, among others, Edouard Manet’s Still Life with Melon from Max Liebermann’s collection.13

9 Esther Tisa Francini, Anja Heuss, Georg Kreis, Fluchtgut - Raubgut. Der Transfer von Kulturgütern in und über die Schweiz 1933-1945 und die Frage der Restitution, Zürich 2001 (Veröffentlichungen der Unabhängigen Expertenkommission Schweiz – Zweiter Weltkrieg, vol. 1), p. 41. 10 The textile manufacturer and art lover Eduard Sturzenegger of St. Gallen made a deed of gift in 1926 which stipulated the transfer of his collection of about 200 paintings and drawings, mostly by German artists of the 19th century, to the art museum in St. Gallen. After Sturzenegger’s death in 1932, Walter Hugelshofer, an art historian from Zurich, did a survey of the works, reporting that several of the paintings were forgeries and that the collection would need to be upgraded through new acquisitions. For more on this, see Isabella Studer-Geisser, Daniel Studer, Die Sturzeneggersche Gemäldesa­ mmlung, St. Gallen 1998, pp. 9 ff. 11 Tisa Francini 2001 (as fn. 9), p. 66. 12 See fn. 2. Unpublished letter from Walter Feilchenfeldt to Konrad Naegeli of July 31, 1936. 13 Rouart/Wildenstein 1975 (as fn. 7), p. 268, no. 352, illustr.

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 Christina Feilchenfeldt

Fig. 32: Erich Maria Remarque, Porto Ronco 1933/34, photo­­graphed by Marianne Breslauer.

The placement of artworks in Swiss museums by way of loan became a way of exporting them from Germany permanently after 1933. Feilchenfeldt often made quite extensive shipments of works of art to various exhibitions outside the country. In some cases, he even sent whole collections, saving them from the Nazi grasp and later forwarding them to their rightful owners, storing or selling the works for them. His most important client in the thirties and even into the war years was the author Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) (Fig. 32), who had become very wealthy after the success of his war novel All Quiet on the Western Front in 1929. Remarque, after his initial enthusiasm for oriental rugs, had begun collecting Impressionist art. In December 1933, after his emigration to Switzerland, Remarque purchased Vincent Van Gogh’s Railway Bridge of 1888.14 The picture had once belonged to the famous actress Tilla Durieux and stayed in Remarque’s possession until his death. Walter Feilchenfeldt became Remarque’s personal advisor and dealer and they quickly developed a very close friendship. Even before the onset of the war, Feilchenfeldt made sure that the most important works in his collections were moved to the safety of various secure places in London in 1939. At this point, Remarque had already left Europe on the ocean liner Queen Mary, headed for America.15

14 Jacob-Baart de la Faille, L’oeuvre de Vincent van Gogh. Catalogue raisonné, Amsterdam 1970, p. 217, no. 480, illustr. 15 See fn. 2, correspondence Ring/Feilchenfeldt of March 21, 1939.



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The Cassirer Gallery’s client list also included the likes of Estella Katzenellenbogen – whose ex‑husband married Tilla Durieux, Paul Cassirer’s wife of many years, after Cassirer’s death – as well as Margarete Oppenheim, Max Liebermann, Samuel Fischer, the businessman Max Emden from Hamburg, and the general director of the “Berlin-Guben Hutfabrik” (hat factory)  AG, Dr. Alexander Lewin. Feilchenfeldt shipped the majority of their art collections to safety outside of Germany.16 The exhibition French Painters of the XIX Century at the Kunsthaus Zurich from May 14 to August 6, 1933, provided the art dealer with the opportunity to transport a large number of paintings out of the country accompanied by loan certificates. In the 1930s, Swiss museums supplied the dealers with passes for the transfer of assets, allowing the objects to enter Switzerland. By declaring that the transfers were loans, the dealers were not required to pay import duty in Switzerland, nor did they need to pay the German export fees that were required if assets were permanently moved out of the country or if art was sold.17 During this time, the museums in Basel, Zurich, and Winterthur displayed about a thousand paintings and drawings to interested audiences, keeping the works safe from the German government and making it possible for their owners to sell them in Switzerland.18 A large number of the 103 exhibition pieces at the Zurich exhibition in 1933 came from Germany. Feilchenfeldt had provided 37 works, seventeen of which belonged to the Paul Cassirer Gallery. Some of these had already taken a detour via Otto Nirenstein’s Neue Galerie in Vienna, which had shown French Impressionist works from February to March 1933. When the exhibition in Zurich ended, Feilchenfeldt arranged for his loaned pieces to be sent to the Fischer Gallery in Lucerne or to the Paul Cassirer branch in Amsterdam, and further objects were stored for their owners at the Kunsthaus for a fee. The list of lenders for the Zurich exhibition reads like a “who’s who” of Berlin collectors before the Second World War. For example, two paintings from the collections of Max Liebermann and Estella Katzenellenbogen were shown next to two by Manet and one by Monet belonging to Bruno Cassirer.19 Originally, Max Liebermann intended fourteen works from his collection to be stored at the Zurich Kunsthaus and not to be shown at the museum.20 Two of these were Edouard Manet’s

16 See Walter Feilchenfeldt, Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte Cézannes in Deutschland, in: Götz Adriani (ed.), Cézanne. Gemälde, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Tübingen, Köln 1993, pp. 293–312, here p. 306. The list of names given here is a selection and is therefore not complete. 17 Tisa Francini 2001 (as fn. 9), p. 165. 18 Ibid., p. 166. 19 See Walter Feilchenfeldt’s exhibition catalogue with handwritten notes on the individual owners. Walter Feilchenfeldt Archive, Zurich, no. 3 (Rouart/Wildenstein 1975 [as fn. 7], p. 150, no. 166), no. 4 (ibid., p. 170, no. 196), no. 17 (Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet. Catalogue raisonné, vol. 1, Paris/ Lausanne 1974, p. 234, no. 280). 20 Tisa Francini 2001 (as fn. 9), p. 170.

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 Christina Feilchenfeldt

Bundle of Asparagus21 and Auguste Renoir’s Flower Still Life,22 which was displayed at the Kunsthaus two years later after all. Some of the pieces in the exhibition in Zurich were available for purchase, though there was no indication of this in the catalogue. On August 21, 1933, Wilhelm Wartmann, director of the Kunsthaus, wrote to Walter Feilchenfeldt about two potential buyers for the paintings by Pissarro, Corot, and Renoir. Today, it is impossible to know exactly which pictures they were and whether they were ultimately sold. The sales of the Cassirer Gallery in Berlin are difficult to reconstruct. The London branch, Paul Cassirer Ltd., and Paul Cassirer, Amsterdam, were able to record regular sales; the gallery in Berlin, however, was liquidated in 1935. A letter from the exchange control office at the Berlin tax authority, written on August 14, 1934, makes it clear that well before the dissolution of the Berlin location it had become nearly impossible for a “non-Aryan” art salon to do business. The same letter states that “proceeds from works of art sold in other countries must be put towards the purchase of new paintings being brought into Germany. By the 10th of every month, all sales from the previous month must be presented to me in connection with the simultaneous proof of artworks imported to Germany. This authorization will become void on December 31, 1934.”23 A few of the pictures exhibited or stored in Zurich, for example Le Linge or Still Life with a Melon, from Max Liebermann’s collection, were sent to the Kunsthalle Bern the following year, where they were exhibited from February 18 to April 2, 1934. Cézanne’s still life Cup, Glass, and Fruit I,24 also of Gallimard provenance, was one of the exhibition pieces as well. Two years later, Siegfried Kramarsky, a banker from Hamburg, purchased it from Paul Cassirer, Amsterdam.25 The exhibition The Master Paintings of French Artists from Ingres to Cézanne at the Kunsthaus Zurich from June 19 to August 18, 1935, was clearly advertised as a sale exhibition. The catalogue does not list the drawings’ sizes or mediums, only noting the titles, dates of production, and the owners. If the piece could be purchased, the note for sale was included next to the catalogue number. Of 264 catalogue numbers, 41 items were for sale. From April 18 to May 15, 1935, a further exhibition had taken place at the same location, including, among others, 25 paintings by Oskar Kokoschka. He was one of the artists deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis. From 1916 to 1931, he was contractu-

21 Rouart/Wildenstein 1975 (as fn. 7), p. 268, no. 357, illustr. The painting was sold by Max Liebermann’s heirs through Walter Feilchenfeldt, Zurich, in 1967 to the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne. 22 Guy-Patrice Dauberville, Michel Dauberville, Renoir. Catalogue raisonné, vol. 1, Paris 2007, p. 119, no. 19, illustr. 23 Copy of a letter: Walter Feilchenfeldt Archive, Zurich. Illegible signature of the author. 24 John Rewald, The paintings of Paul Cézanne. A catalogue raisonné, 2 vols., New York 1996, vol. 1, pp. 215 f., no. 319; vol. 2, p. 103, illustr. 25 Feilchenfeldt 1993 (as fn. 16), p. 306.



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ally bound to the Paul Cassirer Gallery and was endowed with various privileges, enjoying a special status among the gallery’s artists. As part of this, he had a generous travel budget on condition that any paintings executed during his travels would be sold through the gallery. In the summer of 1929, Walter Feilchenfeldt accompanied Oskar Kokoschka to Scotland in the hope of convincing him to do some smaller canvases, which would be easier to sell. Indeed, the three paintings Dulsie Bridge, Findhorn River, and Plodda Falls, painted during this time, are unusual not only for their smaller format: the restrained color palette sets them apart from Kokoschka’s other travel paintings from this period, giving them a special position in the artist’s oeuvre.26 Before the exhibition in Zurich in spring 1935, Feilchenfeldt sent twenty photos of paintings by Kokoschka to Wilhelm Wartmann. The three Scottish landscapes were among the eleven works ultimately sent from Amsterdam to Zurich.27 Most of the 25 paintings were available for purchase, their prices listed in the catalogue.

Helmuth Lütjens: Paul Cassirer, Amsterdam During the war years, Helmuth Lütjens continued the business in Amsterdam and stored many works of art for the gallery’s clients. Lütjens had a doctorate in art history and worked as an intern under Max J. Friedländer at the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin from 1920 to 1923. On July 1, 1923 he joined the Paul Cassirer art gallery. In addition to managing the company’s Dutch branch, his contract specifically stipulated that he was to assist the Dutch banker and collector of old master drawings, Franz Koenigs. Furthermore, Lütjens was given the task of accompanying Oskar Kokoschka on his travels, which often lasted several months and took place regularly from 1927 to 1929.28 His duties included acquiring paint and canvas, finding appropriate accommodations, and providing the artist with the necessary personal and intellectual stimulation.29 Kokoschka completed eleven paintings during these trips with Lütjens and exhibited them later at the Paul Cassirer Gallery in Berlin.30

26 Johann Winkler, Katharina Erling, Oskar Kokoschka. Die Gemälde 1906–1926, Salzburg 1995, pp. 146–148, cat. nos. 255–257. 27 The three oil paintings were assigned the catalogue numbers 91: “Dulsie Bridge (5000 Fr.)”, 92: “Plodda Falls (5000 Fr.)” and 93: “Finthornriver (4000 Fr.)”. 28 See Christina Feilchenfeldt, Oskar Kokoschka und seine Kunsthändler. Die Firma Paul ­Cassirer, Berlin, und Walter Feilchenfeldt, Zürich, in: Andreas Meier (ed.), Kokoschka. Beziehungen zur ­Schweiz, exh. cat., Seedamm Kulturzentrum Pfäffikon/Stiftung Charles und Agnes Vögele, Wabern/Bern 2005, pp. 105–113, here p. 109. 29 See Helmut [sic!] Lütjens, Erinnerungen an O. K., in: Meier 2005 (as fn. 28), pp. 185–195. 30 See Winkler/Erling 1995 (as fn. 26), pp. 135–143, cat. nos. 238–248.

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 Christina Feilchenfeldt

In addition to his interest in Oskar Kokoschka, Lütjens developed a fascination with a second artist during the war years – an artist whose works had first passed through Paul Cassirer’s hands in 1908. In contrast to Kokoschka, though, this artist had never signed a contract with the Cassirer Gallery.31 In 1940, Helmuth Lütjens was introduced to Max Beckmann and his wife Quappi at the home of the industrialist Eduard von der Heydt in Zaandvort.32 According to his own account, Lütjens originally shied away from a closer relationship with Beckmann because he foresaw “consequences” and would have preferred to discuss the issue with his business partners, Ring and Feilchenfeldt.33 In response to a request by Erhard Göpel, the art historian and later editor of the Beckmann catalogue raisonné, Lütjens took about fifty of the artist’s pictures on loan in the spring of 1943 in order to keep them safe for him and sell them if possible. They had been stored at Beckmann’s studio on the Rokin, and Göpel was concerned that the artist would be facing difficulties with the Dutch “Kulturkammer” (Chamber of Culture). Lütjens did not show these pictures until the following year and then only to a select group of interested friends.34 Beckmann started showing his new works to Lütjens at this point and a relationship of trust developed between the artist and the art dealer. In September 1944, the painter feared personal attacks as a result of his German citizenship and shortly before the end of the war he and his wife moved into a couple of rooms at Keizersgracht 109 where Helmuth Lütjens lived with his wife Nelly and their one-year-old daughter Annemarie. During this time, the artist developed the plan to paint a large portrait of the Lütjens family with the unusual measurements of 179.5 × 85 cm. The portrait stayed in the family until 2009 and is now on display at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.35 (Pl. VII) According to Annemarie Lütjens, everybody was immediately pleased with the family portrait and it was displayed in the living room – clearly visible to any visitor.36 As was common for Max Beckmann’s portraits, there were no sittings prior to painting the picture. Instead, Beckmann completed numerous sketches of the family members during his countless visits to the Keizersgracht; he later gave these to

31 See Barbara Göpel, Erhard Göpel, Max Beckmann. Katalog der Gemälde, 2 vols., Bern 1976: Old Botanical Garden, vol. 1, p. 54, no. 21; vol. 2, plate 24, color plate 1; Tomato Still Life, vol. 1, p. 63, no. 49 (without illustr.); Summer Day at the Sea, vol. 1, p. 75, no. 77; vol. 2, plate 38; Portrait of a Lady, vol. 1, p. 75, plate 40. 32 “Come on, now buy a Beckmann too!” Portrait of the Lütjens Family in Museum Boijmans Van Beu­ ningen, Rotterdam 2010, p. 74. 33 Excerpt from a letter of Lütjens to Walter Feilchenfeldt of June 13, 1939, selected parts published in “Come on, now buy a Beckmann too!” 2010 (as fn. 32), p. 149. 34 Ibid., p. 76. 35 Ibid., p. 79. 36 Ibid., p. 9.



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Helmuth Lütjens as a gift. The majority of the 29 sketches are now also in Rotterdam. Lütjens gave three of them away as presents and some remained in the family.37 During the period shortly before the end of the Second World War, German artists in Holland, whose possessions had been confiscated by the authorities, were in financial straits. Without the active support of Lütjens and his wife, the Beckmanns would hardly have survived the difficult war years in the Netherlands. Lütjens not only made sales for Beckmann during this time, he also shared his food and income with the artist in order to save him from extreme hunger.38 Lütjens would have liked to take Max Beckmann under contract at the Cassirer Gallery, but did not want to force this against the will of his two business partners. On October 20, 1945, he wrote a detailed letter to Walter Feilchenfeldt in which he hoped to convince the latter of the quality and modernity of Max Beckmann’s art: “Regarding the paintings, I can only say that I have an exceptional admiration for the artist, B. He is about the same age as Kokoschka, but is tremendously different and, in my opinion, more contemporary. I see in him the German kind of grappling with the world, similar to how Picasso and Braque became representative of Spain and France. He has gone beyond the limits of national significance and has become a world phenomenon …”39 Lütjens and Beckmann were thoroughly disappointed when the two partners at the Cassirer Gallery decided against representing the artist after the war. Feilchenfeldt and Grete Ring viewed the “national” characteristics as still being too dominant in his paintings and considered the “Germanically powerful” aspects to be intolerable so soon after the Nazi period. In a letter to Curt Valentin on October 23, 1945, Lütjens asked the New York dealer to support Beckmann and to exhibit the pictures produced during the war years in his gallery in New York. In December of that year, Valentin began sending money to the artist on a monthly basis and he purchased several of his paintings.40 In the following spring, Curt Valentin hosted a large Beckmann exhibition at his Buchholz Gallery in New York. It sold out almost completely. During the time preceding the Beckmann couple’s emigration to the USA, Lütjens and Beckmann no longer communicated as regularly, but their relationship nevertheless continued to be friendly and trusting. The exhibition of Beckmann’s work at the Kunsthaus in Zurich, planned by Lütjens for May or June of 1946, never took place due to timing difficulties, despite great interest on the part of Wilhelm Wartmann.41

37 See ibid., p. 79; pp. 112 ff., figs. 1–29. 38 Ibid., p. 150. 39 Walter Feilchenfeldt Archive, Zurich. 40 “Come on, now buy a Beckmann too!” 2010 (as fn. 32), p. 81. 41 Ibid., p. 82.

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Grete Ring: Paul Cassirer Ltd., London The business relationship between the Paul Cassirer Gallery, Amsterdam, and the Buchholz Gallery in New York, managed by Curt Valentin, had already taken shape before the onset of the Second World War, when in 1931, Lütjens dispatched several works of Oskar Kokoschka’s, sent to him by Feilchenfeldt from Berlin, onwards from Amsterdam to New York. But Grete Ring also corresponded with Valentin from London. The art historian’s letters from this time discuss her worries concerning her friends and acquaintances in Germany, but also her wish to survive quietly in England and to delve into her studies in art history.42 Before her emigration, Grete Ring had led a lively social life in Berlin. She had carried on nineteenth century salon culture, inviting prominent personalities from artistic and cultural circles to her parents’ home at Schöneberger Ufer 46. Among her friends and colleagues, she was well known and loved for her intelligence and high level of education, which were paired with wittiness and a distinctive sense of humor. Her texts for the Paul Cassirer Gallery are still valid today and display a well-founded knowledge of art history, as do her numerous other publications. Working together with Alfred Flechtheim from December 1932 to March 1933, she played a significant role in the three-part exhibition series Living German Art at the Paul Cassirer Gallery, for which she authored the following ingenious preface: “[…] Today’s true collector knows no time boundaries. As devoted as he is to the living art of living artists, he will not neglect the work of the great masters of the past. And if we see things correctly, the art dealer, too, must be as multifaceted as the collector: the ‘dealer‑in-the-old-only’ is just as out‑of-step with the times as is the ‘dealer‑in-the-new-only.’ Together with the collector and the dealer, the third essential factor in this working triad – the art critic – should finally face the need for continuity in contemplating art. The well-deserved recognition of the German art of our generation – in all its significance – has been painfully difficult to achieve. This is partly due to the fact that German art criticism itself has been artificially widening the gap between non-existent polarities by clinging with all its might – almost without exception – to the alternatives of either ‘old or new’…”43 The series began with an exhibition encompassing 106 works by eighteen artists, including pieces by Willi Baumeister, Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, and Oskar Schlemmer. While the first exhibition was perceived as lacking direction and was received rather negatively by

42 Walter Feilchenfeldt Archive, Zurich. 43 See Lebendige Deutsche Kunst. Ausstellungsfolge in drei Abteilungen. Veranstaltet von Paul Cassirer und Alfred Flechtheim, exh. cat. 1, Kunstsalon Paul Cassirer, Berlin 1933, p. 3. (Exh. cat. 1: Dec. 10, 1932 to mid-January 1933; exh. cat. 2: Jan. ​14 to mid-February 1933; exh. cat. 3: Feb. ​25 to the end of March 1933.)



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both the public and critics – with the exception of the art critic Paul Westheim – the second show was significantly more successful. There was a focus on the works of nine painters and sculptors, two of whom were Barlach and Kokoschka, who had both been under contract with Cassirer for many years. Many of the artists included in the third show are hardly known among today’s viewers: for example, the Dutch artist Bob Gesinus-Visser or Heinz Rosenberg-Fleck. But there were also some younger artists represented in the show whose present fame far exceeds the recognition they were given at the time, such as Ernst Wilhelm Nay or Franz Radziwill.44 On November 1, 1933, the “general partnership” (offene Handelsgesellschaft) Paul Cassirer was transformed into a sole proprietorship with Grete Ring as the sole business owner. Shortly thereafter, she received notice from the state authorities banning her from continuing to conduct business. After the gallery was liquidated in 1935, Grete Ring emigrated to London, in May 1938. Correspondence with the Berlin shipping company Haberling documents the art historian’s properly exported furniture and library, including even Strohmian, her poodle, while a meticulously documented list of her personal belongings and jewelry was kept by the German authorities.45 After her arrival in England, the Home Office granted her permission to work as an art dealer and an art historian for one year. Upon being summoned to the Metropolitan Police Station on November 8, 1939, she prepared a résumé in English, in which she described herself as being “of Protestant faith and not of Aryan origin (according to the Nuremberg laws).”46 In July 1938, Grete Ring opened the newly founded branch, Paul Cassirer Ltd., on Cleveland Row with an exhibition of 45 watercolors and drawings by Cézanne. Walter Feilchenfeldt had also been much in favor of renting this elegant space, as documented in many letters between the two business partners, but the profits of the English Cassirer branch remained fairly low. Grete Ring’s letters from London to her business partner and other colleagues and friends mention the finding and selling of some “trouvailles.” Furthermore, her papers from this time include an undated “desiderata-list” which she kept for Karl Haberstock.47

44 See ibid. For an assessment of the exhibit by the press at the time, see, for example, Adolph Donath, Künstlerische Gestalter. Lebendige Malerei und Plastik bei Paul Cassirer, in: Berliner Tageblatt, Jan. ​17, 1933, morning edition, [n. p.]; B. E. Werner, Lebendige Deutsche Kunst. Second exhibition at Paul Cassirer, in: Stahlhelm, Jan. ​18, 1933, [n. p.]; Curt Glaser, Lebendige deutsche Kunst, in: Ger­ mania, Jan. ​20, 1933, [n. p.]; Paul Westheim, Lebendige Deutsche Kunst, in: Kunstblatt 17 (Jan. ​1933), pp. 4 ff.: “The remarkable thing about these exhibitions – a third one representing the younger artists is still to follow – was, moreover, that they were well-planned and thoughtfully put together […].” 45 Walter Feilchenfeldt Archive, Zurich. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. Haberstock had also started his career as an art dealer at Paul Cassirer before he sold works by “degenerate” artists on behalf of the Nazis in Germany.

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Grete Ring’s work as an art historian after her arrival in England is easier to reconstruct. In December 1938, she wrote an article on the art of Albrecht Dürer, which she discussed in various letters with Max J. Friedländer in Berlin.48 During the war years, she published highly scholarly articles in English and prepared a publication on French painting, which came out in London in 1949.49 In 1941, Grete Ring had to leave Cleveland Row after heavy bombings in which she lost most of what she had brought with her from Berlin. As she wrote in a letter to the art historian Ludwig Grote in Munich on June 29, 1945, her own collection of drawings from the German Romantic period had amazingly been spared. This collection is now kept as the Bequest Grete Ring at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. After the destruction of her living quarters and gallery space, Grete Ring moved into a small house in Richmond together with Arthur and Tamara Kauffmann. Here, in tight quarters but in an intellectually stimulating environment, she spent her days writing in the garden, making lengthy visits to libraries, and attending lectures.50 She soon developed close friendships with English art historians and museum people like the associates of the Warburg Institute and the director of the National Gallery, Sir Kenneth Clark, who issued an affidavit to the English authorities for her.51 Her correspondence with Max J. Friedländer in Berlin, until the time of his emigration to Holland on May 14, 1939, documents an extremely interesting scholarly exchange that lasted until shortly before Grete Ring’s death on August 18, 1952.52

The years after 1945 Walter Feilchenfeldt was able to survive the war years financially thanks to his own abilities and the support of good friends and colleagues. On July  22, 1940 he was issued a “Toleration Residency Permit” in place of the tourist visa he had originally received when first entering Switzerland. However, this still did not give him the permission to earn a living. It was not until 1947 that he could finally open new gallery premises in Switzerland and began to achieve economic stability. In the letters to Grete Ring, which stopped in 1940 and did not resume until 1945, the main point of

48 Grete Ring, A new attribution to Dürer, in: Old master drawings 13 (1938/39), pp. 52–57. 49 Grete Ring, Additions to the work of Jan Provost and Quentin Massys, in: The Burlington magazine for connoisseurs 79 (1941), pp. 156–160; ead., An Austrian triptych, in: The art bulletin 26, no. 1 (1944), pp. 51–55; ead., A Century of French Painting 1400–1500, London 1949. 50 Arthur Kauffmann, previously an employee at Helbing in Frankfurt, had also fled Germany and the Nazis, together with his Russian wife. He also started a new business in London and continued his work as an art dealer after the war. 51 Walter Feilchenfeldt Archive, Zurich. 52 This correspondence, which presents interesting art historical observations and interpretations of primarily early Dutch and Italian painting, presents in itself an independent topic of research.



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Fig. 33: Paul Cézanne, fils (son of Paul Cézanne), photographed at a Parisian art show by Marianne Breslauer, 1932.

discussion was his feverishly awaited work permit, which he finally received from the Swiss authorities in October 1946. On October 27, 1947 the art dealer signed the sales contract for the Old Masters’ Collection belonging to Prince Franz Josef II von und zu Liechtenstein. He succeeded in finding buyers for the 289 pieces between 1948 and 1949. Collectors and dealers frequented the newly opened premises in Zurich and the magnificent works ultimately found their way into private collections and international museums. Today, 11 drawings from the former Liechtenstein Collection are at the National Gallery in Washington, 12 at the Institut Néerlandais in Paris, and 17 at the Kupferstichkabinett in Basel. The largest group, consisting of 80 drawings, was purchased by the Rijksprintenkabinett in Amsterdam. Walter Feilchenfeldt was not able to extend his newly founded business in Zurich for long. On December 9, 1953, he died at age 59 after suffering a stroke. His wife Marianne continued to manage the gallery very successfully alone. (Fig. 33) Her son Walter joined the firm in 1966. As the legal successor of the Paul Cassirer Gallery in Berlin, the branch in Amsterdam was closed in 2012, many years after the death of Helmuth Lütjens on January 7, 1987. The Paul Cassirer Ltd. branch in London remained open into the 70s of the last century, over twenty years after the passing away of Grete Ring.

Christian Fuhrmeister and Susanne Kienlechner

August Liebmann Mayer (1885–1944) – Success, Failure, Emigration, Deportation and Murder Preliminary remarks For both authors, this article has an unusual history – a history that must be told, for a number of reasons. On May 11, 2005, the travelling exhibition Kunstgeschichte im Nationalsozialismus. Wanderausstellung zur Geschichte einer Wissenschaft zwischen 1930 und 1950 (History of Art During National Socialism. Travelling exhibition on the history of a science between 1930–1950) opened at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. In accordance with the principles of that exhibition (each of the show’s venues was asked to present additional material from local sources), a student group from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München had researched additional archival material, to be added to the core documents and objects on display.1 Soon after the opening, Susanne Kienlechner inquired why August Liebmann Mayer, a noted art historian in Munich, was absent both in the exhibition and in the accompanying publication.2 Mayer’s conspicuous absence intrigued both of us, and we embarked on a private joint research project. The first step was a short workshop paper that Susanne Kienlechner delivered in October 2006 in Bonn at the conference Geschichte der Kunst­ geschichte im Nationalsozialismus, 1930–1950 (The history of art history under National Socialism, 1930–1950) that marked the end of a two-year project funded by the German Research Foundation, GKNS-WEL, and which evolved into a co‑authored research article we contributed to the conference proceedings.3

1 www.zikg.eu/main/2005/kuge/index.‌htm (accessed May 2012). 2 Nikola Doll, Christian Fuhrmeister, Michael Sprenger (eds.), Kunstgeschichte im Nationalsozialis­ mus. Beiträge zur Geschichte einer Wissenschaft zwischen 1930 und 1950, exh. cat. (companion book to the travelling exhibition Kunstgeschichte im Nationalsozialismus), Weimar 2005. 3 Presentation within the Forum session: Tatort Nizza. August Liebmann Mayer, Bruno Lohse, Er­ hard Göpel und Bernhard Degenhart, www.welib.de/gkns/GKNS_Tagung.‌pdf (accessed May 2012); Christian Fuhrmeister, Susanne Kienlechner, Tatort Nizza. Kunstgeschichte zwischen Kunsthandel, Kunstraub und Verfolgung. Zur Vita von August Liebmann Mayer, mit einem Exkurs zu Bernhard Degenhart und Bemerkungen zu Erhard Göpel und Bruno Lohse, in: Ruth Heftrig, Olaf Peters, Barbara Schellewald (eds.), Kunstgeschichte im “Dritten Reich”. Theorien, Methoden, Praktiken, Berlin 2008 (Schriften zur modernen Kunsthistoriographie, vol. 1), pp. 405–429.

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 Christian Fuhrmeister and Susanne Kienlechner

Since then, a number of things have happened, from newspaper reports4 to another research article (dealing with the question whether Mayer could have been Lion Feuchtwanger’s model for Martin Krüger, the protagonist of Feuchtwanger’s 1930 novel Erfolg (Success)5 and from further research, notably at the Special Archive in Moscow,6 to a visit of Mayer’s daughter in Los Angeles in February 2009 (with whom we had been in contact since 2005). Concurrently, the German Wikipedia entry on Mayer (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Liebmann_Mayer) –  for unknown reasons, an English or French version does not exist – has grown steadily (without any involvement from our side). Also, it should be noted that Teresa Posada Kubissa, who had been working on Mayer since the early 1990s,7 finished her Ph. D. at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid in 2007, and published it in summer 2010, in Spanish.8 In October that year, an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Munich opened: Einblicke – Ausblicke. Jüdische Kunsthistoriker in München (Insights-Prospects. Jewish art historians in Munich), accompanied by a 4 Renate Schostack, Der Gutachter. August Liebmann Mayer war einer der bedeutendsten Kunsthistoriker der 20er Jahre. Jetzt wird er wiederentdeckt, in: Jüdische Allgemeine, Jan. ​15, 2009, no. 3, p. 15, at www.juedische-allgemeine.de/article/view/id/240 (accessed May 2012). 5 Christian Fuhrmeister, Susanne Kienlechner, Gegenwart und Ahnung. Inwiefern war der Münchner Kunsthistoriker August Liebmann Mayer (1885–1944) ein Vorbild für die Figur des Martin Krüger in Lion Feuchtwangers Roman Erfolg (1930)?, in: Literatur in Bayern 24, no. 93 (Sept. ​2008), pp. 32–44, available at www.kunstgeschichte.‌uni-muenchen.de/forschung/ausstellungsprojekte/einblicke_ausblicke/biografien/mayer/gegenwart_u_ahnung.‌pdf (accessed May 2012). 6 Christian Fuhrmeister, Kunst(geschichte) im Sonderarchiv? Probebohrungen, Zufallsfunde und eine Schlussfolgerung, in: Das Sonderarchiv des Russischen Staatlichen Militärarchivs. Forschungs­ berichte von Stipendiaten des DHI Moskau, Moskau 2008 (Bulletin des Deutschen Historischen Instituts Moskau, no. 2), pp. 21–27, at www.‌dhi-moskau.de/fileadmin/pdf/Publikation/DHIM-Bulletin_2.‌pdf (accessed May 2012). The trip to Moscow in late 2006 and the work in the archive would not have been possible without a research fellowship from the German Historical Institute (DHI) in Moscow, and their concrete help in situ. 7 Teresa Posada Kubissa, August L. Mayer, in: Enrique Arias Anglés (ed.), Historiografía del arte es­ pañol en los siglos XIX y XX, Madrid 1995, pp. 377–380; Teresa Posada Kubissa, August L. Mayer – ein Experte der spanischen Kunst in München, in: Christian Drude, Hubertus Kohle (eds.), 200 Jahre Kunst­ geschichte in München, München 2003, pp. 120–130; Teresa Posada Kubissa, August L. Mayer  – ein bedeutender Kenner spanischer Kunst. Leistung und Schicksal, in: Greco, Velazquez, Goya. Spanische Malerei aus deutschen Sammlungen, exh. cat., Bucerius-Kunst-Forum Hamburg, Staatliche Kunst­ samm­lungen Dresden/Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Szépmüvészeti Múzeum Budapest, München et al. 2005, pp. 170–175; Teresa Posada Kubissa, August L. Mayer, ein bedeutender Kenner spanischer Kunst, in: Mitteilungen der Carl Justi Vereinigung 17/18 (2005/06), pp. 4–12. 8 Teresa Posada Kubissa, August L. Mayer y la pintura española: Ribera, Goya, El Greco, Velázquez, Madrid 2010.  – See also Teresa Posada Kubissa, Justi, Mayer, Dvořák. Drei Kunsthistoriker auf der Suche nach El Greco, in: Beat Wismer, Michael Scholz-Hänsel (eds.), El Greco und die Moderne, exh. cat., Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Ostfildern 2012, pp. 354–361. Cf. the Spanish version of the Wikipedia biography, http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_L._Mayer, published in early March 2013. – While we always referred to Posada Kubissa’s publications, we do not know why she did not and does not even mention our work.



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booklet and an expanded online version of that catalogue, also featuring Mayer.9 One of the many results of this exhibition was the discovery that of all the art historians that had worked in Munich before 1933, Mayer was the only one who was murdered in Auschwitz. These research efforts regarding Mayer have also had an important practical impact – insofar as two German museums have restituted objects that formerly belonged to his private collection.10 Regarding the four objects of the Bavarian State Collections, Andrea Bambi succinctly summed up the case in 2010.11 Curiously enough, it was only after we had published two articles about Mayer that we also presented a paper on him: one at the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, on July 4, 2010, and one in Moscow on June 24, 2011 – and it is the revised and augmented version of the Moscow paper that constitutes our contribution to this volume. That said, the challenge of the present text is twofold: 1) to truly condense and sum up – and not repeat – our two earlier publications, and 2) to discuss as many new findings as possible. We have decided to combine these two aspects in this contribution – to give as much biographical information as needed for a larger readership and to highlight, if possible, details not hitherto published. In doing so, our focus is clearly on Mayer’s tragic vita – and his interactions with other persons –, and neither on his academic or scholarly profile (that Posada Kubissa has studied extensively and thoroughly) nor on proper provenance research concerning the history of his collection. Finally, we would like to add a personal note: although we have been studying Mayer for eight years now, and although the tasks we had assigned ourselves in our first article – “to provide material for the reintegration of Mayer into the history of art history, and to carve out the determining factors of art historical activities, particularly in the Nazi era”12 – have been somewhat fulfilled, we are still moved and still puzzled vis‑à-vis both his personal trajectory and the larger field of inquiry. As a 9 Booklet: www.juedisches-museum-muenchen.de/fileadmin/bilder/10-Bilder/Flyer_Einblicke_low.‌pdf; expanded online version: www.kunstgeschichte.‌uni-muenchen.de/forschung/ausstellungsprojekte/ einblicke_ausblicke/index.‌html, Part VI, Biographies (both accessed May 2012). 10 On May 12, 2010, the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen restituted four objects to the daughter, Angelika B. Mayer, see Süddeutsche Zeitung, May  14, 2010, no. 109, p. 12 and p. 36; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 15, 2010, no. 111, p. 33; www.pinakothek.de/bayerische-staatsgemaeldesammlungen/forschung/provenienzforschung (accessed May 2012), and on April 19, 2012, the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum restituted a small bronze sculpture, see Dattelner Morgenpost, Apr. ​18, 2012 (dpa); Süddeutsche Zeitung, Apr. ​19, 2012, no. 91, p. R 16 – that recent article states, at the end, that “Mayer’s art collection is dispersed world-wide” (“Mayers Kunstsammlung ist weltweit verstreut”). 11 Andrea Bambi, Provenienzforschung an den Bayerischen Staatsgemäldesammlungen. Eine Zwischenbilanz, in: Andrea Baresel-Brand (ed.), Die Verantwortung dauert an. Beiträge deutscher In­ stitutionen zum Umgang mit NS‑verfolgungsbedingt entzogenem Kulturgut, Magdeburg 2010 (Veröffent­ lichungen der Koordinierungsstelle Magdeburg, vol. 8), pp. 259–275, here pp. 262–265. 12 Fuhrmeister/Kienlechner 2008 (as fn. 3), p. 405: “Dieser Beitrag will einerseits Material für die Reintegration Mayers in die Geschichte des Faches Kunstgeschichte bereitstellen, andererseits exemplarisch spezifische Rahmenbedingungen kunsthistorischer Tätigkeit – insbesondere in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus – herausarbeiten.”

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 Christian Fuhrmeister and Susanne Kienlechner

matter of fact, the story we are telling is, necessarily, an unfinished one, with loose ends, dead ends, twists and turns. In other words: we do not (or perhaps no longer) feel like simply unearthing a biography that has been forgotten, dismissed or deliberately pushed aside. Rather, we consider ourselves to be moving in a somewhat dynamic, almost constantly changing and evolving field, and we are thus convinced that our present understanding can and will be expanded and nuanced by future discoveries. A case in point in this regard is the fact that the Bavarian State Library has recently begun to augment their online catalogue with the results of a research project initiated by librarian Stephan Kellner. Regarding Mayer, we now learn that a copy (an offprint, to be precise) of his 1930 Belvedere article on authentic and false Goya drawings was given to the Bavarian State Library on May 17, 1939 as a gift – from the Munich Gestapo.13 Of course, this raises many questions (e. g. where exactly did the Gestapo seize this offprint?), and this is just one of the many reasons why we call the field “dynamic”, as research continues and new sources and resources become available. In this vein, we are currently trying to trace the path of Mayer’s private library that had been seized by the ERR in Paris. We will continue to follow clues that point to the Munich Central Art Collecting Point.

Success The son of a merchant, August Liebmann Mayer was born October 27, 1885, in Griesheim near Darmstadt. After graduation in 1904, he studied art history. His 1907 Ph. D. on Jusepe Ribera was supervised by Heinrich Wölfflin in Berlin. In fall 1909, he took an unpaid position at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, and became a curator in 1914. After 1914, the year in which he did his habilitation on the Seville school of painting, he taught at Munich University, where he became a supernumerary associate professor in 1920. That year, he was appointed chief conservator at the Alte Pinakothek, and married Aloisia Däuschinger (Rabenstein April 11, 1891 – Paris Aug. 1, 1941).14 Between

13 Searching the online catalogue (https://opacplus.‌bsb-muenchen.‌de), the visitor will find information on 44 publications by Mayer. One of them is the article “Echte und falsche Goya-Zeichnungen”, in: Belvedere 9 (1930), pp. 215–217, today to be ordered by call number “4 39.517”. The old handwritten catalogue entry (http://quart_ifk.‌bsb-muenchen.de/ifk_quart//jsp/imageAnz.‌jsp?Display=​ImageCard&ImageID=​46176077&Lang=​de) for this item indicates “G. n. 14428” (links accessed April 2014). If you look up this abbreviation in the Schenkerbuch of the library that lists the donations, as Stephan Kellner and his team did, the provenance is revealed as “Geschenk von: Gestapo München”. 14 We believe that Wilhelm Thöny’s Porträt einer Dame mit rotem Hut, 1913, might depict the 22‑yearold Aloisia (or Luise) Däuschinger. This portrait from Mayer’s collection belongs to the four works of art that were restituted to the daughter in 2010; it was subsequently sold to the Universalmuseum Joanneum, Neue Galerie Graz.



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January 1928 and December 1932 he co‑edited the journal Pantheon together with Otto von Falke. A daughter, Angelika Bertha Mayer, was born February 21, 1930. Mayer was a most prolific author, with dozens of monographs and dozens of articles in Apollo, Arte español, Belvedere, Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, Burlington Magazine, Cicerone, Jahrbuch der Preußischen Kunstsammlungen, Monats­ hefte für Kunstwissenschaft, Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst and Reperto­ rium für Kunstwissenschaft, to name but the most common and frequent (the online catalogue of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte gives 323 hits for this author). A specialist in Spanish (and Italian) art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he frequently provided expert testimonials in other fields as well; from 1913 onwards, Mayer had regular professional contact with a large international network of German, French, Spanish, British and American collectors, scholars, and dealers. However, the art historian did not restrict himself to old masters; he also took immediate interest in the contemporary arts and commissioned works  – like the exlibris/ bookplates designed by Edwin Scharff in 191415 and by Emil Preetorius in 1923, or the portrait bust that Scharff executed in 1917. Furthermore, Mayer had serious ambitions with regard to fiction and drama, translated plays, wrote a novel and even a film script. It is notably the disjointed documents in File 1399 of the Special Archive in Moscow that testify to these rarely examined aspects of his profile, misleadingly entitled Nachlaß (Estate). 1399 contains but 10 files of a most heterogeneous nature, from historic files to manuscripts and typescripts like an unpublished catalogue raisonné of Titian. In all likelihood, these documents were looted by the ERR in Paris in fall 1942, brought to Berlin and later transported further east, where the Red Army seized them.16 Information on his lectures is scarce, but there is evidence that he read a paper on “The History of Synagogues in Spain” to the Jewish community in Munich.17 From his wide-ranging correspondence, only fragments have survived.18 It is fair to say that particularly in the late 1910s and throughout the 1920s, Mayer definitely not only belonged to the cultural and also academic élite in the Bavarian

15 Etching, Edwin Scharff Museum, Neu-Ulm; image and information kindly provided by director Helga Gutbrod, Nov. ​21, 2008. 16 For a short report with a rather superficial description of the contents of that collection, see Fuhrmeister 2008 (as fn. 6), p. 22, fn. 3. 17 Bayerisch-Israelitische Gemeindezeitung, Apr. ​15, 1929, no. 8, vol. 1929, pp. 122–123, here p. 122: “Über die Geschichte der Synagogen in Spanien sprach Prof. Dr. August L. Mayer, Donnerstag, den 28. Februar, im großen Museumssaal im Rahmen der gemeindlichen Lehrkurse.” 18 For instance, his letters to Efraim Frisch, editor of Der Neue Merkur. Monatsschrift für Geistiges Leben (1914–1925), concerning his translation of an essay by Ortega y Gasset in 1922, which are preserved at the Leo Baeck Institute, New York, or his correspondence with Franz Roh, see e. g. Getty Research Institute [GRI], Special Collections, Accession no. 55010, Franz Roh Papers, Box 3/6, Mayer to Roh, Jan. ​21, 1926, or with the art dealer Jacques Seligmann, see Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Jacques Seligmann & Co. Records, General Correspondence, Box 64, Folder 22, and Box 75, Folder 8.

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capital, but was deeply rooted in the intellectual, artistic, and bohemian circles in Schwabing and Maxvorstadt where he lived and worked (Ainmillerstr. 31, Ansbacher­ str. 2, Martiusstr. 8). From his income as a civil servant, the royalties for his publications, the remuneration he gained from acting as an intermediary negotiator,19 the revenues from occasionally selling works from his own collection and the fees he received for his appraisals and expert testimonies (e. g. for renowned international dealers like the Duveen Brothers), he also succeeded financially. It does not come as a surprise that his general success – as a scholar and author, as curator and art historian, as advisor and expert – also aroused envy and jealousy (as it did and still does, perhaps inevitably, in the case of most who, like Bernard Berenson or more recently Werner Spies, have thrived due to their eloquent mastery of joining or even coalescing the fields of art history, connoisseurship, and the art market). Putting it bluntly, the common charge that came and comes with this blurring of boundaries between allegedly pure science and supposedly greedy trade is the claim that “scholars are not supposed to live this way,”20 tainted by the world of business.

Failure In summer 1930, when an exhibition of the Collection Chateau Rohoncz (Sammlung Schloß Rohoncz, i. e. the collection of Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza) was on display at the Pinakothek, some art historians – like Wilhelm Pinder and Luitpold Dussler – not only argued that a great number of authentications were wrong, denouncing the works as fakes,21 but that some of the attributions to well-known masters – a number

19 See the Zentralarchiv des internationalen Kunsthandels, Köln, Bestand A 77 (Galerie Thannhauser), Customer Card Mayer. 20 Michael M. Thomas, Indi(c)ting Bernard Berenson. A review of Artful Partners – Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen by Colin Simpson, in: The New Criterion, vol. 5 (Mar. 1987), p. 66, online at www. newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Indi‑c-ting-Bernard-Berenson-6157 (accessed May 2012). 21 As far as we can see, the story of this incident told by Ministerialdirektor Richard Hendschel (1868–1946), who directed the art department of the Bavarian State Ministry for Education and Religious & Cultural Affairs (Staatsministerium für Unterricht und Kultus) between 1915 and 1933, has not been taken into consideration: “Im Jahre 1930 zeigte Dörnhöffer in der Pinakothek die berühmte Privatsammlung des Großindustriellen Thysen aus Schloss Rohacz [sic!] […]. Thyssen trug sich mit dem Gedanken, die Sammlung aufzulösen und abzugeben und Dörnhöffer machte sich Hoffnungen, daß dabei München zum Zuge kommen würde. […] Leider knüpfte sich in München an die Ausstellung eine recht unerfreuliche Polemik zwischen dem o. Universitätsprofessor Dr. Pinder und Dörnhöffer an. Pinder hatte bedauerlicherweise vor seinen Schülern bei einem Rundgang in der Pinakothek laut behauptet, einige der Hauptstücke der Thyssen-Sammlung seien Fälschungen, andere aber von Dörnhöffer falsch zugeschrieben. Dörnhöffer, der davon erfuhr, war seiner Sache ganz sicher und erwiderte scharf. Ich musste nun Pinder zur Rede stellen, wobei er mir zugab, daß sein Hauptgebiet die Plastik



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of them had been sold to Thyssen by the Munich art dealer Heinemann, whom Mayer had also often advised22  – had even been made despite what the expert (meaning Mayer) knew to be true, insinuating that the latter had declared the bigger name for his own profit, since he received a certain percentage when the work was sold. The background to this éclat was the ongoing debate about expert opinions, which had been raging in the art world since the late 1920s. This vigorous nationwide debate – that had been spurred considerably by the sales of the seized art collections of emigrants from Russia, e. g. in Berlin in 192823 – suddenly focused on Mayer, who became a sort of scapegoat. He was indeed predestined for a volley of reproaches, since he could afford “a nice car and a villa”.24 Such a pointed remark was certainly

sei und daß er über Gemälde kein so ganz gründliches Wissen und sicheres Urteil besitze.” Richard Hendschel, Einige Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen im Kunstreferat aus den Jahren 1913–1933. Auszüge aus den Lebenserinnerungen des Ministerialdirektors a. D. Richard Hendschel, typescript [Bayerische Staats­bibliothek München, call number: 2 Rem.V 1–13], sine loco [Garmisch], n. d. [1946], pp. 64–65. 22 Posada Kubissa 2010 (as fn. 8), p. 77, refers to “el prestigioso antiquario muniqués Rudolf J. Heinemann (1901–1975)”; in the index, however, she states “Heinemann, Rudolf J. (Mimi)”, which is a reference to Franziska (Mimi) Heinemann (1882–1940), who managed the world-famous Gallery Heinemann with her son Fritz (1905–1983) in Munich, see http://heinemann.gnm.de/en/history‑of-the-galerie-heinemann.‌html (accessed May 2012). The database, online since late July 2010, provides abundant information about the many offers and sales in which Mayer was involved. A paper that Birgit Jooss, head of the Deutsches Kunstarchiv at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, delivered on October 31, 2012, in Munich at the Zentralinstitut’s third colloquium on provenance research projects and collection history, has further elucidated the biographies of the different members of the Heinemann family. See www.kunstgeschichte.‌uni-muenchen.de/forschung/ausstellungsprojekte/einblicke_ausblicke/biografien/heinemann/index.‌html. 23 See Fuhrmeister/Kienlechner 2008 (as fn. 3), p. 408, fn. 8. 24 Hendschel [1946] (as fn. 21), p. 65: “Es scheint, daß er [Mayer] hinter dem Rücken Dörnhöffers, seines Chefs, seine großen Kenntnisse bisweilen doch in unzulässiger, eigennütziger Weise ausgenützt hatte, denn er besaß bei bescheidenem Gehalt doch plötzlich ein schönes Auto und eine Villa. Dörnhöffer war Mayer gegenüber wohl zu gutgläubig und zu vornehm denkend: er glaubte sich schützend vor seinen von ihm als Arbeiter und Kenner mit Recht sehr geschätzten Beamten stellen zu müssen, solange diesem nicht wirklich nachzuweisen war, dass er gegen die Vorschriften wirklich verstoße und unzuläßige Geschäfte gemacht hätte. Aber die Angriffe gegen Mayer ließen nicht nach und auch die Presse bemächtigte sich des Falles.” The “modest salary”, to which Hendschel refers, was not so modest: the 9,284.– RM per annum which Mayer had received since January  1, 1928 (see Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen München [BSGS], Alt-Registratur, Box  3, no. 11, “Akte betreff. A. L. Mayer”) were almost equivalent to a full professor’s (Ordinarius) earnings, which usually were around 10,000.– RM p. a. in the late 1920s. In 1927, a “Privatdozent” like Ludwig Bachhofer only earned about a third – 3,261.– RM – (Universitätsarchiv München [UAM], E‑II-760), and in 1935 3,870.– RM (Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv [BayHStA], MK 43578, Hans Gerhard Evers). Regarding the rather special situation of Geheimrat Wilhelm Pinder, who had managed to negotiate a base salary of 12,000.– RM, see Daniela Stöppel, Die Politisierung der Kunstgeschichte unter dem Ordinariat von Wilhelm Pinder (1927–1935), in: Elisabeth Kraus (ed.), Die Universität München im Dritten Reich. Aufsätze, Teil II, München 2008 (Beiträge zur Geschichte der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, vol. 4), pp. 133–168, esp. pp. 140–141.

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also due to the general situation around 1930, when, in the midst of the global economic crisis, many businesses were going bankrupt and unemployment figures were rising to unprecedented numbers  – given these circumstances, a prosperous and well‑to-do bourgeois like Mayer seemed poles apart from all those that suffered. However, it is important to stress here that it was a very common practice for curators, directors and other staff members of museums to give expert opinions, and that this was not considered to be misconduct, but rather an appropriate way to establish and maintain good relations with art dealers, from which museums would eventually benefit in the case of making acquisitions.25 Despite the support he received from the Director of the Pinakothek and many others, the situation in late 1930 and early 1931 (with broadsides from Ernst Zimmermann and Rudolf Berliner, to name just two of Mayer’s critics) put Mayer under heavy pressure. He maintained that he had not personally enriched himself, and that he had declared the fees and royalties, which were entered in the books of the State Paintings Collections as additional income (in fact, the money he earned that way was more or less equivalent to his own salary).26 But on January 30, 1931, anticipating further public attention,27 he resigned from his position at the museum and the university – a step that

25 See Kathrin Iselt, “Sonderbeauftragter des Führers”. Der Kunsthistoriker und Museumsmann Her­ mann Voss (1884–1969), Köln/Weimar/Wien 2010 (Studien zur Kunst, vol. 20), passim.  – See also Hans Eckstein, Kunstwissenchaft und Expertise. Ein Wort zu Aug. L. Mayers Rücktritt, typescript, Getty Research Institute, Special Collections, Accession no. 910156, Hans Eckstein Papers, Box 3/5, 3 pages (there are three different stages of this text – we quote the latest one), p. 2: “Es bedeutet daher eine Entstellung der Wahrheit, wenn verallgemeinernd, wie jüngst von einem Münchner Kunsthändler in der ‘Weltkunst’, von einem Kampf der reinen Wissenschaft gegen die ‘praktische Kunstforschung’ oder den Kunsthandel überhaupt gesprochen wird. Man braucht nur die Namen Bode und Hugo von Tschudi zu nennen, um an eine noch nicht vergangene Periode fruchtbarer Zusammenarbeit von Wissenschaft, Museumsarbeit und Kunsthandel zu erinnern, oder an Cassirer und Hans Wendland zu denken, um zu wissen, was die Gefahren zu bannen vermag.” 26 BayHStA, MK 44803, Kassenbuch der Direktion der Bayerischen Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Einnahmen durch Expertisen von Mayer 1925–1931. 27 To give an impression of the amount of press coverage, we refer to the press clippings collection of only one archive, the Municipal Archive in Munich (Stadtarchiv München), and only to the period between mid-February and early April 1931, in chronological sequence: Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, Feb. ​22, 1931, no. 53; Bayerische Staatszeitung, Feb. ​24, 1931, no. 45; Augsburger Postzeitung, Feb.  25, 1931, no. 46; Völkischer Beobachter, Feb. ​25, 1931, no. 56; Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, Feb.  25, 1931, no. 54; Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, Feb. ​27, 1931, no. 56; Münchner Post, Feb. ​27, 1931, no. 48; Bayerische Staatszeitung, Feb. ​27, 1931, no. 48; Bayerischer Kurier, Feb. ​27, 1931, no. 58; Augsburger Postzeitung, Feb. ​2 8, 1931, no. 49; Völkischer Beobachter, Feb. ​2 8, 1931, no. 59; Bayerische Staatszei­ tung, Feb. ​28, 1931, no. 49; Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, Mar. 11, 1931, no. 68; München-Augsburger Abendzeitung, Mar. 18/19, 1931, nos. 77/78; München-Augsburger Abendzeitung, Mar. 20, 1931, no. 79; Münchner Post, Mar. 20, 1931, no. 65; Münchner Zeitung, Mar. 20, 1931, no. 78; Münchner Neueste Na­ chrichten, Mar. 20, 1931, no. 76; Bayerische Staatszeitung, Mar. 21, 1931, no. 66; Bayerischer Kurier, Mar. 21, 1931, no. 80; Völkischer Beobachter, Mar. 21/22, 1931, nos. 81/82; Münchner Post, Mar. 23, 1931, no. 67; Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, Mar. 24, 1931, no. 80; Münchner Post, Mar. 24, 1931, no. 68;



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became effective as of March 1, 1931. He was obviously convinced that this step would mitigate his opponents, but as it turned out, this was considered an admission of guilt. The radical break with his previous life is evidenced in a strange way in letters dated March 27 and 31, 1931. The note “Antwort an Prof. Dr. A. L. Mayer, München, Alte Pinakothek” that was part of the letterhead of the journal Pantheon – still co‑edited by Mayer – was simply crossed out and replaced by his private address, Martiusstr. 8, as if he had simply moved to another office.28 It should be noted that Mayer’s exit or dropout from public positions did not affect his standing as a curator, as evidenced in a newspaper report from 1931 in which he was considered to belong to the same category as Pinder: “Quarrel between art scholars in Munich” (Streit zwischen Münchener Kunstgelehrten)29 is a title that suggests they were seen as pari passu, ranking equally. It looks as if Mayer’s decision to step out was also based on his confidence that he could rely on his reputation as a scholar and expert, and continue to work as a freelance art historian. The young father was right – for a while. Interestingly, alongside with his art historical activities – compensating the loss of his former positions? finding a new equilibrium? – Mayer wrote a novel, Der Maler von Toledo (The Painter from Toledo). While the typescript (for which he used the pseudonym Konrad Woog, which alludes to the swimming lake “[Großer] Woog” in his native town Darmstadt) is undated, the last page of the handwritten manuscript is dated “29. 9. 32–18. 2. 33”,30 suggesting that in this crucial winter he might have immersed himself in an idealized sixteenth century setting and tale. Within only few weeks after Hitler’s rise to power on January 30, 1933, the latent anti-Semitism which had been only a distant rumble in early 1931 (see, for instance, the article in the Völkischer Beobachter from March 11, 193131) soon became manifest in administrative measures: he was accused of tax fraud, of not having paid enough taxes between 1925 and 1932 (the supplemental claim amounted to 115,000.– RM). In a

Bayerischer Kurier, Mar. 25, 1931, no. 84; Bayerische Staatszeitung, Mar. 25, 1931, no. 69; Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, Mar. 26, 1931, no. 82; Bayerischer Kurier, Mar. 26, 1931, no. 85; München-Augs­ burger Abendzeitung, Mar. 26, 1931, no. 85; Münchner Zeitung, Mar. 26, 1931, no. 84; Münchner Post, Mar. 26, 1931, no. 70; Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, Mar. 26, 1931, no. 82; Neue Freie Volkszeitung, Mar. 27, 1931, no. 71; Völkischer Beobachter, Mar. 27, 1931, no. 86; Münchner Post, Mar. 27, 1931, no. 71; Völkischer Beobachter, Mar. 5/6/7, 1931, nos. 95/96/97. – Press clippings concerning Mayer can also be found at the Stadtbibliothek München, Monacensia; some are included in his personnel files (BayHStA, MK 44803, and BSGS, Alt-Registratur). – Cf. the list given by Posada Kubissa 2010 (as fn. 8), pp. 479–480. 28 GRI, Special Collections, Duveen Brothers Records, Folder  4, August Mayer 1928–1931, Letters Mayer to F. Kleinberger, Mar. 27 and 31, 1931. 29 Neue Mannheimer Zeitung, Feb. ​27, 1931, see fig. 4 in Fuhrmeister/Kienlechner 2008 (as fn. 5), p. 36. 30 Central Special Archive, Moscow, Fond (archive) 1399–1–3:285 (typescript); 1399–1–4:256 (manuscript). 31 Posada Kubissa 2010 (as fn. 8), p. 91, refers to and quotes another article in the Völkischer Beo­ bachter from May 2, 1931.

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short time, and very effectively, pseudo-legal administrative measures were taken. On March 24, 1933, Mayer was arrested and his Munich apartment systematically searched by the police. Four days later, the Völkischer Beobachter, in an openly racist article, titled “A Jewish art parasite in protective custody”, insinuated that Mayer also took delight in pornographic photographs.32 On June 13, 1933, while still in custody, which included daily interrogations and, most likely, mistreatment and torment, Mayer committed suicide – but survived.33 His persecution was reported in the international press, and Thomas Mann, who had fled to Sanary-sur-Mer in southern France, noted the “shock” triggered by the news in his diary.34 After release on 11 July 1933, with his country house in Tutzing being confiscated to serve as security, with his passport withdrawn (a severe limitation for any professional who is used to and dependent on studying and examining objects in situ), Mayer somehow managed to continue, also by selling pieces from his collection.35 Although documents that shed light on this period are particularly rare, it seems a miracle that he could nonetheless work on the catalogue raisonné of Velázquez that was published by Faber & Faber in London in 1936. Without going into detail, it seems fair to say that in 1930 and 1931 it was, predominantly, not Mayer the scholar or Mayer the curator, but Mayer the expert and connoisseur with close ties to various art dealers, who was fiercely attacked by colleagues and critics alike. Furthermore, it looks as if – at least partly – it was also his prosperity that fuelled the reproaches against him. If that holds true, however, the arguments recently brought forward by Götz Aly, who stresses the alliance –  and interdepen-

32 Ein jüdischer Kunstparasit in Schutzhaft, in: Völkischer Beobachter, Mar. 28, 1933 – see fig. 3 in Fuhrmeister/Kienlechner 2008 (as fn. 5), p. 34. 33 For details, see Fuhrmeister/Kienlechner 2008 (as fn. 3), p. 415. 34 See Peter de Mendelssohn (ed.), Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1933–1934, Frankfurt/M. 1977, p. 117: “Dienstag, den 20.VI.33 […] Chocartige Wirkung der Nachricht (durch Jordan), daß August Mayer sich im Gefängnis Hals und Pulsader durchgeschnitten hat und wahrscheinlich tot ist. Der Grund nach englischen Blättern und dem ‘Temps’ völlige Isolierung und unaufhörliche Verhöre seit 3 Monaten. Das wird noch euphemistisch sein. Grauenhaft. Die Hunde. Erschüttert und wohl müde von gestern. Keine Ruhe.” Cf. “Tentative de suicide du Professeur Mayer”, in: Le Temps, Jun. 19, 1933, no. 26228, p. 2: “On télégraphie de Munich: Le professeur Auguste L. Mayer, ancien directeur de la Pinacothèque de Munich, a tenté de se suicider dans sa prison en se coupant la gorge et en s’ouvrant une artère du poignet. Son état est critique./Le professeur Mayer, qui est d’origine juive, est considéré dans l’Europe entière comme l’une des plus hautes autorités en matière de peinture espagnole. Il fut arrêté peu après le triomphe de la révolution nationale-socialiste à Munich, et l’on croit qu’il a été poussé au désespoir par la réclusion et les interrogatoires continuels qu’il a subis depuis trois mois.” 35 See Bambi 2010 (as fn. 11), p. 262: “Dann wurde Mayers beweglicher Besitz, vor allem seine Kunstsammlung, eingezogen und am 24./25. November ​1933 bei Hugo Helbing versteigert. Weiterer Kunstbesitz kam bei den Kunsthandlungen Ruef und Bernheimer sowie im Lagerhaus Ostbahnhof zur Versteigerung. Die Erlöse gingen direkt an das Finanzamt München Nord und das Finanzamt Tutzing zur Abdeckung der Steuerrückstände.”



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dence  – of economic motives, jealousy and anti-Semitism36 are particularly worth considering. Generally speaking, in regard to both victims and perpetrators, to both exile studies and national socialist policies and ideologies, more specific attention to seemingly mundane issues like business competition, rivalry, and profit, and also to more human motives like envy, jealousy, avarice and greed, is certainly necessary for a better grasp and understanding of the processes that took place – not only, but also in the art world and within the machinations of the art trade.37

Emigration In late 1935, Mayer and his family emigrated to Paris. As far as we can tell, after difficult negotiations that included a pledge or loan by Duveen, he was able to take both his library and his material (manuscripts, notes, photographs, etc.) with him.38 There is evidence that in the beginning the family lived in Hôtel Osborne, 4, Rue Saint-Roch (Tuileries)39, and moved to a large apartment at 9, Rue Mont Thabor in fall 1937.40 It seems that he continued to work as a private scholar and writer (it is fairly likely that he either offered articles himself or was commissioned by the editors to contribute to journals like Archivo español de arte y arqueología, Arte español, Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, Gazette des beaux-arts, and The Burlington magazine for connoisseurs, where he frequently published between 1935 and 1940) and earned his living with appraisals and other activities. Curiously enough, two of Mayer’s expert opinions have survived in the photograph collection of Robert Oertel (1907–1981). Oertel was curator at the Gemälde­galerie Dresden and registrar of the collection assembled for Hitler’s museum planned for Linz; from 1958 onwards he was “Hauptkonservator” of the Bavarian State Collections (which now houses the Alte Pinakothek collections, for which Mayer held that same post until 1931) and was later director of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin from 1964

36 Götz Aly, Warum die Deutschen? Warum die Juden? – Gleichheit, Neid und Rassenhass 1800–1933, Frankfurt/M. 2011. 37 For a case study on an art dealer and auctioneer whose main motive in eliminating Jewish art dealers and auctioneers seems to have been profit, and not necessarily a strict ideological anti-Semitism, see Meike Hopp, Kunsthandel im Nationalsozialismus: Adolf Weinmüller in München und Wien, Köln 2012 (Veröffentlichungen des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte in München, vol. 30). 38 For details, see Fuhrmeister/Kienlechner 2008 (as fn. 3), pp. 416–417, and Posada Kubissa 2010 (as fn. 8), pp. 100–104. 39 GRI, Special Collections, Duveen Brothers Records, Series II.1, Papers regarding major art collectors, Box  486, Folder  1, Dr. A. L. Mayer 1931–1940, Mayer to Lord Duveen, Dec. 6, 1936. Cf. Posada Kubissa 2010 (as fn. 8), p. 103. 40 Posada Kubissa 2010 (as fn. 8), p. 105: “En otoño de 1937 lograron alquilar una espaciosa vivienda con seis habitaciones situada en el numéro 9 de la Rue du Mont Thabor.”

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Fig. 34/Fig. 35: August Liebmann Mayer, expert opinion regarding a Nativity scene by Murillo, dated July 2, 1937.

to 1972.41 His collection entered the Photo Study Collection of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich in 1981. The first expert opinion, from 1928, certifies that the work in question is a “characteristic, very speedily painted work” (charakteris­ tische, sehr flott gemalte Arbeit), by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, which he will include in the next edition of his monograph on the artist.42 The second one, concerning a Nativity scene, is dated July 2, 1937; Mayer attests that he considers the oil painting “une œuvre authentique et très caracteristique de B. E. Murillo,” and details the provenance of the particular piece. (Fig. 34/Fig. 35) Moreover, as Teresa Posada Kubissa details, in 1937 Mayer was involved in an exhibition in Paris devoted to El Greco, organized by the Gazette des Beaux-Arts.43 It is hard to tell if Mayer had any outspoken political opinions at all. In any case, he seems not to have contacted any other refugees or emigrants like Paul Westheim (who, in 1931, had published an article on Mayer and the implications of wrong attributions),44 nor exiled German artists living in Paris, like the Kollektiv deutscher Künstler or the Freier Künstlerbund.45 Rather, he seems to have led a fairly secluded life, working on monumental tasks like a catalogue raisonné of Titian – in a letter to 41 See Iselt 2010 (as fn. 25), pp. 319–329; Kathrin Iselt, Robert Oertel (1907–1981). Kustos der Gemälde­ galerie Dresden 1939–1946. Eine biographische Skizze, in: Dresdener Kunstblätter 56, issue 1 (2012), pp. 45–54. 42 Mayer’s first monograph was published in 1913 (Murillo. Des Meisters Gemälde in 287  Abbil­ dungen), the second, slightly augmented version in 1923: Murillo. Des Meisters Gemälde in 292 Abbil­ dungen, Berlin et al. 1923 (Klassiker der Kunst in Gesamtausgaben, vol. 22). 43 Posada Kubissa 2010 (as fn. 8), p. 105. 44 Paul Westheim, Umwertung aller Kunstwerte?, in: Bremer [?] Nachrichten, Feb. ​2 8, 1931, no. 59 (press clipping in Mayer’s personal file in the depository of the Bavarian State Collections, Munich). 45 Cf. Keith Holz, Wolfgang Schopf, Im Auge des Exils. Josef Breitenbach und die freie deutsche Kultur in Paris 1933–1941, Berlin 2001, passim.



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Fig. 36: August Liebmann Mayer, ca. 1940.

Duveen of December 23, 1937, he states that: “I myself feel somewhat tired and overworked. The research for my Titian Catalogue Raisonné is nearly finished.”46 (Fig. 36) From September to December 1939 Mayer was interned by French authorities, and again from May to June 1940, near Toulouse, but when he was released after the armistice, he could not – as a German Jew – return to Paris, and remained in Toulouse, before settling in Nice in early 1941.47 His wife  – who was officially denaturalized or expatriated on June 13, 1941 and lost her German citizenship48 – and his elevenyear-old daughter were supposed to join him there, but Aloisia Mayer died of cancer August 1, 1941. The art dealer Hans Wendland – with whom, amongst others, Mayer cooperated49 – accompanied the daughter to her father in Nice.

46 GRI, Special Collections, Duveen Brothers Records, Series II.1, Papers regarding major art collectors, Box 486, Folder 1, Dr. A. L. Mayer 1931–1940, Mayer to Lord Duveen, Dec. 23, 1937. 47 Cf. Posada Kubissa 2010 (as fn. 8), pp. 106–107. 48 See Reichsanzeiger, Jun. 13, 1941. Cf. Michael Hepp (ed.), Die Ausbürgerung deutscher Staatsange­ höriger 1933–45 nach den im Reichsanzeiger veröffentlichten Listen, 3 vols., München 1985–1988, here vol. 1, Listen in chronologischer Reihenfolge, 1985. Regarding mistakes in the lists, Hepp remarks in the preface (p. V): “Einige Male erschien sogar eine Berichtigung der Berichtigung. Daß es sich hierbei nicht nur um Lappalien handelte, zeigt folgendes Beispiel. Im Reichsanzeiger Nr. 135 vom 13. 6. 1941 wurde unter der lfd. Nr. 259 ‘Meyer, Aloise Sara, geb. am 11. 4. 1891 in Rotenstein’ ausgebürgert. Geändert wurde der Eintrag in ‘Mayer, Aloysia, geb. Däuschinger, geb. am 11. 4. 1891 in Rabenstein, LK. Regen’. Praktisch stimmte in der ersten Veröffentlichung nur das Geburtsdatum.” 49 See ALIU Detailed Interrogation Report: Hans WENDLAND, 18 September  1946, online: www. looted­art.com/MFV7J127611 (accessed April 2014), Section IV. Traffic in Confiscated Art, C. Exchanges with HOFER, Exchange no. 3.

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The systematic deprivation of rights and the consequent disenfranchisement of European Jewry entered its next phase when, in May 1942, Mayer’s Paris apartment was seized by the ERR. Interestingly, the ERR confiscated the library first  – which was sent to Berlin as part of the Sammlung Göring (Göring Collection)50 – while the remaining collection was taken almost six months later, in fall 1942.51 Meanwhile, Mayer had moved to Monte Carlo and continued to work as an expert under the pseudonym Henri Antoine, advising and informing dealers like Hans Wend-

50 Bundesarchiv Koblenz, B 323/278, Sonderstab Bildende Kunst [des ERR], Arbeitsgruppe Louvre, Sept. ​14, 1942, Aktennotiz: “Betr. A. L. Mayer, Paris, 9, rue Mont Thabor, Kunstbibliothek. Am 9. und 10. Mai ​1942 wurde die gesamte Kunstbibliothek des Professors für Kunstgeschichte A. L. Mayer von Pg. Fleischer und mir geräumt und im Bibliotheksraum der Dienststelle Westen Av. D’Iena  54 ausgestellt, einige Tage später verpackt und als Göring-Sammlung nach Berlin transportiert. Die [Rest‑] Bibliothek ist durch die Dienststelle Westen [erst] am 5. 6. 1942 sichergestellt worden. [Signed:] Dr. Tomforde 14. 9. 1942.” Rose Valland mentions a visit of the Jeu de Paume by Hermann Göring on May 16, 1942; in a letter to the Director of the Louvre Jacques Jaujard on June 3 she states: “Après la 15e visite du maréchal Goering au musée du Jeu de Paume, 90 caisses ont été emportées par son train particulier. – 50 de ces caisses contenaient des livres de toutes catégories mais principalement des livres d’art.” (After maréchal Goering’s 15th visit to the Jeu de Paume museum, 90 crates were transported by his private train. – 50 cases contained books of all categories but mainly art books.) See Emmanuelle Polack, Philippe Dagen (eds.), Les Carnets de Rose Valland. Le pillage des collections privées d’oeuvres d’art en France durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Lyon 2011, p. 51 and p. 56, Folios 14 and 36. – The supposition that Mayer’s library was at least temporarily in the possession of Hermann Göring is indeed confirmed by a list dated May 15, 1942. Among the 68 items on this list (nos. 116–184) are works of art, furniture, and 38 (nos. 144–182) crates with books that are explicitly labeled to be Mayer’s property: “39 Kisten mit Büchern, kunstwissensch. Lit. (Bibl. A. L. Mayer)”. The list is signed by both Dr. Helga Eggemann and Dr. Bruno Lohse, and approved “gesehen” by Kurt von Behr, who directed the so‑called M‑Aktion of the ERR since January 1942. National Archives (NARA), A 3389, Ardelia Hall Collection (AHC), Roll 0018, Series: Miscelleaneous Records, Category: OSS Files of Art Papers in French Custody, p. 72. – It is however unclear to what degree the seizure of Mayer’s library is related to a deal that involved the library of Allan (or Allen) Loebl, a Jewish art dealer who collaborated with the ERR and was exempt from wearing the yellow or Jewish badge. See handwritten statement “Bibliothek A. L. Mayer” on a report that documents Hofer’s interrogation, where Hofer argues that an exchange deal between a painting by Utrillo and Loebl’s library was due to Bruno Lohse, not him, Hofer: NARA, M 1947, AHC, Restitution, Research, and Reference Records (RRRR), Walter A. Hofer Papers, Hofer Göring Documents, Göring Lists. 51 Bundesarchiv Koblenz, B 323/278, Einsatzstab RR, Inventarliste: “Die Sicherstellung erfolgte am 20. Oktober ​1942 durch Dr. Tomforde. Eingang im Lager Jeu de Paume am 20. 10. 1942 durch Dr. Tomforde. Inventuraufnahme bearbeitet am 19. 11. 1942 durch Dr. Eggemann. Signatur A. L. M.” The inventory, signed by Eggemann, lists but four items: 1. a small brush drawing by Constantin Guys, 2. an oil painting of a bearded man by Giacomo Bassano, 3. a bronze bust probably by Nicolas Renard (all three restituted from Buxheim on Dec. 28, 1945 – to whom?), and 4. a German oak table from the 17th century. See www.errproject.org/jeudepaume/card_advanced_search.‌php?Card__CollectionId=​4 (accessed May 2012). A year before, in 1941, Annemarie Tomforde had published her Frankfurt University Ph. D. dissertation Die fränkische Gartenskulptur und ihre Ikonographie im 18. Jahrhundert, and married Lieutenant Hermann von Ingram, ERR, Paris.



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land, Karl Haberstock, Herbert Engel and, either directly or indirectly, also Walter Andreas Hofer, the curator of Hermann Göring’s private collection.52 According to Hector Feliciano, Mayer tried to warn Lucien and Henri Schloss, the owners of the famous Collection Schloss, that the Germans were desperately seeking their whereabouts.53

Deportation and Murder Mayer’s scope of action steadily decreased. Without his library and other working material, it became harder to earn the money he needed to maintain himself and his daughter, especially when the German troops, who had invaded la France libre (Free France) in November 1942, also took control of the whole area between Toulon and Nice that, until September 1943, had been occupied by (the then German ally) Italy. In contacting art dealers, agents, and authorities, Mayer ran a high risk, and he frequently changed his place of residence (Nice, Vence, Monte Carlo) – however, he had no other choice but to continue to earn a living. According to Posada Kubissa, Mayer had taken refuge in Monte Carlo at the house of a “Margaret van der Heiden”, widow of “barón Van der Heiden”, where he was arrested on 3 February 1944.54 Subsequently, he was brought to the headquarters of the Secret State Police (Gestapo) at Hotel Excelsior in Nice to be interrogated.55 A press clipping from a French newspaper provided to us and to Posada Kubissa by Angelika B. Mayer makes one reason for August Liebmann Mayer’s arrest clear: information on his whereabouts had been provided by the French art dealer and collector Louis Delclève.56 However, it would be wrong to consider this a clear-cut case of anti-Semitic denunciation. The story is, as always, much more complicated.

52 During the allied interrogations, Hofer claimed that “in 1943” he obtained a permission for Aloisia Mayer to visit, for six weeks, her sick husband in Nice (“Der Frau des Kunsthistorikers Prof. August L. Mayer, Paris, erwirkte ich 1943 die Erlaubnis für eine sechswöchige Reise zum Besuch ihres kranken Mannes in Nizza.”) – however, she had been dead for two years in 1943! NARA, M 1947, AHC, RRRR, RG 260, Walter A. Hofer Papers, p. 10. 53 Hector Feliciano, Das verlorene Museum. Vom Kunstraub der Nazis, Berlin 1998, p. 97. 54 Posada Kubissa 2010 (as fn. 8), p. 109. 55 See Fuhrmeister/Kienlechner 2008 (as fn. 3), pp. 428–429, for further details. 56 Due to an intense and most fruitful exchange with Dimitri Salmon (collaborateur scientifique de conservation, Département des Peintures, Musée du Louvre) regarding Louis Delclève, we can now identify the torn and undated clipping of the article by Mario Brun, “Le dernier voyage. Louis DELCLEVE a été ramené d’Avignon à Nice pour être fusillé ce matin á l’aube” (Last voyage. Louis Delclève was returned from Avignon to Nice, to be executed at dawn this morning), as having been published in Nice Matin, Apr. ​25, 1947 (information kindly provided by Dimitri Salmon, June 2013). The second part of the article, “Les revelations de Sch[ulz] sur les secrets de la Gestapo n[…] Et voici Delclève” was probably published a few days later.

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Louis Delclève (1898–1947) was an art collector, antiquarian bookseller and broker in Nice, and one of Karl Haberstock’s business partners.57 As he had lived in Great Britain from 1915 to 1918, his English was fluent, and he became an agent of the British Secret Intelligence Service no later than 1943 (and was probably also connected to the Résistance). In order to find out where in northern France the Germans had stationed the V 1 and V 2 rockets (Vergeltungswaffen, retaliatory weapons), Delclève had gotten in contact with German authorities, notably with an officer or commissar named Schultz (Schulz, Schulze). As it turned out, Schultz was a staff member of the Gestapo, and he found ways to put Delclève under pressure. Between November  4, 1943 and January 19, 1944, double agent Delclève visited Schultz 25 times. The interrogations of Delclève by the French Police de la Commission d’Epuration (Purge Commission), Hotel Scribe, Nice, on October 16 and 17, 1944, indicate that the art dealer had revealed the identity of many Jews to the Gestapo, including art dealers like Henri de Graef and Henry Satori, and that he had received 500 Francs per person. Simultaneously, however, Delclève claimed to have been member of the FFI (Forces françaises de l’intérieur). In the post-war autobiography of a British secret agent who had met Delclève, the author reports that encounter and his reservations about following Delclève’s suggestions, and adds: “Some time later, he left home and went to live in a villa he had had built in Cimiez, on the hills overlooking Nice. In 1945, he was arrested for having handed over to the enemy a considerable number of British agents, and executed two years later. I would have been among his victims if I had believed in his apparent sincerity.”58 Mayer, as it turns out, was just one of many. On June 20, 1946, Delclève was sentenced to death, and was executed on April 25, 1947. 57 The information in this paragraph is based on documents in the Archives Departementales des Alpes Maritimes, Nice, Cote 171 W 102, file “Delclève Louis, 29. Bld. Gambetta, Nice”. Among them is a signed receipt: “Reçu de Monsieur Louis Delclève la somme de quarante Mille Francs (40.000,–) représentant une commission offerte pour la vente de son tableau de P. P. Rubens à Monsieur Haberstock. Nice, le 14 Fevrier 1941.” The painting in question is Pan and Syrinx, bought by Haberstock for Linz, restituted to France in 1950, and since 1984 at Hazebrouck (D 85–2), signature MNR 404; see www.dhm.de/datenbank/ccp/dhm_ccp.‌php?seite=​9&lang=​en, Linz‑no. 2138, Mü‑no. 1589 (accessed April 2014). See also Claude Lesné (ed.), Catalogue des peintures MNR, Paris 2004, p. 208; we owe this reference to Dimitri Salmon, who also informed us that Delclève lent two paintings to the famous exhibition Les Peintres de la Réalité en France au XVIIe Siècle in 1934, and even sold one of the two to the Louvre during the show for 20.000 frs, a Saint Jerome then given to Georges de La Tour and considered today as a copy after him; see Dimitri Salmon (commissariat), Saint Jérôme & Georges de La Tour, exh. cat., Musée départemental Georges de La Tour Vic sur Seille, Saint-Étienne 2013, pp. 147–148 and p. 162, fn. 94. 58 Gerald Hakim, Un Anglais dans la Résistance, Paris 1968, p. 61 (we owe this reference to Dimitri Salmon). (“A quelque temps de là, il quitta la maison pour aller habiter une villa qu’il s’était fait construire à Cimiez, sur la colline qui domine tout Nice. En 1945, il fut arrêté pour avoir livré à l’ennemi un grand nombre d’agents britanniques, et fusillé deux ans plus tard. J’aurais compté au nombre de ses victimes si j’avais cru à son apparente sincérité.”)



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But the more important figure involved in tracing and locating Mayer was definitely Bruno Lohse (1911–2007). As far as we can tell, the incrimination of Lohse by American lawyers in 1948 (“When France was invaded by the Germans, Dr. Lohse, Goering’s art expert, instituted a search for Professor Mayer in France.”)59 was thoroughly justified. Again, contrary to simple patterns, the issue is complicated insofar as National Socialist cultural and racial policies had officially excluded professionals of Jewish descent  – but this did not preclude the deployment of Jewish experts in numerous cases. Lohse, for instance,60 in late 1941, in a letter to Hermann Göring, did not hesitate to use an appraisal by Mayer to substantiate his claim that a painting should be attributed to Titian.61 Much later, in February 1945, a report quotes an art dealer and auctioneer from Nice, J. J. Terris: “Mr. Terris had shown the painting to Auguste L. Mayer, who attributed it to Goya. Terris did not mention this expertise at the sale, having no confidence in Mayer who, he said, had Goering purchase a Titian recognized as false by Mayer’s deportation in Germany.”62 Even if this reasoning may heavily rely on hearsay, it nonetheless suggests that Mayer’s attribution to Titian may have prompted a desire for revenge in Lohse – and Goering too,63 since Mayer was also involved in the sale of a Rembrandt to Goering in 1942.64

59 As quoted by Fuhrmeister/Kienlechner 2008 (as fn. 3), p. 419, fn. 46. 60 A similar case, more than a year earlier, is the sale of Titian’s Alfonso d’Este & His Secretary from ­Alexandre Bagenoff (acting for the Lithuanian art dealer Paul A. Jurschewitz, who was selling the painting from the property of Josef Skvor, Prague) to Maria Almas-Dietrich in September 1940, also using expert opinions by Mayer, Venturi and Hermann Voss, see NARA, M 1949, MFAA/OMGUS, RC 260, Roll 0011, CPCA, Category: C42 C6/36, Case: Alfonso D’Este & His Secretary, p. 13. Generating a profit of 40.000,– RM, Almas-Dietrich sold the painting to the “Sonderauftrag Linz” shortly afterwards for 130.000,– RM, see www.dhm.de/datenbank/linzdb/indexe.‌html, Mü‑no 8836, Linz‑no. 1198, and MNR 959 at Site Rose-Valland, Musées Nationaux Récupération. 61 Lohse to Göring, Dec. 3, 1941, letterhead ERR; NARA, A  3389, AHC, RG  260, Roll  0018, Series: Miscelleanous Records, Category: OSS Files of Art Papers in French Custody, p. 87; for that particular painting by Titian, Lohse attaches four appraisals by (in this sequence) August L. Mayer, Venturi, G. Gronau, and a letter by [Wilhelm Reinhold] Valentiner dated August 23, 1939. 62 NARA, M 1947, AHC, Wiesbaden CCP, RG 260, Series: Administrative Records, Information Supplied by the Direction Général des Études de Récupération, report de Madame Maxime Kahn, February 1945, p. 54. (“Me Terris avait montré le tableau à Auguste L. Mayer, qui l’attribua à Goya. Terris ne mentionna pas cette expertise à la vente, n’ayant aucune confiance en Mayer, ce dernier ayant, dit‑il, fait acheter par Goering un Titien, reconnu faux par la déportation de Mayer en Allemagne.”) 63 Cf. Posada Kubissa 2010 (as fn. 8), p. 110, who quotes a statement by “baronessa Van der Heiden” that “Mayer knew this was the end, since he had refused to cooperate with Göring” (“Mayer sabia que era el final, porque se habia negado a colaborar con Goering”). – Posada Kubissa does not mention Lohse, except once, in fn. 346 on p. 127, in a general way. 64 MNR  503 “Rembrandt (manière de) Portrait de Vieillard”, in: Lesné 2004 (as fn. 57), p. 203; cf. Esther Tisa Francini, Anja Heuss, Georg Kreis, Fluchtgut – Raubgut. Der Transfer von Kulturgütern in und über die Schweiz 1933–1945 und die Frage der Restitution, Zürich 2001 (Veröffentlichungen der Unabhängigen Expertenkommission Schweiz – Zweiter Weltkrieg, vol. 1), p. 256.

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While officially banned, the use of Mayer as an authority in attributions did not wane. On the other hand, a national socialist museum director like Ernst Heinrich Zimmermann almost lost his position because he still referred to attributions by Jewish experts such as Mayer (and Max. J. Friedländer), as Petra Winter has recently highlighted.65 A recent discovery enables us to further elucidate the circumstances of Mayer’s arrest and the role of Lohse. In a long letter from art historian Erhard Göpel to Hermann Voss, Hitler’s special representative for the new museum in Linz (Sonderbeauftragter des Führers), written February 20, 1944 in Paris (Hôtel Le Bristol) upon Göpel’s return from a journey to southern France, he details the results of the trip.66 (Fig. 37/Fig. 38) Göpel informs Voss that “the rumors circulating about evacuation and other drastic measures had the effect, however, that some owners were more keen on selling than before […].” He recounts which works he has seen, which works he bought for Linz, and proposes to Voss those he considers suitable for acquisition. A couple of pages later, this passage – dealing with one of the 22 works that had been segregated from the Collection Schloss – follows: “The fragment from the Roger [van der Weyden] circle, listed by Friedlander, has turned out […] [illegible] will see the original, I need say nothing more to you. In any case, I would appreciate it if the Sonderauftrag could acquire it. The author of the expert opinion has now been arrested in Monte Carlo – on the same day as Dr. L. was there! – I saw him in a hotel in Nice before his removal and 65 In defense of Zimmermann, and regarding a decree of the Minister of Culture, Robert Schmidt (director of the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Berlin, and Otto Kümmel’s deputy in the head office) argued in a long letter dated October 25, 1937, that Jewish experts were still highly esteemed abroad. (“[…] muss ich darauf hinweisen, dass das Ausland sich die Einstellung des Dritten Reiches absolut noch nicht zu eigen gemacht hat, dass im Ausland die nichtarischen Deutschen Kunstgelehrten und Kunstkenner immer noch den gleich hohen Ruf geniessen wie früher, und dass schliesslich ein Auktionskatalog nicht lediglich für deutsche Käufer gemacht wird, sondern für ein internationales Käuferpublikum.” Quoted after Petra Winter, Vom Kläger zum Beklagten? Der Direktor der Gemälde­ galerie Ernst Heinrich Zimmermann, in: Jörn Grabowski, Petra Winter (eds.), Zwischen Politik und Kunst. Die Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Köln/Weimar/Wien 2013, pp. 271–286, here p. 278.) 66 Bundesarchiv Koblenz, B  323/147, fol. 24–25. –  See Christian Fuhrmeister, Susanne Kienlechner, Erhard im Nationalsozialismus  – eine Skizze, in: Andrea Baresel-Brand (ed.), Kunstexperten im Nationalsozialismus, Magdeburg 2014 (Veröffentlichungen der Koordinierungsstelle Magdeburg, vol. 10), in preparation. (“Die umlaufenden Gerüchte über Evakuierung und sonstige einschneidende Massnahmen liess jedoch manchen verkaufslustiger werden als bisher […].”  … “Das Fragment aus dem Rogerkreis, von Friedländer aufgeführt, hat sich nach [unleserlich] Original sehen werden, brauche ich Ihnen ja nichts weiter dazu zu sagen. Ich würde mich jedenfalls freuen, wenn es der Sonderauftrag erwerben könnte. Der Verfasser der Expertise ist inzwischen in Monte Carlo festgenommen worden – am selben Tage als Dr. L. dort war! – ich habe ihn in Nizza in einem Hotel vor seinem Abtransport gesprochen und er durfte auf meine Bitte dort noch eine Woche bleiben und gab mir wertvolle Hinweise ehe er nach dem Lager Drancy (bei Paris) verbracht wurde. Er bat mich Sie von seinem Geschick zu unterrichten mit der Bitte eventuell etwas [durchgestrichen] ein empfehlendes Wort an höherer Stelle vorzubringen. Aus dem Pariser Handel kommt ebenfalls ein schöner ganzformatiger Krieger, dessen Photo beiliegt.”)



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Fig. 37/38: Letter from Erhard Göpel to Hermann Voss, 20 February 1944, bearing witness to the fact that to the very last day, Mayer was used for his knowledge and expertise.

he was allowed to remain there a week at my request and he gave me valuable information before being sent to camp Drancy (near Paris). He asked me to inform you of his fate with the request that you could perhaps [do] something put in a word for him at a higher level. A nice full length portrait of a warrior is available on the Parisian market, a photograph is enclosed.” As far as we know, Voss did not support the Jewish art historian in prison, whom we identify as Mayer – whose name Göpel does not mention, although he knew him.67 The short passage indicates a rather specific, rather strange encounter: Without openly accusing him, Göpel insinuates that Lohse had something to do with Mayer’s arrest in Monte Carlo, and Göpel himself –  who was well aware that it was not a “hotel”, but the headquarters of the Gestapo – tells his superior that at his request Mayer “could stay there for another week”, as if it were the extension of a holiday. According to Rose Valland, Lohse had left Paris with one of his colleagues on January  26, 1944 for the Cote d’Azur, while Göpel, “représentant d’Hitler en Hol67 Bundesarchiv Koblenz, B  323/112, fol. 4, Göpel to Gottfried Reimer, Jan. ​22, 1943: “[Greco, Mar­ ter des heiligen Laurentius] Vorstudie für das Bild im Escorial […] Das vorliegende Bild wird von A. L. Mayer ebenfalls dem Sohne des Greco zugeschrieben.”

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lande”, was already there, which she considers remarkable, as he “only comes to France for important matters”68 Valland continues: “It is he who recently was in charge of the Schloss collection. Which would seem to indicate that he is still working for the Führer. – One might also think that Dr. Lohse, in the same way as he did when he brought the Schloss coll. to the Jeu de Paume, is proposing his team to Goepel to insinuate himself once more in this affair, which would confirm its importance.” Mayer was interned in the transit camp Drancy from February 13 to March 7, 1944, from where he was deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered on or around March 12, 1944. Göpel continued to buy paintings for Linz. Lohse continued to seize, loot, and buy paintings for various purposes. His personal presence in Monte Carlo has never been mentioned before, and his concrete engagement in tracking down Mayer has never been properly investigated. Nonetheless, a recent article states: “However, Lohse’s role in art theft seems to have been rather small. In any case, after [the] war, the Americans certified the ‘subordinate and entirely official character of Lohse’s role,’ and the French released him as the only German accused of art theft after a short trial in August 1950.”69 That recent article seems to be quite in accordance with information on Mayer given by Hofer to the allies on July 3, 1945: “On several occasions, when Lohse went to the south of France, he carried letters from Frau Mayer to her husband. Lohse believes that M. was ultimately arrested and imprisoned by the Germans, although he is not sure.”70 At this point, we would like to quote the statement with which we ended our introductory remarks at the beginning of this paper: ‘We consider ourselves to be moving in a somewhat dynamic, almost constantly changing and evolving field, and we are thus convinced that our present understanding can and will be expanded and nuanced by future discoveries.’ That said, we will continue to research both actual history (Realgeschichte) and the multiple recollections, individual remembrances and collective (or even national)

68 Note de Rose Valland, 26. Janvier 1944, in: Polack/Dagen 2011 (as fn. 50), pp. 86–87, item 134; the next quote is also taken from this source. (“[Il] ne vient en France que pour les affaires importantes. C’est lui qui s’est occupé dernièrement de la collection Schloss. […] Ce qui semblerait bien indiquer qu’il travaille encore pour le Führer. – On pourrait aussi penser que le Dr. Lohse, procédant comme lorsqu’il a amené la coll. Schloss au Jeu de Paume propose à Goepel son équipe de travail pour s’immiscer à nouveau dans cette affaire; ce qui en confirmerait l’importance.”) 69 Maurice Philip Remy, Geschichte einer Restitution. Irrwege eines Pissarro, in: Frankfurter Allge­ meine Zeitung, Nov. 2, 2009: “Dennoch scheint Lohses Rolle beim Kunstraub eher klein gewesen zu sein. Die Amerikaner jedenfalls bescheinigten nach dem Krieg den ‘untergeordneten und völlig offiziellen Charakter der Rolle Lohses’, und die Franzosen sprachen ihn als einzigen der wegen Kunstraubs angeklagten Deutschen nach kurzem Prozess im August 1950 frei.” Online at www.faz.net/aktuell/ feuilleton/kunstmarkt/auktionen/geschichte-einer-restitution-irrwege-eines-pissarro-1868852.‌html (accessed April 2014). 70 NARA, M 1947, AHC, RRRR, RG 260, Source File for Property Investigation, p. 90.



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memories related to Mayer. A poignant illustration of the different dynamics of Real­ geschichte and Erinnerungsgeschichte (memory history) is a short correspondence preserved at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York between the Jewish physician Gustav Wendel and Lion Feuchtwanger: On July 5, 1954, Wendel (Long Island, NY) writes in German to Feuchtwanger (Pacific Palisades, California) on the occasion of Feuchtwanger’s 70th birthday (July 7). After congratulating him, Wendel adds: “How is it that I know you personally? It’s just 50 years since August Mayer brought you to our regulars’ table in the Café Luitpold. Of course, you don’t remember me, we met only once or twice there. But August Mayer was an old friend of yours. I’d like to know what has become of him. He was a good man, so dear, he often gave me lectures about art, I followed his rise, knew that he was the authority on Spanish painting, and read his contribution to the comment of the Darmstadt Haggadah, which I was able to save [to America]. I beg your pardon if I combine my congratulations with a request. I know of course that you are overburdened with work but if you happen to have a few spare minutes, I would be grateful if you could tell me something about August Mayer’s fate, hopefully nothing bad.” Feuchtwanger promptly replied on July 16, 1954: “What you wrote reminded me of the good time with August L. Mayer. Also later, I owed a lot to him; especially his book on Goya was very useful to me. Of his destiny I only know that, in the years immediately before the war, he surfaced in South America, and since then he is completely lost, and my efforts to learn about him remained unsuccessful.“71

71 Leo Baeck Institute, Gustav Wendel Family Collection (AR 544), folder 1: Lion Feuchtwanger correspondence; the following quote is also taken from that file. – As elsewhere in this article, the translations into English are ours. – Regarding the relationship of Mayer to Feuchtwanger before and after 1933, see Fuhrmeister/Kienlechner 2008 (as fn. 5). “Wieso ich Sie persoenlich kenne? Es ist gerade 50  Jahre her, dass August Mayer Sie an unseren Stamm­tisch im Café Luitpold brachte. Sie erinnern sich natuerlich meiner nicht, wir trafen uns nur ein- oder zweimal dort. Aber August Mayer war ein alter Freund von Ihnen. Ich wuesste gerne, was aus ihm geworden ist. Er war ein so lieber guter Mensch, hielt mir oefter Vortraege ueber Kunst, ich folgte seinem Aufstieg, wusste dass er d i e Autoritaet ueber spanische Malerei war und las unter anderm [sic!] seinen Beitrag zum Kommentar der Darmstaedter Haggadah, die ich heruebergerettet habe. Ich bitte um Entschuldigung, wenn ich meine Glueckwuensche mit einer Bitte verknuenpfe [sic!]. Ich weiss natuerlich, dass Sie ueberbeansprucht sind, doch wenn Sie mal einige Minuten Zeit uebrig haben, waere ich Ihnen dankbar, Wenn [sic!] Sie mir ueber August Mayers Schicksal etwas sagen koennten, hoffentlich nichts Schlimmes.” Feuchtwanger promptly replied on July  16, 1954: “Was Sie mir schrieben, hat mir die gute Zeit mit August L. Mayer wieder deutlich in Erinnerung gebracht. Ich hatte ihm auch später viel zu verdanken; vor allem sein Buch über Goya war mir sehr nützlich. Von seinem Schicksal weiß ich nur, dass er in den Jahren unmittelbar vor dem Krieg in Südamerika auftauchte, seither ist er völlig verschollen, und meine Bemühungen, etwas über ihn zu erfahren, blieben erfolglos.”

Picture Credits Pl. I. In: Michael Janitzki (Hrsg.): Robert Liebknecht, Ölbilder, Zeichnungen, Grafiken und Texte zu Leben und Werk, Anabas-Verlag, Giessen 1991, S. 64, Robert Liebknecht © ADAGP, Paris; Pl. II. In: L’art en guerre, France 1938–1947, Ausstellungskatalog, Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, Paris-Musées, Paris 2012, S. 47 (oben), Anton Räderscheidt © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014; Pl. III. MNC1823, photo by Martina Beck; Pl. IV. Private collection on loan to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Oskar Kokoschka © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014; Pl. V. Národní Galerie, Prague, © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014; Pl. VI. Reproduction generously provided by Musée de Pontoise, Donation Freundlich; Pl. VII. Max Beckmann © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014.

Fig. 1. © Yevgeni Markov/DHI Moskau; Fig. 2. © Estate of Ilse Bing; Fig. 3. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York#Lit-A#/#Lit-E#ADAGP, Paris; Fig. 4. Felix Nussbaum © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014; Fig. 5. In: Rhein Zeitung, April 17th, 1997; Fig. 6. In: M. Pfanner: Der Titusbogen, Mainz 1893; Fig. 7. In: Exh. Cat. Die Pferde von San Marco (SMB PK) 1982, fig. 23, p. 145; Fig. 8. In: E. Kubin, Raub oder Schutz? Der deutsche militärische Kunstschutz in Italien, Graz 1994; Fig. 9. Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung, Ms. germ. qu. 284, fol. 197v; Fig. 10. © Patricia Kennedy Grimsted; Fig. 11. © Patricia Kennedy Grimsted; Fig. 12. © Patricia Kennedy Grimsted; Fig. 13. © Archives des musées nationaux (030–438), “droits réservés”; Fig. 14. © Yevgeni Markov/ DHI Moskau; Fig. 15. © Yevgeni Markov/DHI Moskau; Fig. 16. © Yevgeni Markov/DHI Moskau; Fig. 17. © Special Archive/Moscow; Fig. 18. © Special Archive/Moscow; Fig. 19. Special Archive/Moscow; Fig. 20. Kunsthaus Zürich, Oskar Kokoschka © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014; Fig. 21. Special Archive/Moscow © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014; Fig. 22. Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Oskar Kokoschka © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014; Fig. 23. Special Archive/Moscow; Fig. 24. © Centre Pompidou – Mnam – Bibliothèque Kandinsky – Marc Vaux; Fig. 25. Photo generously provided by Yris Rabenou-Solomon; Fig. 26. Otto Dix © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014; Fig. 27. “droits réservés”; Fig. 28. Felix Nussbaum © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014; Fig. 29. Special Archive/Moscow, copies of letters assembled by Ines Rotermund-Reynard; Fig. 30. Copies of newspapers assembled by Ines Rotermund-Reynard; Fig. 31. © Walter Feilchenfeldt, Zurich; Fig. 32. © Walter Feilchenfeldt, Zurich; Fig. 33. Marianne Breslauer/Fotostiftung Schweiz; Fig. 34/Fig. 35. Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Photo Study Collection, Bildnachlaß Robert Oertel; Fig. 36. Photograph in the possession of Angelika Berta Mayer, Los Angeles; Fig. 37/Fig. 38. Bundesarchiv Koblenz, B 323/147, fol. 24–25.

Authors Christina Feilchenfeldt studied Art History and Italian literature in Berlin. After several stays in Italy, she worked for Sotheby’s in New York and London. She now lives in Berlin and works free-lance as an art historian. Her latest publication concerns the artist Max Liebermann, both as artist and art collector. At present she is involved in the research of the Paul Cassirer Archive in Zurich and in several projects regarding provenance research. Christian Fuhrmeister initiates and coordinates research projects at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich (http://www.zikg.eu/institut/personen/cfuhrmeister). His work focuses on twentieth-century art, architecture, and art history (including Max Beckmann, National Socialist art, provenance research, and war cemeteries). He is author of Beton, Klinker, Granit. Material Macht Politik – Eine Materialikonographie (Berlin 2001). In 2012, he completed a habilitation on German Military Art Protection in Italy 1943–1945 at the LMU Munich. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted received a Ph.D. in Russian history from the University of California (Berkeley, 1964). She is presently a research associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University and honorary Fellow of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. In 2002 she received the Distinguished Contribution to Slavic Studies Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. She is the author of historical monographs and directories of Russian and Soviet-area archives and directs ArcheoBiblioBase in collaboration with the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. She is a major authority on World War II displaced cultural valuables and restitution issues. A bibliography can be found at: . Susanne Kienlechner is a freelance artist with a deep interest in problems of twentieth century art historiography. She published two brief monographs in 2001 and, together with Christian Fuhrmeister, a number of articles concerning August Liebmann Mayer and Max Beckmann’s Amsterdam exile. Kerstin Holm studied musicology and Romance languages, specializing in Slavic studies and Russian language and culture at the University of Hamburg, Munich and Konstanz. After a dual Master, she joined the staff of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and since 1991, has covered the ex-Soviet Union as cultural correspondent. Her book Das korrupte Imperium, a panorama of Russia, was published in 2003, followed by Rubens in Sibirien, dealing with works of art looted in Germany during World War II and now in regional Russian museums.

164 

 Authors

Keith Holz, Ph.D., Professor of Art History, Western Illinois University, Macomb, has held fellowships from the Getty, Fulbright, IREX, DAAD, and DHI–Moscow. His publications examine representations of modern German art in the democracies. He is currently writing Placing Kokoschka, Kokoschka and Place. His other books include: Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague, and London (2004). Recent articles address German exile artists groups as networks (2012), the Großen Deutsche Kunst­ ausstellungen (2012), Kokoschka’s private life in Czechoslovakia (2014), and international responses to Neue Sachlichkeit painting (2015). Vladimir Korotayev studied philosophy at Moscow State University. From 1972–78 he was a researcher at the Central State Special Archive and from 1981–91 worked at the Head Research Center of the Interior Ministry Information Department. From 1991–99 he was Deputy Director of the Center for Historical Documents Collections and since 1999 has held the post of Deputy Director of the Russian State Military Archive. He was among the organizers of a number of international humanitarian projects with Germany, Japan, Hungary and other countries concerning the destiny of war prisoners and displaced persons. As a member of the Interdepartmental Commission for War Prisoners, Internees and Missing Persons, he researched documents relative to such cases for the World War II period. He has also taken an active part in the preparation of serial and multivolume editions on the history of the development of the armed forces in the USSR, on World War II history, and reference guides and document collections, principally in the military domain. He has participated in international conferences in Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Austria, Mongolia and Japan. Isabelle le Masne de Chermont, paleographic archivist, is head of the Manuscript Department at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), and since 1998 has been involved in provenance research and restitution matters. Co-author with Didier Schulmann of the official report on looted art published in 2000 by the Mission sur la spo­ liation des Juifs de France, she curated the 2008 exhibition, “Looking for Owners”, presented in Jerusalem and Paris, with an international symposium held at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme. In 2009, she was co-chair of the “Looted Art” section of the Holocaust Era Assets Conference in Prague. In 2014 she co-published a new edition of Rose Valland’s memoirs: Le Front de l’Art : Défense des collections françaises, 1939–1945. Ines Rotermund-Reynard studied Art History, General Rhetoric and German Literature at the University of Tübingen, the University of Paris VIII, the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and the Freie Universität Berlin. She received her bi-national doctoral degree (Berlin/Paris) in 2007. As associate lecturer at the University of Lille III and the University of Paris I/Panthéon-Sorbonne, she taught German Studies and Art History. Thanks to a postdoctoral fellowship from the German Historical Institute Moscow, she organized the international conference on the Special

Authors 

 165

Archive in Moscow and the Arts in Paris 1933–1945, followed by this publication. Since 2012 she has been an associate lecturer at the University of Cologne and is presently recipient of a fellowship from the Thyssen Foundation for the publication of a biography of art critic Paul Westheim. Hélène Roussel, Germanist, is Professor Emeritus of the University Paris 8. Her research centers on cultural history, literature and art history, culture in the Weimar Republic, and the German-speaking exile of the 1930s and 1940s in fields concerning culture, the fine arts, literature, the press and resistance to Nazism. She has published numerous articles concerning Georg Bernhard, Willi Münzenberg, Paul Westheim, Anna Seghers, Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Klaus Mann, Friedrich Wolf, Ferdinand Hardekopf, and has interviewed Albert Flocon, Jean Leppien, and Willi Maywald. She has also translated several works of Anna Seghers into French. Bénédicte Savoy studied German language and literature at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (Fontenay). In 1994 she received a Masters degree with a thesis on Anselm Kiefer and in 1996 passed the agrégation (state competitive examination for teaching posts). From 1998–2001 she was a research assistant at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin and lecturer at the Technische Universität and the Freie Universität. She received her Ph.D. with a dissertation on French art theft in Germany c. 1800. From 2003–March 2009 she was an assistant professor and since April 2009 has been Professor of Art History in the Art History Department at the Technische Universität, Berlin.

Index Adler, Jankel 10 Albers, Josef 8 Albert-Lasard, Lou 25 Alexander the Great 33 Alexander II (Tsar) 68 Aly, Götz 49 Antoine, Henri 63 Arendt, Hannah 109 Arp, Jean 9, 18, 114 Assmann, Aleida 110, 122 Assurbanipal (Assyrian King) 28 Auerbach, Edith 9, 17 Baeck, Leo 143, 159 Bagel, Moses /Moshe Bahelfer 11, 25 Balden, Theo 87 Barnes, Albert 126 Baumeister, Willi 134 Bayer, Herbert 88 Beckmann, Max 2, 6, 11, 13, 22, 86, 96, 107, 132, 133 Bellmer, Hans 11, 17, 18, 24 Benjamin, Walter 5, 61 Berenson, Bernhard 82 Berger, Klaus 3, 5, 24, 25 Bergson, Henri 37 Beria, Lavrentii 48, 53, 55 Berliner, Rudolf 1, 135 Ber Neumann, Israel 105 Bernhard, Georg 21, 22, 89, 123 Bilbo, Jack 10 Bing, Ilse 9, 10, 17, 25 Bismarck, Otto von 4 Bissière, Roger 16 Bloch, Ernst 24 Blumenfeld, Erwin 11, 15, 17, 18, 25 Bodek, Karl Robert 25, 26 Boisérée, Sulpiz 40 Bondy, Walter 10 Bonnard, Pierre 126 Bosch, Friedrich Wilhelm 71 Bott, Francis/Frabo 11, 12, 23, 25, 26 Braque, Georges 81, 112, 133 Braunschwicg, Cécile 61 Braunschwicg, Léon 61 Brecht, Bertolt 15, 19, 109 Breitenbach, Josef 3, 7, 18, 23, 25, 92

Budge, Emma 76 Burchard, Irmgard 20, 86, 88–90, 92 Caden, Gert 11, 26 Calder, Alexander 105, 106, 108 Capa, Robert 7, 12, 15, 25 Cassirer, Bruno 97, 123, 125, 126, 129–135, 137 Cassirer, Paul 97, 123, 125, 126, 129–135, 137 Cézanne, Paul 17, 24, 129, 130, 135, 137 Chuquet, Arthur 38 Clark, Kenneth 136 Coppens, Christian 76, 79, 80 Corot, Jean-Baptiste Camille 126, 127, 130 Crémieux, Benjamin 126, 127, 130 Cramer, Selma 81 Däuschinger, Aloisia 142, 151 Daladier, Édouard 13 Daumier, Honoré 126 Davringhausen, Heinrich Maria 12, 26 Delclève, Louis 153, 154 Degas, Edgar 80, 123 Degering, Hermann 37, 38 Demeter, Wolf 21 Denon, Dominique-Vivant 29, 31 Dix, Otto 108, 117, 134 Dolgorukova, Ekaterina 68 Domela, Cesar 10, 17, 18 Dudow, Slatan 19 Dülberg-Arnheim, Hedwig 10, 26 Durieux, Tilla 128, 129 Dussler, Luitpold 144 Duveen, Joseph 82 Ehrlich, Gustav 24 Einstein, Carl 3, 12, 88 Einstein, Herbert 3, 12, 88 Emden, Max 129 Engel, Herbert 153 Ernst, Max 1, 3–5, 9, 17–19, 23–26, 29, 35, 77, 79, 88, 109, 114, 134, 135 Falke, Otto 143 Feilchenfeldt, Marianne 123–137 Feilchenfeldt, Walter 123–137 Feininger, Lyonel 134 Feuchtwanger, Lion 109

168 

 Index

Fiedler, Arnold 11 Fischer, Samuel 4, 129 Flechtheim, Alfred 117, 127, 134 Fleischmann, Adolf 11, 25, 26 Floch, Josef 25 Flocon, Albert 2, 11, 26 Frank, Tanja 109, 110 Franz Josef II von und zu Liechtenstein 137 Frenk-Westheim, Mariana 110 Freund, Gisèle 5, 15, 22, 26 Freund, Lothar 5, 15, 22, 26 Freundlich, Otto 2, 5, 9, 17–19, 26, 88, 112–114 Friedlaender, Johnny 11, 12, 15, 25 Friedländer, Max J. 123, 125, 131, 136 Fry, Varian 25 Fuchs, Eugenie 17 Gallimard, Paul 126, 130 Gaulle, Charles de 47 Gerlach, Hellmut von 21 Germain, Jacques 16 Ginsbury, Henry 88 Goebbels, Josef 69 Göpel, Erhard 132 Göring/Goering, Hermann 56, 152, 153, 155, 156 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 39–41 Gold, Gitel 11 Goldschmidt, Anne-Marie 75, 77, 79–84 Goldschmidt, Arthur 75, 77, 79–84 Goldschmidt, Harry 75, 77, 79–84 Goldschmidt, Meier 75, 77, 79–84 Gowa, Hermann Henry 10, 26 Goya, Francisco José de 63, 140, 142, 155, 159 Graef, Henri de 154 Graumann, Erwin 11, 17, 23 Graupe/Joski, Käthe 77, 79, 82 Graupe, Paul 54, 75–77, 79–84 El Greco 63 Grimm, Jacob 35, 36, 38 Groote, Eberhard von 36 Grosz, George 3, 8, 22, 23, 88, 108, 117, 134 Guttmann, Simon 7, 25 Haberstock, Karl 80, 135 Hagen, Friedrich 10, 15, 25 Haitzinger, Horst 27, 28 Hansen, Walter 119 Hartung, Hans 11, 17, 25 Hausmann, Raoul 12, 26 Heartfield, John 8, 15, 17, 88, 112

Heckroth, Hein 10, 22 Heine, Thomas Theodor 88 Henri, Florence 16, 37, 63 Herrmann, Alfred 15 Heydenreich, Karl Heinrich 32, 33 Heydrich, Reinhard 78 Himmler, Heinrich 69 Hitler, Adolf 2, 6, 11, 13, 22, 47, 68, 69, 78, 80, 109, 110, 120, 125 Hodin, Josef Paul 92, 94, 95, 98, 101 Hofer, Walter Andreas 6 Hoffmann, Camill 88, 89, 91, 100–102 Hoffmann, Edith 88, 89, 91, 100–102 Hoffmeister, Adolf 12 Hugo, Victor 10, 21, 41 Isenburger, Eric 9, 17, 24, 25 Jené, Edgar 23 Jonas, Edouard 82 Jouve, Andrèe 82 Jouve, Pierre Jean 82 Jutrosinski, Ernst 77, 79, 82 Kahane, Doris 25 Kandinsky, Wassily 10, 134 Kramarsky, Siegfried 130 Katzenellenbogen, Estella 129 Kauffmann, Arthur 136 Kauffmann, Tamara 136 Kestenberg, Leo 91, 96–98, 103 Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich 46 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 22, 134 Kirszenbaum, Jezekiel David 8, 10, 23, 25 Kisch, Egon Erwin 19 Kiwitz, Heinz 11, 12, 15, 23 Klee, Paul 23, 88, 134 Kleinberger, François 82 Koenen, Gerd 71 Koenigs, Franz 65, 126, 131 Kohl, Helmut 26, 27 Kohl, Robert 26, 27 Kohler, Bernhard 89 Kokoschka, Oskar 8, 12, 21, 22, 85–103, 108, 121, 130–135 Kolbe, Georg 90 Korner, Emil 90, 100 Kosnick-Kloss, Hannah 17 Krakov, Colonel-Lieutenant 70 Kralik, Hanns 11, 12, 15, 16, 19, 23, 25

Index  Kratz-Kessemeier, Kristina 107 Krauskopf, Bruno 22 Krull, Germaine 9 Kubin, Alfred 35, 88 Kutir-Nahhunte I (Elamite king) 28 Kuz’min, Evgenii 48 Lackner, Stephan 6, 13, 86 Lahs, Curt 7 Lammert, Will 13 Landsberger-Sachs, Gertrud/Gert Sax 22 Langhoff, Wolfgang 15 Laves, Werner 25 Le Clech, Sylvie 84 Lehmann-Lukas, Erich 5, 26 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm 108 Leppien, Jean 2, 11, 15, 25 Lévi, Sylvain 62 Lewin, Alexander 129 Liebermann, Martha 90, 123, 125, 127, 129, 130 Liebermann, Max 90, 123, 125, 127, 129, 130 Liebknecht, Karl 2, 9, 17, 23, 24, 26, 114 Liebknecht, Robert 2, 9, 17, 23, 24, 26, 114 Liebreich, Aenne 3, 24 Lindner, Richard 9, 25 Lingner, Max 5, 9, 15, 17–20, 25 Lipchitz, Jacques 112 Lipmann-Wulf, Peter 10, 17, 23, 26 Lismann, Hermann 11, 12, 26 Loew, Kurt Conrad 25 Lohmar, Heinz 11, 12, 15, 19, 23, 25, 88, 114 Lohse, Bruno 139, 152, 155–158 Loos, Adolf 103 Lütjens, Annemarie 123–125, 131–134, 137 Lütjens, Helmuth 123–125, 131–134, 137 Mahler, Alma 103 Maillet, Leo/Leopold Mayer 11, 12, 25, 26, 113 Maksimova, Ella 47, 48 Manet, Edouard 126, 127, 129 Mann, Erika 90, 109 Mann, Thomas 90, 109 Man Ray 23 Marcks, Gerhard 121 Markos-Ney, Suzanne 11, 26 Marschütz, Leo 25 Masereel, Franz 88, 112 Masurovsky, Marc 60, 61 Mayer, August Liebmann 11, 63, 81, 86 Maywald, Willy 2, 9, 26 Meidner, Ludwig 88

 169

Meier, Jacob 81, 131 Meier, Selig 81, 131 Merkel, Georg 12, 17, 26 Merkel-Romée, Louise 12, 26 Meunier, Constantin 123 Michel, Georges-Michel 61, 130 Milkau, Fritz 40, 41 Moll, Carl 102 Moro-Giafferi, Vincent de 62 Müller, Frantisˇek 87, 103, 117 Münzenberg, Willi 4, 15 Münzer-Neumann, Käte 10 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban Namuth, Hans 15, 26 Napoleon (Bonaparte) 28, 29, 31, 36, 37 Nay, Ernst Wilhelm 88, 135 Nebehay, Christian 80, 81 Neugass, Fritz 3, 25 Nirenstein, Otto 129 Norton, Lady 88, 89, 92 Nouveau, Henri/Heinrik Neugeboren 16 Nussbaum, Felix 22, 23, 26, 88, 112, 114, 115 Oehl, Erwin 11, 15, 20, 23 Oelze, Richard 17 Oertel, Robert 149, 150 Oppenheimer, Max 22 Oppenheim, Margarete 129 Osborn, Max 3, 4, 25 Paalen, Wolfgang 9, 17, 18, 26 Palkovská, Olda 88 Pechstein, Max 108, 112 Penrose, Roland 87, 88 Phillips, Ewan 98 Picasso, Pablo 4, 81, 101, 112, 133 Pinder Wilhelm 144, 145, 147 Pissaro, Camille 130, 158 Prokopenko, Anatolii 48 Puyi, Aisin-Gioro 68 Räderscheidt, Anton 11, 13, 17, 23, 25 Raphael, Max 3, 25 Rathenau, Walther 69 Rave, Paul Ortwin 107 Read, Herbert 20, 89, 92, 94, 95 Redslob, Erwin 89 Regler, Gustav 19 Reichel, Hans 9, 16, 25, 26

170 

 Index

Reichsleiter Rosenberg 2, 56, 57, 61, 70, 111 Reinach, Joseph 62 Reinhart, Oskar 127 Reis, Alice 77 Remarque, Erich Maria 128 Rembrandt (Harmenszoon van Rijn) 5, 99, 199, 155 Renoir, Jean 16, 22, 126, 130 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 16, 22, 126, 130 Reuter, Walter 7, 12, 26 Rewald, John 3, 25, 130 Ribbentrop, Joachim von 70 Ribera, Giuseppe 63 Richter, Hans 12, 114 Riemer, Isidor 77 Ring, Grete 123–126, 128, 132–137 Ring, Victor 123–126, 128, 132–137 Rosenberg, Alfred 2, 29, 56, 57, 61, 62, 70, 111, 135 Rosenberg, Erich 2, 29, 56, 57, 61, 62, 70, 111, 135 Rosenberg, Paul 2, 29, 56, 57, 61, 62, 70, 111, 135 Rothschild, Lotte 11, 26, 45, 51, 60, 62, 81 Rothschild, Luis/Georges Mandel 11, 26, 45, 51, 60, 62, 81 von Rothschild, Mayer Carl 81 Salberg, Ilse 11, 13 Salomon, Charlotte 7, 11, 26 Salomon, Erich 7, 11, 26 Satori, Henry 154 Saur, Greta 11, 26 Scharff, Edwin 146 Schiff, Fritz 3, 4, 88 Schlemmer, Oskar 134 Schloss, Henri 65, 86, 119 Schloss, Lucien 65, 86, 119 Schmidl-Waehner, Trude 12, 23, 25 Schmidt, Robert (Count Schenk zu Schweins­berg) 47, 119 Scholtz, Robert 56 Schülein, Julius Wolfgang 10, 17, 23, 25 Schulze, Wolfgang 12, 17 Schwesig, Karl 25, 26, 88 Seghers, Anna 5, 6 Selig, Walter 81, 84 Seligmann, Arnold 81, 82 Seligmann, Jacques 81, 82 Senkel, Anne-Marie 77, 79, 80 Silberberg, Max 76 Simon, Hugo 7, 21, 25, 77, 79, 82, 106

Simon, Käthe 7, 21, 25, 77, 79, 82, 106 Sisley 127 Sokolov, Nikolai 68 Spiero, Sabine 20 Spies, Werner 48 Spira, Bil 12 Spiro, Eugen 2, 11, 17, 19–25, 63, 87, 114 Springer, Ferdinand 6, 9, 17, 24, 25 Stalin, Josef 48, 55, 67 Stein, Fred 10, 25, 40 Steindecker, Fanny 84 Steiner, Lilly 9, 26 Steinmann, Ernst 29, 38 Sternheim, Thea 119, 120 Straus-Ernst, Luise 3 Strempel, Horst 8, 10, 15 Strupp, Günther 10, 11 Sussmann, Heinrich 10, 15, 25, 26 Taeuber-Arp, Sophie 18, 114 Taro, Gerda 12, 15 Tedesco, Léon 81 Terris, J.J. 155 Thomas, Marie-Rose 11, 82, 88, 90 Thyssen-Bornemisza, Heinrich 144, 145 Tischler, Viktor 9, 21, 23, 25 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) 143, 150, 151, 155 Titus (Roman Emperor) 31, 32 von Tolnay, Karl 3 Toulouse-Lautrec 126 Trier, Walter 22 Uhde, Wilhelm 4, 6 Uhlman, Fred 20, 22, 23, 87, 88 Urban, Paul 15 Valentin, Curt 94, 133, 134 Valland, Rose 152, 155, 157, 158 Velázquez, Diego 63 Voss, Herrmann 146, 155, 156, 157 Wack, Vitezlav 19 Wartmann, Wilhelm 130, 131, 133 Weidler, Charlotte 85–90, 93–95, 101, 102, 105–107, 117–122 Weinfeld, Jean (Isaak) 11 Wendel, Gustav 159 Wendland, Hans 146, 151, 152 Wendt, Franz (Francois) Willi 11, 17, 26 Wescher, Herta 3, 20, 26

Index  Westheim, Paul 2–4, 14, 17, 19–22, 24, 26, 63, 85–96, 98, 99, 101–103, 108–114, 116–122, 135 Windhöfel, Lutz 110 Wölfflin, Heinrich 125, 126 Wolff, Else 8, 10, 15 Wolff, Fritz 8, 10, 15 Wollheim, Gert 10, 11, 17, 20, 22, 23, 26, 96, 114

Wols 12, 17, 24–26 Wronkow, Georg 7, 10 Wronkow, Ludwig 7, 10 Wüsten, Johannes 12, 23, 26 Zervos, Christian 14, 17, 18 Zimmermann, Ernst Heinrich 146, 156 Zink, Marcel 70 Zurbaran, Francisco de 126

 171

Plates

Pl. I: Robert Liebknecht, Portrait of Otto Freundlich, 1936, oil on canvas.

Pl. II: Anton Räderscheidt, Camp de femmes (Gurs), (Women‘s Camp (Gurs)), 1940.

Pl. III: Inscription on a Sèvres porcelain showpiece vase by Antoine Béranger, Detail, Paris, ­RMN-Grand Palais (Sèvres, Cité de la céramique).

Pl. IV: Oskar Kokoschka, Selbstbildnis eines entarteten Künstlers (Self-Portrait of a Degenerate Artist),1937, oil on canvas, 110 × 85 cm. Private collection on loan to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

Pl. V: Oskar Kokoschka, Prague, View from the Villa Kramář, 1934–1935, oil on canvas, 90 × 121 cm., Národní Galerie, Prague.

Pl. VI: Otto Freundlich, Composition inachevée (Unfinished Composition), ca. 1940.

Pl. VII: Max Beckmann, Portrait of the Lütjens Family, 1944, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.