Nazi-Era Provenance of Museum Collections

Front matter

NAZI-ERA PROVENANGE OF MUSEUM COLLECTIONS

A RESEARCH GUIDE [a Bey p

, N ÅA eo ae

Contents

List of figures Foreword by Edmund de Waal

Introduction 1 Persecution and dispossession, 1933—45 2 After the war: Nazi-era provenance research today

3 Research strategies and resources: uncovering the stories behind museum objects

Foreword

... — I note

On a little scrap of paper the names of those No longer around me.

(Bertolt Brecht)!

Brecht wrote four poems on the death of his friend Walter Benjamin. They are remarkable, spare texts, inventories or listings of people and places that are lost. This need to name is a kind of collection, a holding in one place of presences and absences. They recall Benjamin’s own obsessional need to record: what epitaph can you write for a recorder of loss? These list-poems have the slightly ragged feeling of a grief that is very present. They feel as if they are unfinished, archival.

Jacques Schuhmacher’s remarkable book is a testament to spending time with the unfinished nature of the archival. It is about finding the traces of what survives, bringing these traces into renewed focus, finding them a place in the world where their connections to lived lives have been erased or effaced, forgotten. It is about valuing the connections between people and the things that they owned, the objects or books or pictures which surrounded them in their daily life and were part of their familial identity.

Walter Benjamin was a collector. He understood that ‘we are alone with particular things, which range about us in their silence ... that even the people who haunt our thoughts then partake in this steadfast, confederate silence of things. The collector “stills” his fate. And that means he disappears in the world of memory.’ To care about the provenance of things is to go deeply into the world of memory, to understand that objects have a kind of agency in the world, to unlock the space

FOREWORD xi xii between the silence of things and the silence of people. I do not mean to imply that provenance research or that restitution are a kind of closure. Tribute and restitution and memorial sound like the end, closure. ‘I do not have clarity today, and I hope that I never will. Clarification would amount to disposal, settlement of the case, which can then be placed in the files of history...nothing is resolved, nothing is settled, no remembering has become mere memory,’ writes Jean Amery, the survivor of Auschwitz. I feel this is true. History is happening. It is not the past, it is a continuing unfolding of the moment. It unfolds in our hands. That is why objects carry so much: they belong in all the tenses, unresolved, unsettling, essais.

What can we do? We follow Jacques Schuhmacher. We record traces, hand them on. We name.

It is a start. Together we find the places where the records are silent, the pages torn out, where there are only shards. Shards matter - they record a moment of disjuncture, indicate a loss. You cannot restore. To restore is to efface. To name loss, to delineate it, is a worthy act.

Edmund de Waal

1 Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Losses’ (1941), from The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, trans. Thomas Kuhn and David Constantine (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2018), 836.

It was only possible to research and write this book thanks to the generous support of the Gilbert Trust for the Arts in London and of the David Berg Foundation in New York.

I would like to express my profound gratitude to the Gilbert Trustees — Nicholas Coleridge, Tristram Hunt, Antonia Boström, Edmund de Waal, Nick Hoffman, Heike Zech, Martin Levy, Erica Boyer, Martin H. Blank and Richard Ziman - for enabling me to research the Nazi-era provenance of Arthur and Rosalinde’s collection and for encouraging me to share this work as widely as possible.

I am equally grateful to the David Berg Foundation, whose generous support enabled me to undertake several research trips to archives, museums and libraries in Europe. Without the opportunity to review large volumes of files and literature inaccessible elsewhere, and to discuss the challenges of various collections on site, this would be a very different book. I am particularly thankful to the Board of the David Berg Foundation for enabling this book to be published as an open access resource, making its contents freely accessible to anyone interested in embarking on this important research. I am also grateful to the V&A Americas Foundation for their support of this project.

I would also like to warmly thank The Polonsky Foundation for their generous support of the V&A’s provenance research efforts.

It is difficult to imagine a more supportive and stimulating environment for provenance research than the V&A and, within it, the Gilbert Collection and the V&A Research Institute, National Art Library and Archives (VARINALA). I am incredibly grateful to Tristram Hunt (Director) for wholeheartedly embracing and championing the importance of provenance research; to Antonia Boström (former Director xiii xiv of Collections) for encouraging me early on to write this book and for opening so many doors to me over the years; to Alice Minter (Senior Curator of the Gilbert Collection), who has so generously shared with me her expertise, and for our rewarding and stimulating collaborations; and to Joanna Norman (Director of VARINALA) for her keen interest in this project and for enabling me to focus on finishing this book and to continue this work in a vibrant research community.

I am deeply humbled that Edmund de Waal agreed to write the foreword to this volume. Edmund’s thoughtful approach to this topic has been a source of ongoing inspiration for me and I am profoundly grateful for his support.

It gives me great pleasure to express my thanks to Coralie Hepburn from V&A Publishing and to Pat Gordon-Smith, my editor at UCL Press. I could not have asked for more skilled or supportive editors; I greatly appreciate their deep engagement with the book and their patience as I completed the manuscript. I would also like to thank Robert Davies for copyediting the manuscript and Elliot Beck for assisting with the images, and to express my gratitude to every individual and archive who gave me permission to use their photographs.

I am deeply indebted to Nick Stargardt (University of Oxford) whose work and perspective has shaped how I approach the history of Nazi Germany. The training I received at the Commission for Looted Art in Europe and my many discussions over the years with Anne Webber are the bedrock upon which this book rests. I would also like to thank Gabriele Finaldi (National Gallery) and the members of the National Museum Directors’ Council (NMDC) Spoliation Working Group, and Lord Inglewood and the members of the Advisory Group on Spoliation Matters, for our ongoing and always informative dialogue on Nazi-era provenance research.

Iam very grateful to everyone who has, over the years at countless conferences, workshops and seminars, public talks and gallery tours, asked me the important, interesting and sometimes very challenging questions that first gave me the idea to write this book, and which directly shaped its scope, tone and approach. In particular, I would like to thank the participants of the National Museum Directors’ Council (NMDC) Provenance Research Training, and of the Society for the History of Collecting’s ‘Provenance in Action Workshop’ for the opportunity to present the entire contents of this book to the kind of audience for whom it is intended, and for providing crucial feedback.

More than other disciplines, provenance research relies on the support of colleagues from around the world. I am profoundly grateful to the provenance researchers and archivists whose generosity enabled me to include a panorama of different case studies and perspectives. In order of their appearance in the book, these are: Juliane Deinert (University of Göttingen), Marcus Kenzler (State Museum Oldenburg), Julia EBI (Albertina), Simon Goodman, Miriam Olivia Merz (Museum Wiesbaden), Sven Haase (Prussian Heritage Foundation), Yvonne Mundt (Federal Office for Central Services and Unresolved Property Issues) and Martin Luchterhandt (State Archive Berlin).

I would like to thank the many other colleagues who each shared important insights and materials: Anna-Carolin Augustin (German Historical Institute, Washington DC), Judith Barr (J. Paul Getty Museum), Giulia Bartrum (British Museum), Uta-Christiane Bergemann (German Textile Museum), Anne Buddle (National Galleries Scotland), Mark Caldon (Department for Culture, Media and Sport), Matthias Deinert (German Lost Art Foundation), Annika Dorn (University of Bonn), Sybille Ehringhaus, Sebastian Finsterwalder (Central and State Library Berlin), Emily Gould (Institute of Art and Law), Ellen Grabowsky and Jona Mooren (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies), Matthew Gale (Tate), Angelina Giovani-Agha (Flynn & Giovanni), Lea Grüter and Mara Lagerweij (Rijksmuseum), Nora Halfbrod (State Gallery Stuttgart), Sam Jones (Tate), Sarah Kinzel (Lindau Museum), Peter Kiräly (Max Planck Society and University of Göttingen), Katja Lindenau (State Art Collections Dresden), Mary Levkoff (Hearst Castle), Matthias Listl (Kunsthalle Mannheim), Andrea Lehmann (Christie’s), Monika Löscher and Susanne Hehenberger (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien), Rosie Mills (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Jane Milosch (University of Glasgow), Alexander Mirgorodsky (Taganrog Local Government), Mary-Ann Middelkoop (Pitt Rivers Museum), Victoria Reed (Museum of Fine Art Boston), Lily Sabelus (Free University Berlin), Roman Satschuk (Hesse Main State Archives), Christine Schmidt (Wiener Holocaust Library), Joachim Sieber (Kunsthaus Zürich), Antje Stahl (University of Rostock), Lucian Simmons, Julia Rickmeyer and Marie Stolberg (Sotheby’s), Annette Weisner (Kunsthalle Kiel), Suzie Tucker and Kathryn Simpson (National Museum Directors’ Council), Jana Jiräskovä (Documentation Centre for Property Transfers of the Cultural Assets of WW II Victims, Prague), Richard Winkler (Bavarian Economic Archive), Charlotte Woodhead (University of Warwick), Sandra van Ginhoven (Getty Research Institute), Brian Weightman (Glasgow Museums), Isabel von Klitzing, TillVere-Hodge, and Matthias Weniger (Bavarian National Museum).

XV xvi

I cannot emphasise enough how grateful I am to two of my fellow provenance research curators — MacKenzie Mallon (Nelson- Atkins Museum of Art) and Katharina Weiler (Museum Applied Art Frankfurt) - who generously agreed to read the entire manuscript and whose thoughtful comments dramatically improved the text. I am equally grateful to the provenance researcher Pia Kainz (Commission for Looted Art in Europe), and to my V&A colleagues Alice Minter, Joanna Norman, Coralie Hepburn, Alexandra Watson-Jones and Emefa Cole for their constructive feedback on the full manuscript.

A wide range of provenance research and restitution experts and museum colleagues provided invaluable feedback on individual chapters: Anne Webber (Commission for Looted Art in Europe), Richard Aronowitz (Christie’s), Alexander Herman (Institute of Art and Law), Thomas Brodie (University of Birmingham) and Arthur MacGregor (V&A). I would also like to thank Susanna Avery-Quash (National Gallery), Alexandra Gerstein (Courtauld Institute), Catherine Poust (Tate), Niklas Krawinkel (Fritz Bauer Institute), Adriana Concin, Anthony Misquitta, Sophie Morris and Jana Riedel (V&A). Needless to say, any errors of interpretation remain entirely my own.

A wide range of colleagues, both past and present, supported this project in important ways. I am deeply grateful to Jessica Eddie, for her extraordinary support as Acting Curator of the Gilbert Collection, and to Emefa Cole, for many stimulating conversations about conceptual and broader issues. I would also like to express my gratitude to: Fahema Begum, Sarah Belanger, Harriet Braine, Oliver Cox, Richard Edgcumbe, Isabella Eggert, Richard Espley, Tullia Fraser, Hannah Auerbach George, Ellen Gillespie, Claudia Heidebluth, Zoé Hollingworth, Olivia Horsfall Turner, Shanna Isaacson, Elizabeth James, Charlotte Johnson, Chloe Johnson, Chloe Kellow, Kirstin Kennedy, Jane Lawson, Clementine Loustric, Christopher Marsden, Dani Martiri, Ana Muñoz, Marta Ajmar, Tessa Murdoch, Angus Patterson, Richard Palmer, Vannis Jones Rahi, James Robinson, Spike Sweeting, Elaine Tierney, Holly Trusted, Andrew Tullis, Simona Valeriani, Matti Watton and Pamela Young. For their encouragement and help at various stages of the project, I would also like to thank: Martin Krause, Hamish Bridges, Robert Lawrence, Edward Rooney, Jeremy Baker, Benjamin Schroeder, Karis Fiorrucci, Christian Mazanek, James Dancer and Martin Kissinger.

This book would not exist without my dear friend and colleague Jonathan Waterlow (Edinburgh). I am deeply grateful to him for our many discussions; his insightful questions and critical interventions at important junctures helped me to understand what kind of book Itruly wanted to write and to never lose sight of what is important throughout the project. Iam also profoundly grateful to Jon for providing crucial feedback on many different draft chapters, and for his unrivalled editing skills which he so generously applied to this manuscript during our writing retreats in Brussels.

I am deeply grateful to Diamatho for her wonderful love and amazing support, which always carried me through the challenging moments.

Lastly, I would like to thank my wonderful parents, Heike and Engelbert, for their constant encouragement, which has led to the most fulfilling and rewarding job one can possibly imagine, and for their loving support and interest in this project. It gives me great joy to dedicate this book to them.

xvii

Introduction

It is disturbing to think that when we look at the artworks on display in museums around the world, there is always a real possibility that some of these objects once belonged to victims of the Nazis — and that this possibility has remained unexplored and unacknowledged for so long. If we are willing to ask the right questions about who owned these objects in the past — about their provenance - then some of these items may speak to us about the fate of individuals and families whose lives were destroyed in the name of the Nazis’ racist ideology. At the very least, uncovering these stories allows us to reinsert lost voices into a historical record from which they have been erased — sometimes deliberately, sometimes by chance. In many cases, this research will raise profound moral questions, not least if it is revealed that an item would never have found its way into a museum collection had the Nazis not seized power in 1933 and then initiated a brutal campaign of persecution, conquest and extermination — a campaign that went hand in glove with the systematic dispossession of their victims (see Chapter 1). The aim of this research is not simply to add a name and date to an object’s record for the sake of archival completeness; it serves to ensure that the Nazis’ worldview and their actions do not live on unchallenged in the galleries and storerooms of our museums today.

If the moral imperative for this research could hardly be clearer, it often comes as a surprise to discover how difficult this work can be. Museums have historically presented themselves as the authority on the objects in their galleries, so one would naturally presume that all that would be required is to pay a visit to the museum’s archives in order to learn who owned an object during the Nazi period of 1933-45. In the case of German museums, which were not only passive beneficiaries of

INTRODUCTION

Nazi policy, but were often also actively involved in the dispossession process, the name of a Jewish collector in the provenance records would immediately stand out to us. Yet even if German curators in the 1930s and 1940s saw no reason to hide where these objects had come from, after the war they had every incentive to obscure this information, making the task of the provenance researcher incredibly challenging.' Moreover, the scale of Nazi dispossession was so vast and complex that it has left traces even in the museums of neutral countries, or of those that actively fought to defeat Hitler’s regime. If we open the acquisition books of museums in North America or Britain, for example, we often find they contain no meaningful provenance information to tell us who owned, and what happened, to these objects during the Nazi period. This is a stark reminder that the goal of recording an unbroken chain of provenance for each object has only relatively recently become the norm (see Chapter 2). Even if we are lucky enough to discover a date and the name of a previous owner, this is usually only the first step on an often twisted path through the many disconnected archives across which the victims’ stories have been scattered (see Chapter 3).

If museums do not hold comprehensive records that can enable us to recover and reassemble these important stories, we might naturally hope that the famously bureaucratic Nazi state would have compiled a master list of objects owned by their enemies, with the ultimate aim of seizing it all for the Reich. The Nazi bureaucracy was certainly relentless in classifying, persecuting and documenting the dispossession of their victims, and they indeed created many detailed inventories, but these were never consolidated, and many did not survive the war. Even if some of these lists have been digitised, much like the various online databases of Nazi-looted art, they can only provide small snapshots of a vast dispossession campaign that straddled the entire European continent and, on their own, will never be enough to tell us the full story of how the Nazis’ actions have affected a particular museum collection (see Chapter 3). These resources can be incredibly valuable, allowing us in some cases to overcome the limitations of museum records, but it is self-evidently insufficient to cross-reference an incomplete list of objects with a museum collection, highlight any overlaps and then call it a day. Even if we recognise an object from such a list or database in a museum collection (and are sure it is not a duplicate), it is crucial to dig much deeper if we are to recover and do justice to the full human story of what happened to an object and its owners. There is no way around it: if we want to understand the true history of a museum collection during and after the Nazi period, then we must begin with the objects themselves and, with the museum records as our starting point, begin to trace their journey through time and space by drawing on as many resources as possible.

There is so much to gain by treading this difficult path: we can tell a more complete and accurate story of one of the darkest chapters in human history; we can better understand how its reverberations continue to affect our culture today; and, in light of this information, we are challenged to consider what the role of museums has been and should be in our own countries. Fundamentally, this research is the essential foundation for us to ensure that museums act as ethical stewards of our shared history (see Chapter 2).

As we begin this work, it can certainly feel that we are doing it ‘too late’, and we cannot help but wonder why it has not already been completed. In 1945, the Allies did initiate a major research effort into the origins of the millions of artworks and other cultural property that the Nazi state had hidden in salt mines, remote castles and caves as the Reich began to crumble. This important research was carried out by curators and art historians — later known as the Monuments Men and Women - whose work culminated in the largest provenance research and restitution effort in history (see Chapter 2). Donning the uniforms of the victorious Allied armies, they drew on their training and expertise with the aim of reversing the Nazis’ campaign of plunder. Instinctively, they approached this task as if they were cataloguing a museum collection, yet remarkably these efforts were not thereafter replicated in the museum world - not in Germany, not in the formerly occupied territories, nor in the Allied or neutral countries. By this point, many objects that carried a Nazi provenance had long since entered museum collections across the world, often after a complex journey through the international art market. Not only were existing museum collections not scrutinised with respect to the Nazi past, but over the ensuing decades museums also continued not to ask in-depth questions about the new items that they added to their collections. As a result, the scale of this unexamined legacy only grew larger.

It is surprising that it would take more than 50 years after the end of the Second World War before museums began to confront this legacy in earnest. In 1998, a major international conference held in Washington, DC, at the US State Department and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, shone a dramatic spotlight onto the fact that museum collections had never been systematically studied with respect to the Nazi period (see Chapter 2). The revelations of the conference would be a powerful call to action. It created the expectation that

INTRODUCTION museums should carry out research into the Nazi past of their collections, that they should publicly acknowledge what they found, and that they must ensure that they are not the beneficiaries of Nazi policies. But the conference had effects that reached far beyond the walls of museums: it galvanised research into persecution and dispossession under the Nazis, drawing large numbers of researchers to museum collections, where the consequences of the Nazi period become very concrete as they looked upon material objects, knowing that they were once held by both victims and perpetrators. As journalists, filmmakers and scholars have continued to highlight the Nazi past and its legacies, museum visitors now expect to be told not only about the aesthetic qualities of objects on display, but also about their unvarnished histories. They also rightfully expect museums to take appropriate decisions on the basis of this information, including a fully transparent engagement with questions of restitution. It is reassuring to see that the Nazi past is no longer a topic confined to history museums, but is increasingly taken up by art museums through exhibitions, talks and gallery tours.

Now, decades after the Washington Conference energised the sector, its vision remains only partially fulfilled, which is a stark testament to just how difficult this work can be. At its core, this research must be truthful, accurate and complete. This book seeks to equip anyone interested in researching museum collections with the knowledge necessary to embark on this journey. It is not only aimed at curators who wish to confront the provenance of their collections, but also seeks to empower anyone interested in using the objects on display in our museums to confront and engage the Nazi past.

The first two chapters of the book focus on providing the essential background and historical context for undertaking this work. Although this research shares many similarities with traditional provenance approaches, in that it aims to reconstruct who owned objects in the past, it rapidly and inescapably pulls us into a far more complex realm. Traditional provenance research was largely an exploration of past cultural climates, describing the tastemakers and trends, the interconnected world of art dealers and prominent collectors, and in doing so often kept a cautious distance from matters that might cast a troubling light on the objects studied.” Although Nazi-era provenance research often involves the records of dealers, auction houses and collectors, it is fundamentally about reconstructing the lives of helpless individuals tormented by a brutal dictatorship. Here, the objects are the gateway into the human realities of what it meant to live under the Nazi regime.

As Chapter 1 shows, in order to make the objects reveal this history to us, it is essential that we have a clear understanding of Nazi ideology and how it was put into practice; without this, the sources can remain deceptive or deeply confusing.

As Chapter 2 explores, researchers have now been analysing Nazi-era provenance issues and the modes of persecution and dispossession for far longer than the Nazi regime itself existed. For this reason, as part of our orientation, it is essential that we grasp the nature and extent of the post-war restitution effort, which produced a wealth of knowledge in the most difficult circumstances, and which remains the bedrock upon which all future efforts are constructed. It is equally important that we are aware of the restitution and compensation mechanisms that were available to the survivors after the war. Through these records, we can sometimes recover their desperate pleas for redress and uncover the human stories that were ignored in the cold documents generated by the Nazi bureaucracy. As we will be focusing on museum collections, it is crucial to understand how the Washington Conference transformed the field of provenance research and the very idea of how museums should fulfil their role as civic spaces.

The third chapter ofthe book deals with how we can best approach research into particular collections- the strategies, methods and resources we can use to explore the moving stories behind the objects. Museum collections can certainly appear overwhelming. Depending on the institution, they may have thousands of items of various kinds in the collections, and it is simply impossible to know by looking at any object, ancient or modern, whether it carries a Nazi-era provenance. And while we must look at the objects that entered the collections between 1933 and 1945, we must not ignore the records of the following decades. The Nazi empire was vast, and its mechanisms of dispossession were at times overt and brutal, while at others they were creeping and sinister. Despite the magnitude of the task and the complexities of Nazi policy, it will be reassuring to realise that the fundamental research strategy always remains the same: we need to closely examine the object and then carefully think about where it may have left archival traces that will enable us to fill in the gaps. In some cases, this will mean tracing an object back from the present and into the Nazi past; in others, it will mean picking up the trail before Hitler came to power and following the object into the 1930s—40s. As we do so, we are able to call upon many rich resources that help us to bypass apparent brick walls and make connections that would otherwise be impossible if we had only followed the limited or opaque information in museum acquisition files.

INTRODUCTION

This book aims not only to provide the tools and references essential to this work, but also through vivid case studies to bring to life the research process as it plays out in practice. The goal of this research is always to discover the name of an individual, whom we can then investigate further. In doing so, we recover a crucial sense of their agency and bear witness to them as far more than victims of a brutal and repressive regime.

1 On the erasure and obfuscation of provenance records, see, for example: Weiler and Weber 2019, 49.

2 On the remarkable development in recent decades of provenance research from an often optional or auxiliary field into an prominent, dynamic and thoughtful discipline, see, in particular: Feigenbaum and Reist 2012; Milosch and Pearce 2019.

As our goal is to research the Nazi-era provenance of objects and the fate of their previous owners, it is essential that we have a firm and nuanced grasp of the Nazi ideology that defined the regime’s brutal campaign of persecution and conquest. At the core of the Nazi movement’s worldview was its hatred for the Jews. After the Nazis seized power in 1933 and crushed their left-wing opponents, they mobilised the might of the German state to torment the Jewish community. The regime issued a series of escalating decrees, accompanied by waves of violence, designed to exclude Jews from public life and the economy, forcing them into a state of isolation and despair. As the social, economic and legal pressure continued to build, many Jews were left with no choice but to part with their possessions, either needing to raise funds in order to survive this hostile environment, or to finance their escape from Hitler’s regime. As the Reich expanded, the Nazis exported their ideology and its mechanisms of persecution and dispossession, all of which were further radicalised in the violent environment of war, and would lead ultimately to the systematic mass murder of millions of innocent Jewish men, women and children.

The Nazi worldview

In 1933, Nazi activists clustered around a Berlin tram stop, eagerly distributing an election pamphlet which aimed to provide a straightforward summary of the key elements of their ideology.' It was penned by Johann von Leers, one of the most prolific antisemitic writers of the Nazi movement, with a talent for capturing the essence of Nazi ideology in a far more concise fashion than Hitler and other prominent leaders could manage.” The Jews played a central role in this worldview, as the title of the pamphlet made plain - Juden raus!’ (Jews out!).?

The central premise was that the salvation of the German people depended on the removal of Jews from their midst. Leers’ pamphlet was infused with the ‘scientific’ racism of the day. He claimed that the Jews had convinced the world of a great lie: that all humans are equal, when in fact they belonged to distinctly different races, the members of which were forever bound together by blood. Leers painted a disturbing and lurid picture of world history as a Darwinian struggle between races for supremacy. If any race allowed its blood to be diluted, it would eventually, inevitably perish.*

Leers urgently wanted Germans to wake up to the terrifying fact that members of an alien and hostile race were living among them. He claimed that, unlike other races, the Jews never built anything of their own but instead operated as parasites that extracted the vitality and wealth from other races, until their victims had been sucked dry. Their ultimate goal, Leers claimed, was world domination — a goal they ceaselessly pursued through any and all means. This is why he could simultaneously claim that the Jews were the puppet masters behind both capitalism and communism. Both systems were a mere facade for the larger Jewish mission which would, all too soon, cease to operate in the shadows and become an overt grab for total power - unless, of course, the German people voted for a party that recognised this existential threat and promised to address it in a ruthless fashion.