Hitler's Last Hostages Page 29
Within a few days of the news breaking that the German government had confiscated over 1,000 artworks from Cornelius Gurlitt’s apartment two years before and kept the find a secret, Nemetz gave his one and only press conference. With him was Meike Hoffmann, an art historian at Berlin’s Freie Universität whom he had asked to research the Gurlitt hoard. Although the Washington Principles stated that if Germany discovered potentially looted art, sufficient “resources and personnel should be made available to facilitate [its] identification,” Hoffmann had been working alone, was based five and a half hours from where the artwork was located, and was balancing a full course load at the university. Unsurprisingly, she had made little progress.
Nemetz was deeply perturbed that the Gurlitt case had leaked—and even more irked that so many people throughout the world, including Holocaust victim advocacy groups, saw his investigation as somehow tied to history as opposed to a routine tax evasion case. “We don’t see our task as art historical,” the prosecutor declared, rejecting tenet seven of the Washington Principles that Holocaust victims from whom art had been stolen “should be encouraged to come forward and make known their claims to art that was confiscated by the Nazis.”36
Hoping that as few people would attend as possible, Nemetz held the press conference not in Munich, Bavaria’s accessible capital, but in Augsburg, his small hometown best known for its elaborate puppet theater. He refused to answer basic questions or provide a transcript of the event. Nemetz’s assistant put it bluntly when the probability was raised that, at this pace, Holocaust survivors might die before seeing their art returned: “We’re in no hurry.”37
By far the most poignant and emotionally charged reactions to the Gurlitt collection came from the Jewish families who had clear proof that their Nazi-looted artworks, which they had presumed lost, were actually in the Gurlitt trove. David Toren, the descendent of David Friedmann and heir to Max Liebermann’s Two Riders on the Beach, and the Rosenberg family, from whom Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Fan had been looted in France by the Nazis, were righteously furious.
A few days after the news of the Gurlitt trove went public, David Toren was sitting in his Manhattan apartment high above the New York skyline when his phone buzzed. A friend was calling to ask if the Liebermann painting circulating in the press was indeed the same one that Toren had been trying to find for decades.
Memories of Toren’s childhood in Nazi Germany now came flooding back. Particularly emotional for him was the moment when he was thirteen and, then known as Klaus Tarnowski, had gazed at Two Riders as his father, Georg, helped broker the “sale” of his great uncle David Friedmann’s land to the Nazis before they escorted Georg to a concentration camp.
In August 1939, the young boy had escaped via the Kindertransport to Sweden, where he received postcards from his mother before both his parents were deported to Auschwitz and gassed. His brother, Peter Tarnowski, four years older, had been too old to qualify for the Kindertransport and had made his way to London, changing his name to Peter Tarnesby. After the war, Klaus had moved from Sweden to Israel, changing his name to David Toren. He worked for a patent attorney in Tel Aviv and met his wife, Sarah, a Jewish New Yorker in her late twenties. The couple moved to New York City in the mid-1950s, and Sarah gave birth to their son, Peter, in 1959.
As an international patent lawyer, Toren had reluctantly worked with German companies over the years. “I will never forget that they killed my parents. I work with them, but I don’t like Germans,” he resolved. Because of America’s Marshall Plan, Toren realized, Germany was likely to become a major world power once more. He hoped that the nation would use its economic prosperity as a force for good and atone for its sins.
Over the decades, however, Toren observed how the German government, wealthy once again, often shirked its responsibility to help Jewish families reclaim their looted artworks. Even after the nation signed on to the Washington Principles in 1998, German bureaucrats continued to demand reams of documents that most Jewish Europeans who fled the Nazi regime had been unable to take with them and which the Nazis had subsequently destroyed.
Part of Toren’s pain stemmed from the fact that he actually had escaped with numerous letters, photographs, and postcards, including his mother’s final missive before the Nazis herded her and her husband into the gas chambers. Toren had kept them in his safe at work, calculating that they would be most secure there.
Yet, one Tuesday morning, as autumn was settling into New York, Toren headed to his Manhattan office and saw smoke billowing from his work building. It was 11 September 2001. Toren’s family heirlooms on the fifty-fourth floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center were about to be obliterated.
Toren felt a pang of anger upon learning of the Gurlitt trove, not only for the painful memories it resurrected but also because the German government had kept the discovery quiet for almost two years, citing “data protection.” “Whose data are they trying to protect—a bad guy’s or my family’s?” he fumed.38
The resurfacing of Two Riders had also startled David Toren’s son, Peter, a patent lawyer in his mid-fifties living in Washington, DC. Beginning in childhood, Peter had learned from his parents about his grandparents’ bravery and self-sacrifice. “There wasn’t a time that I remember not being aware of it.” Now, here was a tangible object, thousands of miles away, to remind the Torens that for David, the war was not yet over. One of the fifty paintings the family had thought to be lost still existed, waiting to come home.
Seeing Two Riders on the front pages of newspapers jolted Peter Toren, who had never expected even one of the family’s lost artworks to ever be found. “It was very much out of the blue,” he said.39 Within days, David and his brother, Peter Tarnesby, filed documents with the German government showing they were the sole heirs to the Friedmann estate when the Nazis had looted it. They provided a copy of a document the Nazis had written about the collection, in which one officer noted, “It should be stressed that, especially among the paintings, there is a whole series of pieces” that would “certainly bring in foreign currency quickly.” Cross-referencing this with Hildebrand Gurlitt’s file, which was now accessible in the US National Archives, they clearly showed that Gurlitt had deceived the Monuments Men about the provenance of Two Riders.
Coincidentally, filming of The Monuments Men starring George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, John Goodman, and Matt Damon had recently wrapped up in Germany. Around €8 million of the film budget stemmed from German government contributions and subsidies. As marketing for the film began to escalate, an awkward question hung in the air: Would the German government put as much effort and money into rectifying the flawed work of the Monuments Men in real life as they did into lionizing the Allied heroes on the silver screen?
The German government replied to the Torens, telling them to wait and citing its two-year-old tax investigation.
“I thought the painting would be returned very quickly,” said Peter. “I was naïve.”40
Marianne Rosenberg was the granddaughter of collector and art dealer Paul Rosenberg and daughter of Paul’s son Alexandre. After Paul had escaped to the United States following the Nazi invasion of France in the summer of 1940, he had worked with the help of Alfred Barr, the Museum of Modern Art’s founding director, to regain a foothold in the modern art world in Manhattan. He wrote to Henri Matisse to say he had arrived safely in New York. The artist, upon receiving the letter, was primarily concerned with how his former dealer’s Jewish heritage would affect his own career. Much to Matisse’s annoyance, his daughter Marguerite, like Rosenberg’s son Alexandre, became part of the European-based resistance. Although Alexandre could have escaped to America with his father, he firmly believed that, as an able-bodied man, he should combat the Nazi threat by joining the Free French Forces.41
In August 1944, toward the end of the war, Alexandre had unexpectedly rescued crates of his father’s artworks in a train the Nazis had loaded up as they prepared to retreat from Paris. The resc
ue was turned into the 1964 feature film The Train, in which Burt Lancaster portrayed Alexandre. Feeling the need to be closer to his family now that the war was over, Alexandre moved to the United States in 1946 and married his wife, Elaine, on 29 February 1948, joking that the leap year anniversary would save him from buying her a present each year. Around this time, he had returned to France and was “disgusted” by the fact that everyone he met claimed to have been part of the resistance. Returning to America, Alexandre recognized that the art market had permanently moved to New York, and he resolved to make Manhattan his home as he followed in his father’s footsteps as an art dealer. He insisted that Marianne receive a French education in the United States as a child, and while his daughter held both French and American passports, Alexandre never became a US citizen. After his father died in 1959, Alexandre continued the family’s efforts to relocate their stolen art, the majority of which was still missing.42 It was a quest he would pursue for the rest of his life, until he died in London in 1987.
At the time of her father’s death, Marianne had earned a law degree from the Université de Paris II and her LLM from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She pursued a successful career as an international finance lawyer, rearing two children of her own. Like her father before her, she continued the search for the family’s artworks, impressing the importance of this on her children as well.
Shortly after the tax prosecutor Reinhard Nemetz’s tense press conference, Marianne received a call from Christopher Marinello, the family’s lawyer specializing in art restitution. Marinello had been sipping coffee in his hotel room in Manhattan when he saw a shoddy, low-resolution photograph of Matisse’s Woman with a Fan in the newspapers. Despite its graininess, the image was unmistakable: the portrait of a pale brunette with big eyes and perfect posture was part of the Gurlitt trove.
“They’ve got the painting—your painting,” Marinello, a spirited Italian American extrovert, told Marianne. She had long wondered what had happened to the Matisse, one of the 160 artworks that her grandfather had stowed in his bank vault in southern France.
Marianne began to gather fragments about what had happened to Fan over the past seventy years. Hitler’s art experts had stolen the portrait from the bank in September 1941, then transferred it to the Jeu de Paume in Paris and, later, to a storage area in Baden-Baden, a wealthy spa town on the French border. Then the trail had gone cold, until now.
Unbeknownst to the Rosenbergs, Cornelius Gurlitt had wanted to sell Fan after his father’s car crash in 1956, correctly assessing it as one of the most valuable pieces in the collection. Yet a French dealer and friend of his family had warned him not to; Fan was too “hot” for sale even on the grey market because Rosenberg had been such a prestigious dealer. Begrudgingly, Cornelius had deferred to the dealer’s judgment, eventually rolling up Fan and shoving it in the crate of tomato cans in his Munich apartment’s kitchen.
It became immediately clear in November 2013 that Fan would serve as a test case for the German government’s handling of the entire Gurlitt trove. The portrait belonged to the 1 percent of looted artworks for which clear documentation of ownership still survived, and its owners belonged to a family that understood the legal paperwork necessary to file a claim for looted art and had the funds to finance the legal battle. Rosenberg had been a professional dealer, accustomed to keeping a thorough inventory. Upon realizing that he and his family needed to flee to America, he had the foresight to send his documents abroad. From a market perspective, the Matisse was one of the most valuable works in the Gurlitt collection, probably worth a low seven-figure sum in dollars, though the growing interest in the painting, given its bizarre postwar journey, could well push that value higher.
As much as the art world’s dealers, collectors, and researchers shied away from saying it officially, they were all thinking the same thing, repeating it at champagne-filled parties in London and New York: if Germany did not expeditiously restitute Fan, it would be all but impossible for families with less money and less proof to see their artworks again. It did not take much time to confirm that, even for the Rosenbergs, reclaiming their stolen work would be an uphill battle.
Meike Hoffmann, the lone researcher of the Gurlitt trove, had known for twenty months that the Nazis had looted Fan from Rosenberg. Discovering this had not exactly been difficult. Fan was registered in the official German government database for looted art that she had been reading since embarking on the project to evaluate the collection.
Still, almost two weeks after the Gurlitt trove became public knowledge, the German federal government was silent, deeming it a “Bavarian issue.” Bavarian officials, meanwhile, remained sluggish and evasive. They upheld Nemetz’s rationale: the case was not historically significant and hardly differed from the thousands of other tax investigations Germany conducted.
The US State Department’s Holocaust Issues office began to lose patience. Frustrated that the German government seemed unable to grasp the heartlessness of its actions, Stuart Eizenstat, Secretary of State John Kerry’s special advisor on Holocaust issues, publicly urged Germany to publish a full list of the works in Gurlitt’s apartment. Bavarian officials had begrudgingly acknowledged that they had flagged at least 590 artworks as probably looted but had published a list of only 25.
Meanwhile, Cornelius Gurlitt conducted an interview with Der Spiegel, the most respected weekly magazine in Germany. It was to be his sole interview. The drama in which he was now embroiled was Hitler’s fault, Cornelius argued. He considered his father a hero.43 Cornelius denied that Hildebrand Gurlitt had dealt in looted art, either for himself or for Hitler.
“That would have nauseated him,” said Cornelius.44
Yet, in almost the same breath, Cornelius said that were it to come to light that works in the collection had been looted from Jewish Europeans, he still would not return them. “I’m not giving back anything voluntarily. No, no,” he declared with obstinate conviction.45
As brazenly tasteless as that remark was, another point made by Cornelius resonated viscerally with everyday Germans, making him seem sympathetic, perhaps even a victim: “What kind of government are they to reveal my property?” he asked rhetorically.46 Had he committed a crime, Cornelius noted, the government surely should have charged him within the past twenty months instead of holding his property indefinitely.
Hanukkah in 2013 began on 27 November, the day before Thanksgiving. The Gurlitt discovery had been public for only twenty-four days, but to Peter Toren and Marianne Rosenberg, it felt like far longer. David Toren began experiencing a literal bad taste in his mouth from stress. He wrote multiple letters to Ingeborg Berggreen-Merkel (no relation to Chancellor Angela Merkel), head of the recently founded German taskforce charged with researching the Gurlitt trove. He was insulted that the government, after two years of holding it, still had not declared Two Riders a looted painting.
Despite declaring that the taskforce’s aim was to increase transparency, Berggreen-Merkel had granted only one formal interview, to Der Spiegel. Published in German, the interview was inaccessible to those without a high mastery of German legal language. Der Spiegel never questioned her regarding the absurd fact that, even if her taskforce declared Two Riders and Fan looted, there was no way to compel Cornelius to return them to the Torens and the Rosenbergs. From its conception, the taskforce seemed purely symbolic. “If you continue with this snail’s pace of examining paintings under suspicion it will take about 82 years and then we’ll all be dead. But I suppose that’s the intention,” David Toren, now almost ninety, fumed in an angry letter to Berggreen-Merkel.
Tenet eleven of the Washington Principles had declared that nations should “develop national processes to implement” resolution of disputes regarding Nazi-looted and Nazi-confiscated art.47 Yet the prevailing German attitude was that the Holocaust should be remembered annually in speeches and ceremonies, but its victims should let go of hope that they would recover stolen property. Peter Toren summed up the
mentality rhetorically: “Why do these damn Jews keep bringing up art they owned 75 years ago?”48
Two days before Christmas, the German judicial system finally did intervene—to the benefit of Cornelius. After his medical doctors expressed concerns about his declining physical health, a Munich court appointed a local lawyer, Christoph Edel, to represent him. Edel, a prickly man with a military-style buzzcut and no-nonsense attitude, assembled a motley crew of advisors: Hannes Hartung, whose resting face was a smirk, served as his assistant lawyer, and mild-mannered Stefan Holzinger, for whom the Gurlitt case represented his biggest break yet, became his public relations advisor. Holzinger immediately set up a website for Cornelius Gurlitt to humanize the “phantom,” as many Germans still referred to him. The portrait he put on the website was a stock photo of a random silver-haired, blue-eyed man in a dapper suit.49
Cornelius spent the 2013 Christmas season alone in his apartment, as he had since his mother’s death. He grew frail and needed hospitalization for his myriad heart problems. A member of his legal team who visited him in the hospital was struck by how angry Cornelius was, despite his physical frailty and normally placid demeanor. He “felt like a victim of Bavaria,” his advisor stated. It was clear that Cornelius wanted to spite Germany for persecuting him.50
Inspiration for his revenge came from an unexpected source: Ingeborg Berggreen-Merkel. By Christmas 2013, the tax prosecutor Nemetz knew that the investigation had produced no proof of tax fraud. The case against Cornelius was deteriorating. Realizing that the government would soon need to release the artworks, Berggreen-Merkel reached out to Cornelius and arranged a meeting. She considered this a long shot, but Cornelius agreed to it. Gently, she suggested that he craft a last will and testament, donating his artworks to an institution as a way to help rehabilitate the public perception of the Gurlitt family name. She suggested that he bequeath his collection to a German museum. Leaving the meeting, which she considered a polite and “serene” conversation, Berggreen-Merkel felt she had made headway and possibly secured a gargantuan donation for the museum system in which she had worked for thirty years.51