Hitler's Last Hostages Page 30
Cornelius, however, had a more cunning idea: he took Berggreen-Merkel’s suggestion and used it to snub both her and his home country. Unbeknownst to anyone except his legal team, he immediately called a notary to his hospital and signed a secret will on 9 January 2014 that bequeathed his entire collection to the Kunstmuseum Bern in the capital of Switzerland. The will remained secret to all, other than Cornelius, his legal team of three, and his notary, for the next five months. By the time anyone would know to ask Cornelius why he had chosen to bequeath his trove to Switzerland’s Kunstmuseum Bern, he was already dead.
The Christmas season in Germany is long: white-collar workers and politicians shutter their offices and use up whatever is left of their legal minimum of thirty vacation days. That had typically been the routine of Winfried Bausback, the forty-eight-year-old Justice Minister of Bavaria. The year 2013, however, was different. The devoutly Catholic father of three found it difficult to stop thinking about the Gurlitt case, what it said about the unresolved moral issues regarding Germany’s accountability for World War II, and the legacy it would hold for his children.
As a proud Bavarian, he had always been in a unique cultural position: unlike natives of most of Germany’s other provinces, Bavarians were a fiercely independent bunch, fond of hunting and church and proud of their culture. Yet Bausback knew that Bavarians—and Germans—could only be proud of their heritage if they worked to right the injustices of Nazi Germany. He had only learned about the Gurlitt case from the press, which infuriated him, given that his prosecutor, Reinhard Nemetz, had been under orders to report all cases to him, especially those as culturally explosive as the Gurlitt trove.
It was Bausback who had created the taskforce that Berggreen-Merkel headed. It was he, not Chancellor Merkel or her deputies, who had met with Israeli and US diplomats to hear their concerns about the Gurlitt predicament.52 The Justice Minister was not an art expert. To him, however, this case was about the reputation of the state that he loved and represented as a public servant. On a pragmatic note, Bausback suspected that if there was one “Cornelius Gurlitt” out there, there very possibly were many others. The statute of limitations for returning Nazi-looted art that had expired in the 1970s would prove morally disastrous in bringing these “future Gurlitts” to justice. Suspecting that Cornelius had only months to live and that he wanted to see his art collection before he died, Bausback instructed Berggreen-Merkel, who had visited Cornelius around Christmas to discuss the elderly man’s last will and testament, to negotiate with him and his legal team about what to do with works in the Gurlitt trove that were clearly Nazi-looted art.
The political pressure was high for Bausback—not because his bureaucratic colleagues expected him to secure justice for Holocaust victims but because the notion of bringing morality into a tax investigation went against the German tradition of following protocol. Bausback pressed on regardless. He pressured Germany’s Culture Minister, Monika Grütters, who was based in Berlin only steps away from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office, to make a public statement on behalf of the federal government. On 11 February 2014, two years after the government raided Gurlitt’s apartment in Munich, Grütters stated that the Gurlitt scandal had exposed severe problems within Germany’s art restitution system, noting that the government had underestimated “the emotional components” of the scandal and needed to begin “earning back trust.”53
She announced that Germany would create an independent center to investigate museum collections for Nazi-looted art, acknowledging, albeit in restrained terms, that German museums had been “a bit shy” in combing their collections for looted or confiscated artworks. The center, Grütters said, would have an annual budget of around €10 million.
Just hours after the announcement by Culture Minister Grütters, it leaked to the media that the legal team for Cornelius Gurlitt had recently visited his Salzburg home, loaded the 250 artworks he held there into a van, and ferreted them away to a secret location. Cornelius had not visited the home for years, and by the time his legal team opened the door, the air in the cottage was musty and damp. In a corner was a pile of trash from the time Cornelius had last been there. It was a small miracle that vermin had not taken over the house or that it had not been robbed of the works, which included eighteen by Grosz, thirty by Nolde, and numerous from mostly French masters, including Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Rodin.
The leaked news of the treasures in the nearly abandoned house, occurring the same day as Culture Minister Grütters’s announcement of the culture center, overshadowed her declaration and once again made the German government appear incompetent. Cornelius’s legal team gleefully announced that they were keeping the works outside Germany and thus outside of Prosecutor Nemetz’s jurisdiction. The German government had made no move in more than three years to learn what works were in his Salzburg home. Now, the world might never see a list of them. The brouhaha gave credence to the name art world insiders were increasingly using to refer to the Gurlitt scandal: Scheißsturm, or “shit show.”
Bausback, the Bavarian Justice Minister, was not yet ready to give up hope. Reading Minister Grütters’s announcement, he noted her promise to throw her support behind lifting the statute of limitations on art stolen between 1933 and 1945 from Jewish Europeans and other persecuted groups. In order for this to become law, however, the measure needed to be introduced to the Bundesrat, Germany’s upper house of parliament, either by Chancellor Merkel or a Bundesrat member. Merkel would not budge on her policy of noninterference in the Gurlitt scandal, so, on Valentine’s Day 2014, Bausback took to the Bundesrat floor even as Gurlitt’s lawyers made a formal complaint to the government that Cornelius should either be charged with an actual crime or receive his artworks back.
Bausback was not a frequent orator, but he delivered a speech that was concise and articulate. After a short paragraph recapping Hildebrand Gurlitt’s work for Hitler and the 28 February 2012 raid on Cornelius Gurlitt’s house, Bausback led with a critical question: “To whom do these pictures belong today, and under what conditions can they be returned to the victims of Nazi art theft or their heirs?”
Bausback referred to the phrase that many Jews and Holocaust art researchers used regarding stolen artworks that had yet to be returned to their original owners or the owners’ heirs. They were “Hitler’s Last Hostages.”54
“The international interest in how Germany goes about dealing with these issues is huge,” he continued.55 With tens of millions abroad watching Germany in this critical time, he stressed, it was crucial to implement improvements swiftly. “The Bundesrat should build on this today,” he implored. The laws allowing Jews to claim reparations from the German government had also expired, he pointed out.
Justice Minister Bausback had poured his heart—and much of his political capital—into pushing for at least a sliver of change. He firmly believed it was the litmus test for his generation to show the rest of the world that Germany was now a beacon of compassion, justice, and atonement. His efforts failed. His oration was the only speech given by any German politician on the parliamentary floor regarding the Gurlitt case. After he concluded, no one in the Bundesrat rose to support or even question his proposal. It was dead in the water.
Angelica Schwall-Düren, a member of the Social Democratic Party—the only party to oppose Hitler and survive the war—instead took the floor to initiate a lengthy, painstakingly detailed and bureaucratic discussion of the regulatory procedures for evaluating codified real estate management guidelines.
Six weeks passed. Bausback pressed on with trying to improve the private talks between his ministers and Cornelius’s lawyers. If he could not change the law, he reasoned, he could at least make a difference in this single instance. Clashes soon became frequent between one of the primary lawyers, Hannes Hartung, and a newer lawyer, Tido Park. While Park felt that Gurlitt should return Liebermann’s Two Riders to the Torens and Matisse’s Fan to the Rosenbergs, Hartung wanted Gurlitt to sell the paintings and give a
portion of the proceeds to the two families.56
Marianne Rosenberg adamantly opposed setting a precedent in which her family paid for artworks that had been stolen from them. “Since when do you purchase works that belong to you?” she reasoned. “The term for purchasing something that you own is called ‘ransom’ and we don’t indulge that,” she stated.57
Hartung’s attitude was cast into sharp relief when, in late March 2014, the Henie Onstad Art Center in Høvikodden, Norway, restituted Henri Matisse’s Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace to the Rosenbergs. Sonja Henie, an Olympic champion figure skater and her husband, Niels Onstad, a shipping magnate, had acquired the work in France in the 1950s, unaware that it was a looted piece. Because it was a “good-faith purchase,” the art center had the right to keep the work under Norwegian law. At first, the art center was hesitant to relinquish the crown jewel of its collection. However, Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg used the power of public pressure to urge that restituting the work was the morally correct decision. Solberg’s move succeeded, and the museum returned Woman in Blue to the family. The fact that Norway’s Woman in Blue was painted by Matisse, the same artist who created the work the Rosenberg’s were still attempting to retrieve from Germany, made the parallel particularly damning of German government inaction.
The family called on Chancellor Merkel to aid the family in the way that Prime Minister Solberg had done. Yet still Chancellor Merkel and Culture Minister Grütters declined to intervene.58
By this point, Cornelius Gurlitt’s heart was failing, and he checked into an intensive care unit before moving back to his apartment, now outfitted with a hospital bed, full-time caretakers, and a security guard. Aware that Cornelius’s death was imminent, Justice Minister Bausback knew that time was running out to secure a deal and see his artworks again before he passed away. He submitted a six-page contract to Cornelius, which the octogenarian read over the weekend of 5 April 2014. It stipulated that whoever inherited Cornelius’s art would be required to consent to a year of research by Berggreen-Merkel’s taskforce, for which the German and Bavarian taxpayers would pay.
Unlike Bausback, Cornelius knew that, once he died, his roughly 1,200 artworks would belong to Switzerland’s Kunstmuseum Bern as a result of the will he had signed in January. So why, he wondered, should he care about what might happen to works among those 1,200 or so artworks that had been looted from Jewish Europeans? Certainly, Switzerland would not care.59
Cornelius still had never used a smart phone or a computer and remained utterly baffled by the concept of the internet. Nevertheless, it was clear to him from reading print newspapers that his family name had been tarnished worldwide. His view of his father as a war hero and victim of Hitler was unwavering, and he was determined to burnish Hildebrand’s legacy as much as possible.
On 7 April, in the early afternoon, Cornelius signed the document. Within forty-eight hours, Prosecutor Nemetz’s office had released the collection, citing “fresh elements” and noting that Cornelius’s legal team should come pick the artworks up from a taxpayer-funded warehouse.60 Then, the government dropped its tax investigation.
A few weeks later, on 6 May 2014, Cornelius’s security guard stood outside his door and heard the elderly man stumble in his living room. He entered the apartment and helped him to bed. Hours later, with his guard and at least one caretaker present, Cornelius Gurlitt died in his sleep of heart failure. He was eighty-one. Klaus Fräßle, his sister Benita’s widower, arranged for him to be buried in Düsseldorf next to Hildebrand and Helene Gurlitt, whose wartime secrets he had spent his life trying to keep.
Just hours after Cornelius’s death, Matthias Frehner, director of the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland, had been sitting in a routine meeting, when his assistant interrupted to tell him that a middle-aged German man claiming to be the lawyer for Cornelius Gurlitt had called to inform Frehner that the Kunstmuseum Bern, a small institution in the sleepy Swiss capital, was the sole heir to the Gurlitt art trove. Frehner shrugged it off. The caller’s claim was so far-fetched, he reasoned, that it was patently a prank.
The next morning, Frehner, a pensive Swiss academic in his late fifties, sat at his desk next to a massive window overlooking the grassy banks of the Aare River below. The weather was getting warmer, he noted, and local teenagers soon would be frequenting the spot on the bank, flirting and drinking beer. Though Bern was the nation’s capital, the Swiss federation operated on a decentralized political system in which the different cantons, or provinces, were largely independent of each other. The museum housed mainly works by Swiss artists who, untested by war or political turmoil, largely painted banal, bucolic scenes of cows and pastures. As Frehner sipped his espresso, the phone rang. It was Christoph Edel, Cornelius Gurlitt’s lawyer, telling the director that he had indeed called the day before and that Cornelius had bequeathed roughly 1,200 artworks to the Kunstmuseum Bern. German taxpayers would pay for the taskforce’s research into the provenance of each work and return any looted pieces to the rightful heirs, if they could be located. The remainder, a collection worth at least tens of millions of euros by Europe’s great masters, would belong exclusively to the museum.
Frehner was flabbergasted. It was unclear what would happen to the works were the museum to reject the bequest. If it accepted them, however, the small and quiet institution would rocket to international fame and be permanently redefined as the home of this problematic trove. Berggreen-Merkel, head of the task force, urged Frehner to accept Cornelius’s gift. If he did not, she warned, the works likely would be dispersed among Cornelius’s distant relatives throughout Europe. The Swiss museum provided a stable location to house them, pushing them out of sight and mind for Germans uncomfortable with how botched the German government’s handling of the investigation into the Gurlitt family had been. Frehner asked his board of directors to prepare for a formal vote.
In early June, Germany’s Gurlitt taskforce officially declared Two Riders and Fan to be looted artworks that rightfully belonged to the Torens and Rosenbergs, respectively. Both families expected that now, finally, the works would be available to them immediately.
They were wrong.
Until the Kunstmuseum Bern accepted or rejected the will, the German government declared, the artworks were in limbo, held hostage in the government’s storage facility.
It took six more months after Cornelius’s death for the Kunstmuseum Bern’s board of directors to accept the collection. “If you had told us before he died, ‘Would you like to deal with the collection of some recluse whose father worked for the Nazis and have that tied to you forever?’ then we would have said ‘No way.’ But ultimately when something like this falls into your lap of course you’re going to vote to take it,” summarized one board member.61
Several weeks later, the German government finally authorized the release of Liebermann’s Two Riders on the Beach to the Torens and Woman with a Fan to the Rosenbergs.
The Rosenbergs, wealthier than the Torens, kept their Matisse. The Torens, however, decided to sell Two Riders at auction. David Toren’s brother, Peter Tarnesby, had died in 2014 as the family was still battling to recover the artwork. Had David Toren and Peter Tarnesby been the only heirs, an arrangement could possibly have been made for one of the brothers to keep the work. Now, however, Peter’s multiple relatives were coheirs to Two Riders, and with the market value especially high because of the interest surrounding the stories of the Gurlitt trove, the inheritance tax would be prohibitively high. The painting had to be sold.
The family approached Sotheby’s and Christie’s, but the former auction house gave them a better contingency rate—around 12.5 percent on the first million earned and 5 percent on profits over that. The family chose Sotheby’s, and the auction house set the sale for its London-based headquarters during the annual June auctions there.62
Under normal circumstances, there might have been time for Sotheby’s to ship Two Riders to New York, but the days between the restitution, authen
tication, and the auction were too tight. Even if the storied auction house had sent the work to Manhattan, however, it was already too late for David Toren to see the work again.
He had lost his eyesight in the time it took to locate the painting.
On 24 June 2015, shortly before 7 p.m., Peter Toren and his twenty-two-year-old son Ben took their reserved seats in the headquarters of Sotheby’s in London. Despite the depressing twists and turns of the drama surrounding the Gurlitt art trove, it was important to Peter that he represent the family there on behalf of his father, too weak by now to travel to London. Equally critical for Peter was impressing upon Ben their European and American family history.63
In a steady stream, the audience filed in, taking their seats facing the rostrum where auctioneer Henry Wyndham, a tall Englishman with an ample tuft of unruly gray hair, would oversee the sales. In over two decades at the house, Wyndham had handled masterpieces worth far more money than the Liebermann. In February 2010 he had worked the room to sell a statue by Italian sculptor Aberto Giacometti for $104 million, the auction record at the time. In December 2012 he had manned the rostrum as billionaire financier Leon Black bought Raphael’s Head of an Apostle for $47.9 million, making it the most expensive work on paper. Wyndham and the Torens knew that the Liebermann would never reach those prices, but despite the almost religious reverence the art world had for Giacometti and Raphael, the stories behind the Two Riders made the work resonate strongly with potential buyers.