Retrospective Recognition of German Jewish Artists – Local Connections

(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 70, No. 1, Pesach 2015)

 

Fame comes to some artists only after death. Van Gogh is a famous example. He only sold one painting in his lifetime. Now his works sell for millions of dollars. But what about those artists who were deprived of the opportunity to become better known, denied the opportunity to create art and, even worse, persecuted and killed because they were Jewish?

On 9 November 2010 – the anniversary of Kristallnacht – an exhibition entitled Degenerate Art in the Rubble opened in Berlin’s Neues Museum. It consisted of eleven statues unearthed a few months previously during excavations for an underground station.1 Two of the sculptors were Jewish – Naum Slutzky, who fled to London, and Otto Freundlich, who was murdered at Majdanek. How the sculptures got there, no one knows. What is known is that they were among 16000 pieces deemed ‘un-German’ and ‘degenerate’ by Joseph Goebbels when he served as Reichsministerfor Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and confiscated from public collections. Exhibitions of this “degenerate art”, known as Exhibitions of Shame, toured Germany, attracting huge audiences. It had “a cultural-political aim…to reveal the systematic attempts by Jews, those of Jewish descent and others sympathetic to Jews, to poison and destroy the German Volk… by the conscious intention of causing the ‘degeneration’ of the Germans to prepare them for chaos and Bolshevism.”2

Historians trying to identify the provenance of the eleven pieces have found documents showing that some were returned to the Nazi Propaganda Ministry in 1941. After that, the paper trail goes cold. The artworks were dug up under a building destroyed in an air raid. Several rooms on the fourth floor had been rented by Erhard Oewerdieck, a German tax lawyer, and his wife Charlotte, both of whom were, in September 1978, awarded the title “Righteous among the Nations” by Yad Vashem for hiding Jews and helping them escape.3 Did the Oewerdiecks buy the pieces to save them from destruction? 4

Seventy years later, these eleven sculptures were again on exhibition – but the aim of Degenerate Art in the Rubble was different. As a reviewer commented, “its real value is as a posthumous recognition of artists silenced in their lifetimes because they didn’t fit Hitler’s vision of art derived from classical forms.”5

Posthumous recognition is of no comfort to the dead, but it can serve as a lesson to the living regarding the enormous damage racism and antisemitism can pose to a society. Nelson Mandela believed that reconciliation meant working together to correct the legacy of past injustice and this is the intention of such forms of posthumous recognition.6 There have been a number of exhibitions in modern Germany designed to correct its legacy of past injustice by providing retrospective recognition to the gagged artists whose work had helped glorify Germany and who were so brutally repaid for their talent.

In 1933, the Nazi regime removed its Jewish citizens from all areas of cultural life. Jews, claimed Goebbels, were “not suited to be involved in the administration of German cultural assets”.The Reich’s Chamber of Culture Bill made membership of chambers necessary for following a career or profession. Jews were disqualified from membership, and thus could no longer exhibit or sell their work. Jewish art was removed from the walls of museums and galleries and valuable collections were confiscated. Jewish portraits by non-Jewish artists had the sitter’s name erased.7 Some art was confiscated for Hitler’s planned Fuhrermuseum; some were seized by high-ranking officials such as Hermann Göring while others were traded to fund Nazi activities. In 1940, Göring’s Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) was ordered to seize ‘Jewish’ art collections and other objects. “It used to be called plundering”, Göring told the Nazi Party, “It was up to the party in question to carry off what had been conquered. But today things have become more humane. In spite of that, I intend to plunder and to do it thoroughly.”8

Under the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, German Jews lost their citizenship rights and the policy of aryanisation – the expropriation into ‘Aryan’ hands of Jewish property in order to “de-Jew the economy” – was instituted. Jewish-owned assets were looted, confiscated, forcibly sold below fair market value or sold to pay for the Reichsfluchtsteuer (‘Reich Flight Tax’), the departure taxes that stripped Jews of their property before they were allowed to leave. By September 1939, this amounted to 96% of their assets, payable in cash or gold.9

Peter Moser, Austrian Ambassador to the United States, described the process with reference to looted art belonging to a Jewish family: “The property they had to leave behind or sell. The rest were confiscated. It was sheer looting and robbing. The Nazis took the paintings out of the home. They made use of the objects; they auctioned them off, whatever.”10

The extent of the robbery is beyond belief.In Poland alone it has been estimated that the Nazis looted over 516 000 individual art pieces, including 2800 paintings by European painters, 11000 by Polish painters, 1400 sculptures, 75 000 manuscripts, 25 000 maps, 90 000 books (including over 20 000 printed before 1800) and hundreds of thousands of other items of artistic and historical value.11

Most countries have made little progress toward returning stolen cultural items to their rightful owners. A survey of 50 countries by the Conference for Material Claims Against Germany and the World Jewish Restitution Organization revealed that two-thirds of the nations that had endorsed agreements regarding research, publicity and claims for Nazi-era looted art had done little to implement those pacts – 44 were signatories of the 1998 Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, 47 endorsed the 2009 Terezin Declaration and all 50 were signatories to the Code of Ethics for Museums of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), which requires museums to establish the full provenance of items in their collections. Few have implemented this Code.12

Modern Germany has rejected its Nazi past and embarked on acts of commemoration and memorialisation, not only focussing on the killing fields and extermination camps, but also on the lives of individual victims. In a book published in Germany thirty years after the Holocaust, Bernt Engelmann detailed how, once cleansed of Jewish influence by Nazi antisemitism, German culture was shattered. “Instead, an indefinable loss has set in… how could such a loss ever be measured?”

As regards Jewish artists, he writes that “the attempt to measure the loss the world – or even Germany alone – has suffered… is bound to fail. It is even more impossible to evaluate accurately the loss from works that were never produced or to capture it in percentages or pin it down to particular countries… The loss is immeasurable and what has been lost can never be replaced.”13

Recognising its cultural losses caused through the loss of its Jewish artists, Germany has taken steps to honour some posthumously by holding retrospective exhibitions or by dedicating museums to their works.

This article will look at some South African connections to posthumous recognition and to ill-gotten possession.

Herman Hirsch

Some time ago, the SA Jewish Board of Deputies (Cape Council) received a request from the Göttingen Städtisches Museum for copies of paintings it owned. The Museum was planning a commemorative exhibition of the work of Hermann Hirsch (1861-1934). Its website explained that this would be “the first such event to be held in Germany in appreciation of this versatile and unjustly forgotten artist and it might at the same time be seen as an attempt to make good in some small way for the injustices he and his work were subjected to in Germany.”14

After paying a wealth tax, German Jewish immigrants to South Africa were allowed to leave with ten Reichmarks each, and some personal possessions. Some arrived with paintings that had been in the family for generations and some of these, years later, were donated to the Jewish Museum in Cape Town. When it was superseded by the South African Jewish Museum, these paintings passed into the possession of the Board as trustees of the former Museum. Among them were three paintings by Hermann Hirsch belonging to his niece Hilda Jeidel.15 A painter and sculptor, Hirsch had studied at the Academies of Fine Art in Berlin and Düsseldorf. He was a member of the Society of Berlin Artists and lived in the Rhineland, Italy and Greece before settling, in 1918, in Bremke, ten kilometres from Göttingen and joining the university-affiliated Association of Göttingen Friends of the Arts, which held regular exhibitions. One contemporary review stated that his work stood out among others, gaining the highest praise and that Göttingen could be proud to have such an outstanding artist.16

From 1933, the situation for Jews deteriorated dramatically. Although Hirsch had been prominent, people did not dare visit him and he could not sell his work. His niece, Sabine, recalled that he was threatened at home; young Nazi thugs roved around his house, throwing stones and calling him ‘Jew’.17 He moved to Göttingen, becoming a boarder. The Jeidels told the Jewish Museum that their uncle committed suicide after the Gestapo entered his studio and destroyed his work.

The Göttingen newspapers printed long obituaries attributing his death to Hirsch having “broken under the hardship of fate.”18Göttinger Zeitung editor Dr Wilhelm Lange wrote, “His work lives on and with it the memory of a great artist, a good German and a genuine Mentsch.”19

Although the intention of the museum was “to announce the re-discovery of the regionally significant painter”, a certain amount of whitewashing seems to have taken place. The exhibition catalogue merely states that “up until today it is not verified whether Hirsch died as a result of national socialist maltreatment, suicide or illness”. Certainly the sum of 10 RM that the Göttingen Städtisches Museum outlaid did not represent a fair payment for the sixty Hirsch items it bought at the October 1941 auction of the “Jewish relocation assets” to pay the Reichsfluchtsteuer. It was a willing participation in the looting of Jewish possessions. Their purchase must have been pre-arranged as the sale was registered before the auction date. Nor has the museum retained any correspondence about this purchase recorded as numbers 12076-12083 in the Entry (Accessions) book 1922-1950.

Hirsch’s house was sold for 5265 RM; once the Jewish wealth tax was deducted, his main heir, niece Marie Günther, was left with 39.53 RM.20 Although the British Military decreed that the Nazi aryanisation policy amounted to robbery, as Marie did not claim restitution for the auction,21 the Museum has retained ownership and was able to mount this posthumous exhibition. As required by the ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums, it has established the full provenance of the Hirsch items in its collection and publicised its findings in its illustrated catalogue. However, no claims process has been instituted to compensate his family adequately for his suffering or for the depressed prices at which the Museum obtained his work – ten items per Reichsmark.

The Cape SAJBD 22 arranged for the works to be photographed professionally and they subsequently appeared in colour in the excellent Göttingen Städtisches Museum catalogue, Hermann Hirsch: A Jewish Artist in Gottingen (1861-1934).23

The museum website mentioned that the focus of the exhibition was not solely on Hermann Hirsch the artist. It also documented his life as a Jew in the Germany of the 1920s and 30s until his death on 1 March 1934 and the subsequent fate of his works, “a history in which loss, emigration and ‘Aryanisation’ are prominent elements…His death after one year of National Socialist rule, coupled with the fortunate emigration of almost all his Jewish relatives, caused the painter to be almost completely forgotten in Göttingen and over the whole of Germany.”

The word ‘fortunate’ is insensitive in this context. Emigration in this case involved the confiscation of Hirsch’s relatives’ assets – the only fortunate part was that leaving saved their lives. Also, the implication that Hirsch would not have been forgotten had his death occurred after several years of Nazi rule is ludicrous. The catalogue introduction presents an additional explanation why he was forgotten – “the majority of his works is in the ownership of members of his family” – ignoring the sixty works bought by the Museum at the auction. The Museum retains ownership and the exhibition enhances their value.

Nit-picking aside, the fact remains that eighty years after Hirsch’s death, the town where he lived and died has given him posthumous recognition. The Bremke Historical Society has erected a plaque at his house stating that the Jewish artist Hermann Hirsch lived there from 1918 – 1933.24

Max Liebermann Last year, the Cape SAJBD received a request for assistance in lodging a claim for compensation for a house in Berlin belonging to the claimant’s grandfather. Susan Liebermann had been invited to visit Berlin, where a memorial was to be erected at the site of the house, subsequently bombed. Unfortunately, as the property was in West Berlin, it was no longer possible to obtain compensation.25

The house belonged to Georg Liebermann, brother to the artist Max (1847 –1935). His house at 4 Tiergartenstrasse was inherited by his son Hans, a Professor of Chemistry. When the Nazis came to power Susan’s father, his son Heinrich, managed to immigrate to South Africa. Hans committed suicide shortly before Kristallnacht, hoping his death would save his non-Jewish wife and two younger sons.26His widow had to relinquish the house, which was rented to the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil- und Anstaltspflege (literally, “Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care”) as its headquarters and she had the humiliation of having to go to collect the minimal rent when they were willing to pay.27

This “charitable foundation” was dedicated to killing those Hitler deemed “unworthy of life”. It was run by Hitler’s personal doctor, Dr. Karl Brandt, and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, head of Hitler’s private chancellery. This meant that from Susan Liebermann’s grandfather’s former house, the T4 euthanasia program – named from the address of the Liebermann house – was run. Working in the house, a team of doctors, who presumably had all sworn to fulfill the Hippocratic Oath, arranged for six gassing installations to be set up at psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria to kill the elderly, the incurably ill and the physically and mentally disabled. The program – which gassed 70 273 people, with others killed by injection and starvation – ran officially from September 1939 to August 1941. It is estimated that in all its stages probably 200 000 people were killed. The technology gained by this undertaking was later used in mobile death vans and extermination camps.28Few of the people involved in executing the program were punished afterwards.29

Susan Liebermann and her sister, Gillian Cobley from Canada, attended the ceremony on the site of their family’s house – now the Berlin Philharmonic – where a 79-foot blue glass wall memorial was erected dedicated to those killed through the T4 program. The memorial includes audio and video information on the Nazi euthanasia program and its victims. A plaque commemorating the victims has been placed in the pavement where the Liebermann House had stood to mark the location and historical significance of the site.30 However, no recognition was given at the ceremony to the fact that the T4 house had been taken from the Liebermanns – an indication to Susan that further aryanisation was still being perpetrated.

Max Liebermann had lived from 1892 in another house, inherited from their father, on Pariser Platz near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. He also built a summer cottage in Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin in 1910, painting 200 pictures of his garden there.

39 It is estimated that in all its stages probably 200 000 people were killed. The technology gained by this undertaking was later used in mobile death vans and extermination camps.28Few of the people involved in executing the program were punished afterwards.29Susan Liebermann and her sister, Gillian Cobley from Canada, attended the ceremony on the site of their family’s house – now the Berlin Philharmonic – where a 79-foot blue glass wall memorial was erected dedicated to those killed through the T4 program. The memorial includes audio and video information on the Nazi euthanasia program and its victims. A plaque commemorating the victims has been placed in the pavement where the Liebermann House had stood to mark the location and historical significance of the site.30 However, no recognition was given at the ceremony to the fact that the T4 house had been taken from the Liebermanns – an indication to Susan that further aryanisation was still being perpetrated. Max Liebermann had lived from 1892 in another house, inherited from their father, on Pariser Platz near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. He also built a summer cottage in Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin in 1910, painting 200 pictures of his garden there.Liebermann was one of the foremost German impressionists. He was the leader of the Berlin Secession, an avant-garde movement advocating for separation of art and politics. In 1897, he was appointed Professor at the Royal Academy of Arts at Berlin. In 1898 he was appointed President of the Berlin Secession.31 He was elected President of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1920 and, on his 80th birthday in 1927, was celebrated with a large exhibition, declared an honorary citizen of Berlin and hailed in cover stories in Berlin’s leading art magazines.

With Hitler’s accession to power, Jews were prohibited from holding any cultural posts, and Liebermann resigned as President of the Prussian Academy to avoid the humiliation of being forced to do so. He died in 1935, isolated and embittered. Unlike Hirsch, who received a long obituary in the Göttinger Zeitung in 1934, his death was not reported in the Nazi-controlled media and no one from the Academy of Fine Arts, or the city of Berlin, was allowed to attend his funeral. Despite official Gestapo restrictions on attendance, Heinrich Liebermann told Susan that he had gone together with his family.

Max’s widow, Martha, inherited his estate but because of aryanisation, was forced to sell the houses and relinquish her assets. Impoverished by these demands, she sold artworks to pay the rent and buy food and medicine. On 5 March 1943, the Gestapo arrived to take her to Terezin. Aged 85 and bedridden after a stroke, she took poison like her nephew Hans.32The Gestapo seized the remaining art works in her apartment.

Outside their house, there is now a stolperstein (stumbling block),33 but the couple’s great-granddaughters are still struggling to obtain two confiscated drawings from his collection now in the Berlin Kupferstichkabinet.34 Another stolpersteinhonouring Prof Hans Heinrich Liebermann is situated outside his house in Wilmersdorf.

As for the summer house with its beautiful garden on Lake Wannsee, the Max Liebermann Society has restored it and the Liebermann Villa is now a museum housing his work. The history of the Liebermann family and the house are documented with a multimedia installation, including documents, photographs, sound recordings and films, recording such details as how Martha was forced to sell the villa at a highly undervalued price which she did not even receive.35 Susan and Gillian donated a painting of Max and Georg Liebermann’s father, Louis, done in 1870, to the Villa.36

Hanns Ludwig Katz

Hanns Ludwig Katz (1892-1940) studied art in Paris, Karlsruhe, Heidelberg, Berlin and Munich, becoming known as a painter of portraits, cityscapes, and still lifes that revealed the influence of Max Beckmann and the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement. Although his mother was not Jewish, Nazis identified anyone with one non-Aryan grandparent as a Jew.37 No longer able to sell his works, Katz involved himself in theCultural Association of German Jews, which had been set up to provide opportunities for the expelled Jewish artists. In a speech at its inaugural meeting in 1933, writer and theatre critic Julius Bab stated, “Hundreds of German artists, actors, musicians and intellectuals in various fields… have been deprived of their fields of activity because they are of Jewish descent. These people, most of who are inextricably bound to their professions, have no possibility of switching to another occupation. The situation is becoming increasingly desperate.” 38

Katz, an expressionist painter, started a house painting and decoration business, which went bankrupt. He immigrated to South Africa in 1936, on the Stuttgart, sharing a house in Johannesburg with fellow refugee Hans Wongtschowsky. In 1938, one of his portraits was denounced in Germany’s Degenerate Art exhibition. Sadly, in the ultra-conservative South African society, his work was also too avant-garde to be popular.39 His family offered one of his paintings, The Eye Operation, to the Witwatersrand University as a gift. It was declined. He tried to support himself as a house painter and decorator before his death from cancer in 1940. Posthumously, some of his paintings were shown for the first time at local Jewish art exhibition organised by the Jewish Board of Deputies and the Johannesburg Women’s Zionist League.40

Hans Wongtschowsky sent slides of Katz’s paintings to a relative in Germany, who showed them to Henri Nannen, whose foundation had endowed a new Kunsthalle in Emden. Nannen contacted the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, which owned a few charcoal drawings by Katz. Intensive research into the work and life of the forgotten artist culminated in a major 1992 retrospective exhibition, Hanns Ludwig Katz 1892-1940 in the Frankfurt Jewish Museum and then in the Emden Kunsthalle under the auspices of the Henri Nannen Foundation.41 Two years later, the exhibition was brought to the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, where it was shown from November 1993 to the end of February 1994. The catalogue contains full details of the impact of antisemitism and the restrictions on Jewish artists in Germany, in addition to Katz’s life story. Thus, after forty years, Hanns Ludwig Katz received the posthumous recognition his genius deserved, both in Germany and Cape Town.

As for The Eye Operation, it is now in Emden, Germany.

Terezín children’s art (1942-1944)

One of the first travelling exhibitions to visit the Cape Town Holocaust Centre was an exhibition under the auspices of the Czech Embassy displaying art drawn by children interned in Terezin. Called The Children’s Story: drawings from Terezin 1942-1944, it featured reproductions sent from the Prague Jewish Museum. Here again is an exhibition giving posthumous recognition to the child artists, most of who did not survive.

Terezin was an unusual camp because it included many scholars, artists and writers who organised intensive cultural activities – orchestras, opera, theatre, light entertainment and satire, lectures, study groups and a library. Among these activities was a clandestine education programme for children, including art classes which functioned as therapy. These were taught by former Bauhaus lecturer Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, whose goal was “to rouse the desire towards creative work”. Drawing on scraps of paper and the backs of official forms, the children drew the camp life they saw around them as well as happier memories of home.

Before she was deported to Auschwitzand her death in Birkenau, Dicker-Brandeis filled two suitcases with about 4500 children’s drawings and hid them. Immediately after the war, they were recovered and handed over to the Jewish Museum in Prague, where they are on permanent display in the Pinkas Synagogue.

Opening the exhibition, Education Minister Naledi Pandor said, “We must ensure that as many South Africans as possible, especially children, get to see the drawings …We must ensure that every child who passes through our education system has an understanding, not only of our apartheid past, but also of the Holocaust and its universal message.”

Copies of 100 drawings have been donated to the Holocaust Centre which has loaned them to other centres including Worcester, Johannesburg, Durban and Margate.

Of the 15 000 children held in Terezin only 100 survived and, in most cases, these pictures are all that is left to commemorate their lives. Without them their names would remain forgotten. These exhibitions and books on their art act as a posthumous memorial.

Felix Nussbaum (1904-1944).

In 2005, Cape Town’s Jacob Gitlin Library was given a large lavishly illustrated book called Felix Nussbaum: Art defamed, Art in exile, Art in resistance. On the title page was the following inscription:

Dear Reader

A friendship between a German, who grew up in Osnabrück (Nussbaum’s birthplace) and a Jewish Capetonian has resulted in my wife and I visiting the (Gitlin) in Cape Town and our friends visiting the Nussbaum Museum in Osnabrück. This book is a gift by my wife and myself and we trust that the book will contribute to the building of bridges between not only our towns, but also people of different languages, cultures and religions.

Bernd and Gudrun Oevermann, Osnabrück, 30 June, 2005

Bernd Oevermann had been transferred for three years by his Osnabrück company to its Cape Town branch. There he met and befriended Terence Matzdorff, an attorney whose father had come to South Africa as a refugee from Germany. Visiting Europe some years later, Terence made a detour to Osnabrück to visit Bernd, who took him to see the Felix Nussbaum Haus.

“I had never heard of Nussbaum, but the impact of his art hit me in the gut”, Terence told this author. He was determined to bring attention to this artist who, knowing his likely fate, had said, “If I go down, do not let my paintings die.”42

Oevermann visited Terence in Cape Town, taking with him the above-mentioned book about Nussbaum. Together, they tried to arrange an exhibition of Nussbaum’s work in Cape Town, but there were too many difficulties.

Oevermann inscribed a copy to Terence: “We are the living examples that Germans and South Africans, Christians and Jews, can build up and maintain friendship over many years and thousands of kilometers with trust, humor (sic) and in harmony.” He has since given the Gitlin Library a number of other books on Felix Nussbaum and the Cape Town Holocaust Centre printed a lecture on Nussbaum by its director, Dr Ute Ben Yosef.

Born in Osnabrück, Felix Nussbaum studied art in Berlin and won a prize to study in Italy. In 1935, after the passing of the Nuremberg Laws, he and his wife moved to Belgium where, as an act of resistance, he painted pictures reflecting the Nazi persecution. These works reflect the vulnerability of exiles, of homelessness, isolation and an ensuing pessimism which slowly developed into a certainty of death. Arrested as a foreigner, he was sent him to the Saint-Cyprien camp in 1940. He managed to escape and return to Brussels, where he and his wife went into hiding.

The only art review of his time in hiding writes of his plight with understanding. “There is an art that remains unknown. … It does not sell, it is pushed off the streets and dwells in attics, shivering with cold and hunger. It is the art of the exiles, the homeless, and the German and Austrian refugees who earn their daily bread, God knows how or where.”43

Denounced in 1944, Nussbaum and his wife were forced to board the last transport to Auschwitz and death.

In 1970 two elderly Israelis clutching an old suitcase containing a number of moldy damaged paintings visited the curator of the Osnabrück Cultural History Museum.. They told him they had just come from Belgium where, with great difficulty, they had reclaimed the paintings of a relative who had been murdered in Auschwitz. His dentist, Dr Grosfils, had stored them in his basement and refused to hand them over until, after years of court proceedings, the Belgium court ordered him to do so.

One look at the paintings convinced the curator of their value and he had them restored. However, he was unable to find any reference to Nussbaum in his birthplace, so successfully had evidence of Jewish contributions to German culture been eradicated. Nor were there references to Nussbaum in books of modern art or works on 20th Century Jewish art published after World War II. As Felix Nussbaum had vanished from the records, the curator advertised in the Osnabrück newspapers and gradually information, and other paintings, came to light.

Today, Osnabrück has a magnificent art gallery, the Felix Nussbaum House (the “Museum without exit”) devoted to Nussbaum’s memory.44 It was designed by Daniel Libeskind, architect of the Berlin Jewish Museum.

At its first major retrospective of Nussbaum’s art as long ago as 1971, Mayor Willy Kelch called the exhibition a “contribution towards reparation of the injustice which Jewish citizens in Osnabrück and all over Germany suffered in the name of an inhuman ideology.”45 The decision for the small city to build an expensive museum to hold Nussbaum’s oeuvre was taken by the city in order “to show that Osnabrück, which had refused to house the Jewish painter after 1933, was taking responsibility for its past. What had been done was to be made known and the tragic paintings of Nussbaum are suffering and death placed in the historical context of the persecution and murder of the Jews in Nazi Germany.”46

Today, Nussbaum’s paintings portraying the life of these exiles are on permanent display in Osnabrück’s Felix Nussbaum Haus. Osnabrück has thus taken responsibility for the horrific treatment of its Jewish citizens, carried out with the connivance, active or passive, of the German people, and lets the power of the paintings serve as a reminder of what had happened.

Looted art

What about the morality of the forced sales during the Nazi eras where paintings were stolen or sold on auction for a fraction of their value? The Göttingen Museum and the Liebermann works and homes are examples. What about the museums and galleries who benefitted from the acquisition of these artworks? Most are reluctant to return their ill-gotten treasures to the families of the original owners.

Rabbi van de Kamp, Belgian chair of the Jewish Inheritance Commission, claimed to know of hundreds of cases like that of Felix Nussbaum, whereby Jews about to be deported (fearing the worst but hoping to survive) left their works for safekeeping with friends or neighbors who, like Dr Grosfils, subsequently refused to return them to their heirs. For moral reasons, Rabbi van de Kamp felt that auctioneers should refuse to sell the works.

In August 2014 the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, agreed to return a Van Gogh painting it had acquired in 1940, Head of a Man, to two elderly sisters in Johannesburg. The Gallery agreed that the sisters were the sole heirs of the owner, German-Jewish industrialist Richard Semmel, whose auctioning of his painting in 1933 should be regarded as involuntary. As signatories to the Washington conference referred to above, it believed it was “appropriate to restitute the painting” to them.47

How innocent is South Africa in this? Looted items found their way into the country Africa through being brought in by their Nazi owners, who were shielded by the apartheid government with its many Nazi supporters. (Dr DF Malan once said, ‘We are not race-haters, but anti-Semites. We shall follow the same course as Germany, Austria and Italy, and we shall deal with the Jews in South Africa as the above-mentioned countries.”48)

South Africa possesses objects of dubious provenance. Pretoria University owns an extremely valuable collection of art given to them by Jacob van Tilburg, sentenced in Holland for collaborating with the Nazis. The Dutch Resistance claimed that his collection had been improperly received for safe keeping from Jews fleeing Nazi persecution and he admitted keeping pieces for Jews who never returned. It is alleged that van Tilburg was connected to a collaborator who promised to transport Jews to Vichy France in return for money, but handed them over to the Gestapo instead. The University accepted the gift, claiming it had cleared van Tilburg. It refused to reveal the evidence it found to do so. Since 1977, the Dutch Jewish community has been asking for its return. Pretoria University was only prepared to return individual pieces in the (unlikely) circumstances that the heirs could produce documentary proof of ownership. Considering how few Dutch Jews survived, the Dutch community’s Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp regarded this as unacceptable.

“But more importantly,” said Rabbi Soetendorp, “There is a body of evidence to show that Van Tilburg had stolen much of this collection, and bought the rest with money stolen from Jewish refugees.” Rabbi Soetendorp believed that on moral grounds the university should not display the collection.

The Ronald Lauder Commission for Art Recovery and the SA Jewish Board of Deputies tried to negotiate, but the best that could be achieved was that the university promised to circulate a pamphlet explaining the dubious origins of the collection.49 However, although the University of Pretoria website contains extensive information on the Van Tilburg collection, nowhere does this information appear.50

The University of Johannesburg owns a collection of 8000 books willed to them by a convicted war criminal, UNISA Professor HJ De Vleeschauwer, who brought the books with him from Switzerland, to where he had fled to avoid arrest after the war. In 1940, he was appointed to Göring’s ERR book selection commission with a “special responsibility for philosophy books.” He had also stolen books from the University in Belgium while on its staff.51 A striking feature of his collection is the mysterious removal, by cutting or erasure, of ownership markings and names in many of the books.

The American Alliance of Museums stipulates that “Acting ethically is different from acting lawfully” and that museums and custodians should “take affirmative steps to maintain their integrity so as to warrant public confidence. They must act not only legally but also ethically.”52 Unlike the German cities dealt with above, or the National Gallery of Victoria, neither South African university has taken steps to restore these looted possessions or acknowledge that there is anything amoral or unethical in holding treasures stolen from murdered Jews.

Germany is confronting its past. It is this recognition of past guilt that enables true reconciliation to take place. “If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth.”53 This should apply as much to our academic institutions.

 

Gwynne Schrire is Deputy Director of the Cape Council of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies. She is a regular contributor and a member of the Editorial Board of Jewish Affairs and has written, co-written and edited various books on aspects of local Jewish and Cape Town history.

 

NOTES

1. Among the sculptures are Otto Baum’s 1930 work “StandingGirl,” Otto Freundlich’s 1925 “Head,” Knappe’s “Hagar,” Naum Slutzky’s “Female Bust,” Scharff’s “Portrait of the Actress Anni Mewes,” Gustav Heinrich Wolff’s “Standing Figure,” Emy Roeder’s terracotta sculpture “Pregnant Woman,” and Moll’s “Dancer.” Several featured in the Nazis’ “Degenerate Art” exhibition. Three sculptures have yet to be identified. www.bloomberg.com/…/-degenerate-sculptures-unearthed-from-bomb-r…Catherine Hickley.” Degenerate’ Art Unearthed From Berlin Bomb Rubble “Nov 8, 2010 Bloomberg
2. H. Proud and W. Snyman, in Hanns Ludwig Katz, SA National Gallery, Cape Town, 1993, p47.
3. Erhard Oewerdieck and his wife Charlotte (née Porath) sheltered a Jewish office employee, Martin Lange, during the war in their home in Berlin-Neukölln. The entire time they shared their food and clothing with him as well. The risk and burden they assumed were all the greater since Oewerdieck, a sworn enemy of the Nazi system, was barred during the entire period from his job as auditor and tax consultant on account of “political unreliability.” In 1939, Oewerdieck did not hesitate to spend his own money in order to finance the journey to Shanghai of … [Show more]Arno Lachmann, his wife, and aged father, thus saving their lives. Oewerdieck was also instrumental in making possible the last-minute emigration to the United States, in March 1941, of the famous Jewish scholars Eugen Taeubler and Selma Taeubler-Stern, for whom he also kept a part of their library and personal papers. Family Details – The Righteous Among The Nations – db.yadvashem.org/righteous/family.html?language=en&itemId
4. Charles Hawley, ‘Buried in a Bombed-Out Cellar: Nazi Degenerate Art Rediscovered in Berlin’, spiegel on line Buried in a Bombed-Out Cellar: Nazi Degenerate Art …www.spiegel.de › English Site › Zeitgeist › Art Nov 8, 2010.
5. Karen Egebo, The art that was forbidden – EXBERLINER.com Dec 6, 2010, www.exberliner.com/culture/art/the-art-that-was-forbidden
6. Mandela, Nelson, 6.12.1995.
7. For example, Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was exhibited in Vienna’s Belvedere Gallery as Portrait of a Lady with Gold Background; O’Connor, Anne-Marie, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, Alfred Knopf, New York, 2013, p179.
8. O’Connor, Anne-Marie, op cit, p175.
9. http://alphahistory.com/holocaust/jewish-property-seizures/#sthash.5fxSizqz.dpuf.
10. Interview 2001, in O’Connor, Anne-Marie, op cit, p242.
11. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_plunder
12. The Claims Conference/ World Jewish RestitutionOrganization presented its findings on 11 September at the Museum & Politics Conference hosted by ICOM-Germany, ICOM-Russia, and ICOM-United States , St. Petersburg, Russia, in conjunction with the 250th anniversary of the Hermitage Museum Claims Conference notice, 10 September, 2014.
13. Engelmann, Bernt, Germany Without Jews, Bantam Books, Toronto, 1984, first printed in Germany in 1979, pp40, 282.
14. Hermann Hirsch – Städtisches Museum Göttingen, translatedby Dr Ute Ben Yosef, www.museum.goettingen.de/texte/sonderausstellung_hirsch_englisch.htm
15. A self-portrait, a portrait of her mother Betty and a portrait of a friend’s daughter.
16. Hermann Hirsch (1861-1934), A Jewish Painter in Göttingen, Civic Museum Göttingen, Exhibition catalogue, 20. 8. 2009 – 10. 1. 2010, p20.
17. Driever, Rainer, Hermann Hirsch (1861-1934), Ein Júdischer Maler in Gõttingen, p21.
18. Schlapeit-Beck Dagmar, Preface: Hermann Hirsch (1861-1934),Ein Júdischer Maler in Gõttingen.
19. 2. 3. 1934
20. Schlapeit-Beck Dagmar, p25.
21. Marie Günther reported the sale of the house at the Central Registration Office in Bad Nenndorf. On 12 February 1949 the Central Claims Registry/Property Control blocked the planned re-purchase of the property by Frieda Bunnenberg.
22. It took some detective work for the Göttingen Museum researcher to track the work to the Jewish Board of Deputies. The self-portrait, which was in storage after the closure of the original Jewish Museum, had been given on request to a niece. She had passed away and willed it to a nephew in Zeekoevlei, Cape Town, who directed the researcher to the Board.
23. Driever, Rainer, Hermann Hirsch ( 1861-1934) : Werkverzeichnis, Niedersåchsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur, Göttingen, 2010, pp20 &74.
24. On 19 August 2010. Driever, Rainer,, op cit. p178.
25. With thanks to Susan Liebermann for generously sharing information, 23.11.2014.
26. Regarded as Mischlings, the two sons were conscripted for forced labour but survived the war. All three sons became doctors.
27. Gillian Cobley was told this by her cousin. By e-mail, 24,11,2014, Susan Liebermann.
28. Action T4 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_T4; Euthanasia Program – United States Holocaust Memorial …www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?ModuleId=10005200
29. JTA 3.9.2014.
30. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_T4#cite_note-10.
31. Liebermann-Villa on Lake Wannsee – Max Liebermann.www.liebermann-villa.de/en/biografie-max-liebermann.html, translated by U Ben Yosef
32. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Liebermann#cite_note-faz-stolper-16
33. These are cobble-stone sized brass plaques in the name of victims who had lived there www.stolpersteine-berlin.de/de/biografie/4854
34. Hickley, Catherine, Jewish Artist’s Heirs Pressure Museums on Nazi-Era Losses 11.9.2012, www.bloomberg.com/…/jewish-artist-s-heirs-pressure-german-museums-
35. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebermann_Villa
36. The director showed Susan and Gillian the painting wrapped in tissue paper – it is displayed for three months a year as it is too valuable to be placed on permanent display. Susan Liebermann, 23.11.2014.
37. H Proud and W. Snyman, pp 14-15.
38. Ibid, p41.
39. H. Jeppe, South African Artists 1900-1962, Afrikaanse Pers-Boekhandel, Johannesburg, 1963, p46.
40. Sachs, Joseph, ‘Hans Katz’, in Jewish Affairs, September 1947.
41. Kraftgenie, 24.6.2010 – Weimar: Hanns Ludwig Katz, weimarart.blogspot.com/2010/06/hanns-ludwig-katz.html.
42. Terence Matzdorff, interview, 6.7.2014.
43. Quoted in Ben Yosef, ‘The Life and World of Felix Nussbaum( 1904-1944)’, Cape Town Holocaust Centre and Jacob Library, 2010, p24.
44. Ibid, pp2-3
45. Kaster, Karl Georg, op cit, p19.
46. Osnabruck Mayor Hans-Jurgen Flip, in Kaster, op cit., p5.
47. Govender, S, ‘Joburg sisters win battle for looted Nazi artwork’, Sunday Times, 3.8.2014.
48. Berger, N, In those days, in these times, spotlighting events in Jewry – South African and General, (Johannesburg, 1979), p53.
49. Many parties were involved: the SA Jewish Board of Deputies;Deputy Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology Brigitte Mbandla; the board of UP; the SA ambassador to the Netherlands, Carl Niehaus; the Dutch embassy in Pretoria; Dutch Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp; and the former minister of culture in the Netherlands, Aad Nuis. Bart Luirink. ‘Jacob van Tilburg loses his head’, Mail & Guardian, 6 Oct 1998.
50. JA van Tilburg (1888-1980) > University of Pretoria web.up.ac.za › … › Van Tilburg Collection › JA van Tilburg (1888-1980).
51. Dick, Archie Scholarship, Identity and Lies: The Political Life of H.J. De Vleeschauwer, 1940-1955. Periodical: Kleio. Volume: 342002. pp5-27 ;Archie L Dick, The Hidden History of South Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures, University of KwaZulu Natal, 2013.
52. Gideon Taylor Op-Ed: ‘U.S. museums must deal fairly with Nazi-looted art claims’, JTA, 1.12.2014.
53. Tyson, Timothy B, American historian, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story.