The Nazis looted my family’s art – here’s how we might get it back
Gabrielle Schwarz on the hunt for the countless works the Third Reich stole from their Jewish owners
Afew years ago, when on holiday in Salzburg, I went in search for the brass plaque, or Stolperstein (“stumbling stone”), which had been laid in the ground to commemorate the life of my paternal great-grandfather, Walter Schwarz. A Jewish department store owner, he also set up a gallery in the city in 1919, dealing in the work of Austrian modern artists. His death in the Gestapo headquarters in Munich 20 years later was recorded, possibly falsely, as a suicide. By then, like so many others, he had been forced to turn over his businesses and property – the “Aryanisation” programme that the Nazis undertook from 1933 until the end of the Third Reich.
After the war, some efforts were made to return this property to Jewish families or offer financial compensation for what had been lost. This included the estimated 650,000 artworks which the Nazis had stolen, either through forced sales or direct seizure. Occasionally these would surface: in the early 1980s, a group of Expressionist works labelled as belonging to my great-grandfather were found in a gallery storeroom and returned to his son. But, without a well-coordinated restitution effort, much else remained missing.
The Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, drawn up at a conference in 1998 and attended by representatives of 44 countries, were supposed to fix this – “to complete by the end of the century the unfinished business of the middle of the century”, as Stuart Eizenstat, the lawyer who organised the conference, said in his concluding statement. These principles, which included calls for the creation of national claims processes and a central registry of missing works, were designed to make it easier for heirs to identify and reclaim their families’ stolen art.
One international organisation that emerged in the wake of the Washington Principles is the Commission for Looted Art in Europe (CLAE). Among its first activities was the creation of a freely accessible online central registry, but the London-based non-profit continues to assist in the research, identification and recovery of Nazi-confiscated material all around the world. Although an important step, the Washington Principles are nonbinding, and many countries have been accused of implementing them inadequately. They also only apply to works found in public collections.
The CLAE is looking for several thousands of works at any one time. Some come with extensive documentation of their journeys, while others have little more than the title and the name of the artist to go on.
The CLAE’s latest success story is illustrative of some of the obstacles to restitution efforts that have persisted since 1998. Earlier this year, it was announced that an important lost work of the Polish avant-garde had been recovered: a 12-minute experimental Futurist film titled Europa, created by the artist couple Stefan and Franciszka Themerson in Warsaw in 1931–32.
The Polish-Jewish couple both died in 1988, believing that Europa was lost for ever. They had deposited it, along with four other works, in a film lab in Paris before enlisting to fight alongside the Allies during the war; when they returned, the lab’s owner informed them that the five works had been seized by the Nazis and probably destroyed. One film later surfaced in the Soviet Union but the others remained missing – until two years ago, when the Themersons’ niece, Jasia Reichardt, received a tip-off from the Polish government’s Pilecki Institute. A researcher had found a reference to Europa in an index in a printed catalogue, indicating that it was held in the Bundesarchiv in Berlin.
The CLAE was drafted in, beginning a correspondence with the Bundesarchiv: establishing exactly what the film in its collection was, how it had got there, and what to do about it. It took extensive research to confirm that the copy of Europa in the Bundesarchiv was indeed the cellulose nitrate version deposited in the lab in Paris – including a lengthy back-andforth with the archives, who did not have a record of it in their online database.
Despite this, Anne Webber of the CLAE explains, “anything that is in a public collection in Germany that could be problematic is supposed to be recorded and listed on a government website. And yet there are still thousands of looted works of art, not just in Germany but also elsewhere, only a fraction of which have been published. Europa was not one of them.”
The Bundesarchiv agreed to return Europa to the Themerson Estate, and the family donated the original copy to the British Film Institute in London. A happy if belated ending, then – but things aren’t always so easy.
One problem, as Webber tells me, is the inadequacy – or more frequently, total absence – of national claims processes for heirs seeking the return of works that have been identified in public collections. Since Washington, only five countries, including the UK, have set up such processes. Many more, including Poland, Spain and Switzerland, have not. (The Kunstmuseum Bern recently decided to return a number of works with murky provenance from its controversial Gurlitt bequest, but this was entirely at the Swiss museum’s discretion.)
There is also the issue of Naziconfiscated material that appears in private collections. In any claim, as Webber explains, whether an artwork is returned “depends on the accident of where a looted work of art is found”. The big auction houses such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s are pretty good on this, with dedicated restitution departments that research the provenance of works before consignment. This isn’t necessarily bad for business: witness, for example, the deal brokered by Christie’s New York of a Van Gogh watercolour, which sold last month for $35.9million, a
For many, this stirs up painful issues about what happened to their families
record for a watercolour by the artist. The proceeds were split by the estate of its most recent owner and the two Jewish families who had owned the work before it was looted.
Where cases are disputed, claimants in the United States can go to court, but this is not an option in most countries. Nonetheless the CLAE, Webber says, “are great believers in doing everything amicably and by negotiation”. Unlike with the Van Gogh or Europa, most of these cases are negotiated privately and go unreported: “For many people, this stirs up a lot of complicated and painful issues about what happened to their families, and so they prefer to have no publicity about the restitutions.”
It would be impossible to say how many works remain unrestituted, but a few years ago Webber conducted an informal survey. She asked other experts working on restitution of Nazi-looted art what percentage of the pieces they were looking for had been found. “It was an average of about seven or eight per cent.”
Webber asks me whether I’m sure all the artworks owned by my great-grandfather have been recovered. Truthfully, I have no idea. But I do know that the works returned in the 1980s were then sold, for not an insubstantial amount of money, which was placed in some dodgy stocks and quickly lost. Webber’s interest has been piqued; she makes a note of my greatgrandfather’s name so she can do some of her own research. Who knows what might surface?