AN AFFRONT TO MEMORY

The sudden cancellation by the city museum in Düsseldorf of a planned exhibition on Max Stern’s life and work is disturbing and disappointing. That the news comes only days after annual commemorations of Kristallnacht is all the more jarring; it’s one more reminder that restitution for the crimes of the Nazi era, despite all that has been done, remains unfinished business.

Before the Second World War, Stern was an art dealer in Düsseldorf. As a result of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic laws, he was no longer allowed to continue his work and was forced to sell his collections at distress prices, mostly in 1937. He fled his native Germany shortly thereafter, and eventually made his way to Montreal, where he went on to become a prominent gallery owner and a champion of Canadian painters like Emily Carr and the Group of Seven.

In the meantime, works that had, in effect, been stolen from him were sold and resold.

Stern died in 1987, but not before launching an effort to recover his works. Five were recovered in his lifetime. That left a couple hundred more. The Max Stern Art Restitution Project was launched in 2002 by McGill, Concordia and Hebrew universities, to which he had left the bulk of his estate. Several have since been recovered.

The Düsseldorf exhibition was to have gone on to Israel and then to the McCord Museum in 2019. The Stadtmuseum, in cancelling it only months before its scheduled opening, cited “current requests for information and restitution in German museums in connection with the Galerie Max Stern.”

That sounds disturbingly like the museum, and/or municipal authorities, are under pressure from German institutions that feel vulnerable to claims concerning their own holdings.

Do they fear that an exhibition on Stern would foster public sympathy and bring pressure against them?

While one can understand present-day owners of stolen artwork might wish for bygones to be bygones, particularly if they themselves came by them honestly, justice demands restitution. No one should want to profit from Nazi crimes, and no one should be allowed to do so.

Memory is the most powerful rebuke we have against the Holocaust and all the atrocities of Nazi era, which is why the move to quash an exhibition in Stern’s honour is so painful.

Germany has, to its credit, done an enormous amount to remember and come to terms with its history. So why this affront to the memory of a victim of Nazi-era persecution and theft?

Stern’s story deserves to be told, in Germany as elsewhere. Let us hope authorities in Düsseldorf have a change of heart.