by Mary M. Lane
Looking around, Peter Toren observed how the atmosphere at Sotheby’s was an odd mix of understatement and opulence. Against one wall, the press gathered. Younger reporters balanced spreadsheets with notes about the artworks with corporate-owned iPhones, from which their editors required they send rapid-fire tweets during the sales. The Sotheby’s specialists—even the stouter and older ones—were all naturally good-looking, with coiffed hair, perfectly tailored suits, and paradoxically alert yet relaxed expressions. Everyone in the room seemed to know each other; yet no one appeared overly sociable. “The whole thing was just kind of bizarre with all these extremely well-dressed women in low cut dresses and fancy things,” observed Peter Toren.64
Sotheby’s had estimated the value of Two Riders at between $550,390 and $864,900. Wyndham opened the bidding at $377,400, and within thirty-nine seconds the price had climbed dramatically. Bidding stalled for twelve seconds, an interminable pause in the frenetic world of high-end auctions. Wyndham patiently waited for it to climb again. Within a minute and thirty-three seconds after the bidding began, three prospective buyers pushed the price up to $1.4 million. Lengthy pauses continued; it was clear that buyers were weighing the story behind Two Riders with the investment potential of the painting itself. Bidding stalled once again at $1.7 million before climbing again to reach $2.95 million and selling to buyer L0014, a bidder on the phone.
The sale of Max Liebermann’s Two Riders on the Beach was a resounding success. The story of the Torens’ fight to have their work restituted had pushed the final price of the work to five times its conservative estimate, far more than the Torens or even Sotheby’s had predicted. “It was a bit of an overwhelming experience on a variety of levels,” noted Peter Toren.65
After Two Riders sold, Peter and Ben watched the next twenty-two works sell, including an Henri Matisse portrait for $2.8 million and an Edgar Degas of two criminals in court for $762,700. Nearly all of the most successful artists of the night were those whom Adolf Hitler had labeled degenerate seventy-eight years before, artists whose works were now being fought over by the Germans, Austrians, and French whom Hitler had hoped his Reich would incorporate for 1,000 years. The long-dead Führer could hardly have dreamed that the works would also be sought after by newly wealthy Russian, Chinese, and Arab collectors as well.
Once Wyndham hammered down a price on the last work of the night, Ben and Peter Toren slowly made their way out onto the sidewalk in front of Sotheby’s on New Bond Street. Peter knew that his family likely would never learn who bought Two Riders on the Beach. He or she wished to remain anonymous. For Peter, though, the “weirdest part” was the fact that he felt content to see the painting go to this new home. He understood that some people would criticize the family for selling the work, but there was no way they could have afforded to keep it. Though the decision to sell it had not been entirely their own, the sale had provided the family a certain sense of emotional closure regarding their fraught past.
On the way to a celebratory sushi dinner, Peter felt emotionally overwhelmed. How should he make sense of everything that had happened to his family—from his grandparents’ murders at Auschwitz to the trauma his father, David, had suffered as a result? How, Peter wondered, should he process the ways in which his father’s trauma had affected himself as a son of a Holocaust survivor?
Ultimately, however, Peter focused on the fact that the family’s efforts to locate Two Riders had deepened their bond and was a further step in the long process of coping with the pain that Hitler inflicted on millions of people.
In that sense, despite everything, Peter could not help but feel a certain pity for Cornelius Gurlitt. Certainly, it was mixed with anger; Cornelius could have done so much more with his life, and he had not. Peter Toren realized that he felt something Cornelius never truly had: a sense of love, being loved, and true purpose in the world—a purpose not merely to preserve his family’s past but to continue its future.
There would be time to contemplate all of these issues on the plane back to Washington, DC. For now, however, Peter and Ben felt a warm contentment sharing not only sushi but a bittersweet satisfaction that, even though Two Riders on the Beach was no longer in their hands, it had been rescued from the limbo in which Adolf Hitler, Hildebrand Gurlitt, and the German government had trapped it for seven decades.
One of Hitler’s Last Hostages was finally free.
EPILOGUE
BUSINESS AS USUAL
“The root of all evil is laziness, stupidity, or greed. There is nothing truer than that. It governs everything.”
—Marty Grosz, son of George Grosz
IN OCTOBER 2018, FIVE YEARS after I first started reporting on the Gurlitt case for the Wall Street Journal and six days after celebrating my thirty-first birthday, I took a taxi from Prenzlauer Berg, the trendy district in eastern Berlin where I had lived for several years, down to Mitte, Berlin’s central district. There, I entered an exhibition of works from the Gurlitt trove on display in the Martin-Gropius-Bau, a Renaissance-style exhibition hall built in 1881 and still standing after the World War II bombings that had destroyed most other buildings in the vicinity.
Throughout the building, the German government had hung 200 of the roughly 1,200 artworks that I had spent thousands of hours researching. Most of them were by artists whom Hitler had labeled degenerate and whose upended lives and legacies I had come to understand intimately. Emil Nolde’s Flood, Evening hung above Gustave Courbet’s large portrait of Jean Journet, not far from Käthe Kollwitz’s Lamentation for the Dead and her charcoal work Mother with Dead Child. Several of George Grosz’s street scenes were present, the vibrant reds of the prostitutes’ dresses and garish glows of yellow streetlights more eye-catching in person than a reproduction can ever capture.
Also on display in the Martin-Gropius-Bau were several pieces by Max Beckmann, including Old Woman with Cloche Hat, Zandvoort Beach Café, and several others on paper that Hildebrand Gurlitt had obtained from collections confiscated by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels from small museums throughout Germany—leaving gaping holes in their collections that these provincial museums could now never financially afford to fill with other artworks of similar quality.
Max Liebermann’s Two Riders on the Beach and Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Fan were not present: the Rosenbergs had not wanted to lend Fan, and the Torens had no idea who had bought Two Riders when they auctioned it at Sotheby’s in spring 2015. However, Roofs, the looted work by Adolf Menzel that Hildebrand Gurlitt had taken from the Wolffson collection and which the family had finally received back in 2017, was on display at the Wolffson family’s request.
Making my way through the rooms of artworks, I had in my head the lengthy speech that Culture Minister Monika Grütters, who had held her ministerial position as the Gurlitt scandal was unfolding, had given at the exhibition’s opening a few weeks earlier.
The remarks by Grütters did indicate some progress in the German government’s attitude toward the restitution of Nazi-looted art. After five years of bureaucratic obfuscating, Grütters finally had agreed to the basic facts that Hildebrand Gurlitt was not “merely ‘an art dealer during the Nazi period’” but also had been an “opportunist” as one of Hitler’s four main art dealers for the Führermuseum Project. She also noted that her government had made desperately needed changes to the advisory commission that it had founded—only in 2003—to mediate between victims of Hitler and German museums that allegedly possessed Nazi-looted art; from 2016, the committee members no longer held lifetime appointments. Her ministry also had expanded the board to include a minority of members who were not affiliated with the museums whose fates they were deciding. Overall, however, Grütters’s opening remarks revealed how little the German government officials whom she represented actually had changed since their initial mishandling of the Gurlitt case.
The position of Culture Minister does not exist in the United States. In Germany, this officeholder is in charge of guiding the nation’s
museums and other cultural institutions, the vast majority of which are overwhelmingly funded by taxpayers without the aid of donations, sponsorships, or private fellowships. The Minister is responsible for setting the nation’s cultural policy. This includes Wiedergutmachung, a euphemistic term that roughly translates to “The Making Better Policy” and refers to how Germany atones for World War II on governmental and legislative levels.
At no point before, after, or during the speech did Minister Grütters publicly acknowledge that the German government had erred. She refused to recognize that Germany had been wrong to hide the Gurlitt trove after its discovery. She continued to maintain that this was a local issue for Bavarian officials to address—despite the fact that these officials still refused to comment on the matter, deflecting that responsibility back to her, as the government’s most powerful voice on cultural affairs in Germany. While touting the importance of the rule of law, Grütters refused to acknowledge that Germany had held Cornelius Gurlitt’s trove for over two years without informing him of his legal rights or charging him with a crime.
In the autumn 2018 speech, Grütters finally did lament the loss of documents and witnesses that could have helped identify looted works in the Gurlitt trove. She declared that “behind every looted artwork stands the individual fate of a human being; we owe it to the victims of the Nazi regime of terror and the descendants of these victims to recognize this.” Yet she did not address why the German government, by hiding the existence of the trove for over two years, had obstructed the very investigations into the artworks that she now claimed to advocate.
As I glanced up at a self-portrait of Max Beckmann hung near Nolde’s Flood, Evening, it struck me as bizarrely tone-deaf that Grütters had ended her speech with a quote from the artist’s 1938 essay “About My Painting,” in which Beckmann had warned against the dangers of collectivist thought and eschewing personal responsibility. Collectivism, Beckmann had warned and Grütters reiterated eighty years later, was “the largest danger that threatens all of humankind.” Moreover, the Culture Minister cited Beckmann’s essay in asserting that much of life consists of “having your happiness or opportunities to live get beaten down by a state” that treats its constituents like “termites,” inconsequential pests, when they challenge government regulations. “I resisted this with all the power in my soul,” she said, quoting from the end of Beckmann’s essay, before adding her own conclusion: “This strength, Ladies and Gentlemen, I also wish for our democracy. May the ‘Status Report: Gurlitt’ exhibition also contribute to this!”
Beckmann wrote his essay a year after the 1937 opening of the House of German Art and the concurrent Degenerate Art Exhibition, in which the German government had displayed twenty-one of Beckmann’s confiscated paintings, including The Lovers, a lithograph I now saw on display in another German government exhibition, the provenance of which the state had yet to clarify. Beckmann had made his comment about the so-called termite state as a criticism of the very type of bureaucratic lethargy that had made it impossible for him to have his artworks restituted before his death in 1950.
Rereading Max Beckmann’s essay after the speech in which Culture Minister Grütters had cited it, I noted that he had delivered it in London, a year before Germany invaded Poland. Beckmann had attempted to warn other countries of the bureaucratic collectivism rampant in his native country. At the beginning of his 1938 speech, Beckmann explained how apolitical people tended to fall prey to the ability of governments to legalize moral injustices. The artist admitted he was no political expert but declared, “Nevertheless, I am aware that there are two worlds here: the world of the soul and the reality of politics.”
It struck me how similar Beckmann’s warning was to a comment made to me in 2013 by Michael Franz, the administrative head of the German government’s Looted Art Commission. “There are two different rules: legal laws and moral guidelines, and they are very separate and distinct,” he told me.1 Franz had been one of the rare public officials willing to speak on the record, not only during the time that the Gurlitt scandal was unfolding publicly between 2013 and 2014 but also in the years since then.
In February 2014, after several rebuffed attempts, I met Minister Grütters herself in her office in Angela Merkel’s chancellery overlooking the German parliament. Finally, for the first time on the record with any publication, Grütters conceded that since the end of the war in 1945, German institutions responsible for the restitution of artworks had been “a bit shy in their public relations activity,” adding, “It’s a matter of earning back trust.”
Now, over five years later, I wonder: what does it say about “earning back trust” that, were the Gurlitt scandal to unfold as of this writing, the Torens, Rosenbergs, and Flechtheims still would have no more significant legal protections than they had possessed in previous decades?
Numerous German officials at local, state, and federal levels have acknowledged this reality to me in confidential conversations over the years. In postwar Germany, morality and legality are two distinct forums. When it comes to the restitution of looted artworks, bureaucratic collectivism discourages individual public servants from sticking their necks out to advocate for survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants, who, as a result of government atrocities committed decades ago, are no longer part of the citizenry that these public servants represent.
The only exception I have seen is Winfried Bausback, justice minister of Bavaria, the state representing Munich, where Cornelius Gurlitt lived. Bausback was the one politician to directly petition the Bundesrat, Germany’s highest body of legislators, to amend the statute of limitations on stolen artworks that protected private individuals such as Cornelius Gurlitt. In his Valentine’s Day 2014 speech to the Bundesrat, Bausback had referenced his hero from American literature, William Faulkner, citing the author’s famed quote from his 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Yet, despite Bausback’s singular pleas, no politicians—including Culture Minister Monika Grütters—backed his attempt to enact legislation that would prevent “a future Gurlitt” from doing exactly what Cornelius had done: admit to holding Nazi-looted artworks while flaunting how the law protected him over the victims from whom these works had been stolen.
A few months before I viewed the Berlin exhibition in October 2018, I had visited the West German city of Bonn and the Swiss capital of Bern—the location of the Kunstmuseum Bern to which Cornelius Gurlitt had bequeathed the trove—to view works from the Gurlitt trove for the first time. I initially expressed optimism that the placards on the walls next to the artworks displayed detailed descriptions of their provenance—the journey each work had taken from the artist’s studio to the present day.
Yet I noticed a disturbing pattern, beginning with a vibrant still life oil painting, circa 1885, of a canned jar of cherries set between a pristine white cloth and two liqueur glasses created by the Parisian realist artist François Bonvin. The placards for that work and several others in the exhibition, including a pastel of a Berlin garden by Max Liebermann, featured a cryptic notation. For the last notation on each placard—the line indicating to whom the works now belonged—ambiguously read, “By Descent to a Private Collection, South Germany.”
Alarm bells rang in my head. I called Rein Wolfs, director of the Kunsthalle in Bonn, where the works were on display. After minutes of prodding, Wolfs confirmed to me that the euphemistic line on the placards did, as I suspected, indicate that these pieces were in the possession of Klaus Fräßle, the widower of Benita Gurlitt, the sole sibling of Cornelius Gurlitt.
Why did the taxpayer-funded exhibition not simply note that directly on the placards, I asked?
Wolfs demurred, saying that, while it was true that the exhibition and Kunsthalle were taxpayer funded, “we to that [point], as a federal institution, would not want to speak out so much about that,” preferring instead to focus on the life of Hildebrand Gurlitt. He openly acknowledged that “the situation with Cornelius call
s into question” moral issues and “judicial questions” that he did not care to confront.
“The thing is, we wanted to make an exhibition about the art itself and not the aftermath, so to speak,” he said.2 In other words, fighting to secure or even improve justice for Hitler’s victims and their descendants was not his problem either.
The conversation with Wolfs made it clear to me that he, Grütters, and the entire German legislative body were constantly pointing fingers at each other rather than taking responsibility for fixing a broken restitution system. The legislative body claimed this was a matter for the Culture Ministry to solve, the Culture Ministry said that it was a matter for the legislative body to solve, and government-funded museums said it was not their responsibility to speak publicly about political matters, even those so clearly rooted in the cultural affairs that they oversaw.
Toward the end of writing this book, I developed an almost obsessive interest in trying to find the line where complicity with evil becomes evil itself. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels most certainly were evil, but what about Hildebrand Gurlitt? What about Cornelius Gurlitt? What about the public servants in Germany who still refuse to fix their broken system? What about their constituents, who do not insist that they do so?
I spent hours discussing this topic with Marianne Rosenberg, David Toren, his son Peter Toren, and George Grosz’s son Marty, all of whom had nuanced and insightful takes on the matter. Hildebrand Gurlitt, we all agreed, was most certainly a war profiteer. Unlike the others, David Toren had some sympathy for Hildebrand for his behavior during the war, while his son was more forceful in wanting to hold Hildebrand to account. “He danced with the devil. He supported an evil regime,” was Peter Toren’s verdict. Marty Grosz put it more bluntly: Hildebrand “knew what kind of evil son of a bitch [Hitler] was and supported him because it was good for business.”