The Orpheus Clock

by Simon Goodman

  • • •

  There would be not just one auction, but two. The first would be in Amsterdam on May 13 for everything except the three silver pieces. The catalog would be entitled Property from the Gutmann Collection, and the cover illustration was to be one of the Louis XIV ormolu chenets. The second auction was scheduled for exactly a month later in London. The three Renaissance silver-gilt pieces would be the highlight of the London auction, entitled “Important Silver Including Three Magnificent Renaissance Silver-Gilt Works of Art from the Collection of Fritz and Eugen Gutmann.” The Lencker ewer would adorn the cover of the catalog.

  The night before the Amsterdam sale, Jop Ubbens organized a grand dinner, surprisingly right in the auction room. Immediately I noticed, just behind the auctioneer’s stand, two familiar photos: extremely large copies of Man Ray’s portraits of Fritz and Louise. They made me feel straight at home. It was a good omen. At dinner were a large contingent of Christie’s executives from across Europe; they seemed to be taking this first restitution sale seriously. A contingent also came from the new Dresdner Bank, now based in Frankfurt, to pay their respects. Lili always enjoyed the attention they showered on her, albeit so late in life.

  The auction room was already packed when Nick and I arrived the following morning. We could hardly contain our excitement. Jop Ubbens was our auctioneer. May and I were spellbound by his command of the room. Things were going well. Early on, an armorial plaque by Andrea della Robbia started a bidding war. It was thrilling to watch. Next the Jakob Elsner sold extremely well. Equally successful were the two exotic Flemish tapestries that followed. Most surprising, the sturdy bronze mortar and pestle started a frenzied bidding contest. Eventually it went for something staggering—twenty-five times its low estimate. Jop was more animated than the conductor at the Concertgebouw. Then the woman sitting right in front of me became determined to win the huge Savonerrie carpet. Every time she asked her husband, sitting right next to her, for more money to bid with, May and I unashamedly egged him on. I’m not sure if she realized who we were when she thanked us afterward. Then we watched as a beautiful, richly painted canvas by Michele Rocca, entitled Rinaldo and Armida, went for nearly four times the low estimate. During all the excitement my son, James, managed to fall sound asleep. People nearby seemed genuinely charmed by his snoring. In another touching moment a nice lady from Heemstede bought a Delft dish as a memento of Bosbeek in its better days. Lili appeared moved by this gesture; otherwise she remained stoic throughout. It must have been difficult to say good-bye to all these wonderful things one more time. Nevertheless, the auction was a great success.

  A month later in London, I arrived with my family at Christie’s in St. James’s for an elegant dinner in the Directors’ Boardroom, arranged by Anthony Phillips. Nick was already there, as was Sheri Farber. Out of the blue, seven-year-old James politely asked for some chocolate. He cut such a dashing figure, in his brocade waistcoat and silk bow tie, that two pretty interns immediately rushed off to find some. Christie’s silver specialist Harry Williams-Bulkeley calculated that James must have been the youngest person to have ever had dinner in the boardroom in the 180 years since Christie’s moved from Pall Mall to St. James’s. I was moved by the lengths to which the venerable old firm had gone to accommodate my family. A lot had changed since that day less than five years before when Nick and I had gone to Marc Porter’s office in Beverly Hills to complain about the Degas evaluations.

  Over dinner the conversation inevitably turned to Eugen’s original collection. Anthony Phillips asserted that the collection was of exceptional quality and depth. He went so far as to say he thought there was no better example of late-nineteenth-century taste and that Fritz’s three pieces being offered the next day were of the greatest artistic importance. His exuberance reached a pinnacle when he began to describe the Lencker ewer: “It is a sublime work.”

  The next day our anticipation was extremely high. We had taken a big gamble turning down the Rijksmuseum and their money. Lili, as a result, had started to find all these financial shenanigans, including the negotiations with Christie’s, a little distressing. She had decided to stay home in Florence. Nick and I devised a plan to make sure she would not suffer regardless of the final results. In case we had miscalculated, she would still receive her share of what the museum had originally offered—even if it came out of our own pockets.

  Christie’s had saved the Gutmann silver until last. By now several old friends were in the room. After a slow start and well over a hundred lots, the silver-gilt ewer by Johannes Lencker came up for bidding. Slowly it reached a point near the reserve price, then the bidding stopped for what seemed an age. We could hardly breathe. Suddenly the bidding resumed, this time much faster. Quickly it went over what the Rijksmuseum had offered and then kept going, hitting some kind of a record. James was definitely not asleep this time. Next came the Petzolt cups. They, too, quickly reached their reserve, then the low estimate, then passed the high estimate. Nick and I looked at each other in triumph and relief. By the time the beautiful Horse and Rider by Hans Ludwig Kienle came up, I had started to breathe normally again. Whatever happened, we had been vindicated. The Kienle finished the auction in great style, also comfortably surpassing its high estimate.

  We soon discovered that the winning bidder for the Lencker ewer had in fact been a proxy for the Rijksmuseum. With enormous satisfaction, we realized the museum had just paid more for the ewer than they had originally offered us for all three of our silver-gilt masterworks.

  The Petzolt cups found a good home at the Detroit Institute of Arts (now sadly beleaguered), and the Kienle also made its way across the Atlantic. Just a few months later May and I were in Chicago when we were invited for lunch at the Art Institute by Ghenete Zelleke, the curator of European decorative arts. Ghenete was justifiably proud of the Art Institute’s new acquisition and enthusiastically showed me some of the results of her exhaustive analysis of the sculpture. During that same visit, Suzanne McCullagh, curator of prints and drawings, came by to say hello. Suzanne was also a lifelong friend of Daniel Searle’s daughter, and, rather significantly, she wanted to show me the institute’s new provenance and research department. She proudly ushered me into the large new wing, where I saw bright-eyed university graduates studying delicate drawings. The scale of the department and its state-of-the-art facilities were impressive. Then she took us to a room to greet an old friend. More than five years had passed since May and I had last seen the Degas Landscape with Smokestacks, and James had only been a baby when he had first seen our Paysage. As I again mused over its beautiful colors, I began to reflect on how much all our lives had changed since that day in September 1995 when I first found it.

  May and Simon toasting the family’s success with the Petzolt cups.

  CHAPTER 13

  SIN AND SENSUALITY

  Karl Brandt (the wartime owner of Sensuality) and Anni Rehborn at their wedding, in 1934, with Hitler and Göring as guests of honor.

  After the excitement of our auctions began to subside, a nagging feeling seemed to take its place. By returning so many pieces to us, the Dutch government had surely done a decent thing—albeit more than a half century late. But I could not help wondering how they had decided exactly what to return. How good a job had they done? After all, if they found so many Meissen cups and saucers, where were the teapots or coffeepots?

  I decided to construct, to the best of my ability, a master list of the entire family collection based on every inventory and catalog I could find. My task would be to identify and reference every item that had eventually been recovered or compensated for and every piece that had disappeared. (I’ve been working on this for years and am still not finished.) I incorporated all the prewar documents that had survived and, most important, the meticulous Nazi inventories that were finally becoming available. The Allies, in their wisdom, had sealed all Nazi-looting documents as classified after the war. Now that fifty years had elapsed, the national archives of the
United States, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Germany were opening their vaults for the first time. To this day, many vital documents still elude us. However, to my everlasting astonishment, I now have in my possession copies of Fritz’s first forced sale to Göring’s agent Haberstock, the first Nazi inventory of Bosbeek, their secondary inventory of the estate, the Nazi inventory of the Gutmann Silver Collection, the ERR confiscations from Fritz’s storage in Paris, and so much more.

  After a year or two of painstaking work, I began to recognize several pieces from the Gutmann collection that were still in the Dutch National Collection. Most were listed under the euphemistic heading “Origins Unknown,” meaning no known provenance. I began filing claims.

  At the same time, I filed a petition for the return of the money my father and aunt had been forced to pay to the Dutch State in 1954. The Ministry of Finance in The Hague had insisted on being “compensated” before it would release over seventy antiques and seventeen paintings belonging to our family. Unfortunately, these new claims would keep me tied up in red tape for several years to come. It soon became apparent that the thaw in restitution practices we had enjoyed in 2002 was often the exception rather than the rule. That being said, several other restitutions began to take place in Holland, most notably for a sizable part of the Goudstikker Collection. However, Christine Koenigs, and others less fortunate, continued to be rebuffed.

  Undaunted, I turned my attention elsewhere. During an extended European trip, I put aside a week to make a long-overdue visit to the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, on the Rhine. Each morning I would drive along the scenic river, with medieval castles perched above, from the fabled Lorelei rock to the ancient city of Koblenz. The dichotomy between this idealized view of Germany and the cloaked reality that I would discover in the national archives was startling. On my arrival, across an empty, cavernous hall, I was greeted by a most deferential curator. She seemed to know who I was, which I found a little unsettling. After a busy morning, copying furiously from several enormous index files, I was ready with my most wanted list. It included all the usual suspects: Haberstock, Böhler, Mühlmann, Miedl, and Plietzsch. When I read the name Göring to the archivist, the already-quiet reading room suddenly became several decibels quieter. After a long pause, he explained to me that I was asking for a lot. However, the next day, when I came back, they had two enormous shelves tagged with the name Gutmann. I did not know where to begin.

  My photocopying bill ran into the hundreds of dollars. To this day, I have not fully processed this gold mine of information. One of the first gems I uncovered was the actual first forced-sale contract between poor Fritz and Karl Haberstock. Most of the paintings that had been itemized were no surprise to me. They were some of the greatest from Fritz’s collection, and they had been intended for none other than the Führer. They included the Cranach Samson and the Lion, the three different Madonna and Child paintings by Memling, Isenbrandt, and Holbein, the Northern Renaissance portraits of men by Elsner, Burgkmair, and Baldung Grien, and the Van Goyen Landscape with Two Horsecarts. The ninth item consisted of two carved, seventeenth-century Spanish shields, which had apparently originated from the Oppenheim collection. This, in itself, was an invaluable clue, since the Oppenheim family had several well-illustrated catalogs, dating from the turn of the old century. The last item, however, had me baffled: Die Sünde von H. Stuck.

  I had seen the word Stuck on some earlier inventories. In German the word simply meant “stucco,” so I assumed it was a typo for Stück, which was “a piece,” as in a piece of furniture. However, the title Die Sünde clearly had no other meaning except “the sin.” Obviously, this had to be a piece of art. Also, considering that all the other items in this forced sale were major works of art, Haberstock, at least, must have valued highly this mysterious piece.

  Soon enough I would discover a German Symbolist painter in the late nineteenth century called Franz Stuck. H. Stuck simply meant “Herr Stuck.” Later he was made a knight and became Franz von Stuck. He was a protégé of Franz von Lenbach, who had painted portraits of both Eugen and Sophie. I felt I was onto something; but my enthusiasm was soon dampened when I learned that Stuck had made at least a dozen paintings (as well as engravings) all called The Sin. If you factored into that series those paintings also called The Sensuality or The Vice, there must have been over twenty. What was even more perplexing, though, was the subject matter. All the paintings in the series depicted a very pale young woman, half naked, entwined with an overtly phallic snake.

  I had trouble imagining my grandfather even buying such a painting, let alone hanging it on his walls between a Madonna and Child and some turgid sixteenth-century nobleman. The next thing, obviously, was to call my aunt. Did she remember anything by Franz von Stuck? After a long silence came a strange, short laugh. “How did you know?” she exclaimed. Then, while I relayed my discovery, the details began to come back to her.

  Lili must have been about ten, at the time, when Fritz came back from the auctions in Munich. Under his arm was this strange painting. Perhaps the repercussions from the crash on Wall Street, just a few months earlier, had unhinged my grandfather—bankers in Germany were reeling from the aftershocks. The world was changing fast and so, perhaps, was Fritz. Clearly he felt he had to try something new. However, when he bravely unveiled his new acquisition to the family, there were screams. Louise quickly banished Franz von Stuck’s sinister image upstairs, out of sight and out of mind. After the initial shock, all this must have been a source of considerable merriment among the guests at Bosbeek before the war.

  Then I discovered the deposition Karl Haberstock had made to Allied officers, a year after the war. He claimed he could not return the Stuck because he had sold it to a certain Dr. Brandt, resident in the Schloss Bellevue, Berlin. Well, Schloss Bellevue is now the official residence of the President of Germany, but during the war it was a guesthouse for high-ranking Nazis. After considerably more digging, I discovered the true identity of this Dr. Brandt. In trying to uncover what happened to my family, I have had to delve far deeper into the Holocaust than I ever thought I had the courage for. This was one of those moments.

  Dr. Karl Brandt was no ordinary doctor. In 1934 he became Hitler’s personal physician, but it was his medical “experiments” that would earn him the titles of SS-Gruppenführer and SS-Brigadeführer. Starting in 1933, he began the state-sponsored eugenics program to rid the Reich of the “genetically disordered” and the “racially deficient.” By 1939, Brandt was head of the Aktion T4 Euthanasia Program, through which over seventy thousand people would be killed in its extermination centers.

  Hitler quickly took the doctor under his wing. The Führer was the guest of honor when Karl Brandt married Anni Rehborn, a renowned athlete and medal-winning swimmer. With her siblings, Anni had become akin to an “Aryan” pinup. Hitler even remarked, “This face could originate from one of the temple friezes of Olympia.” The tall, ambitious physician and his athletic bride seemed to epitomize the new Germanic ideal. Before long, Karl and Anni Brandt were invited into the Führer’s closest inner circle.

  The Brandts were soon regulars at the Berghof, Hitler’s weekend mountain retreat on what had been the Austrian border. Anni’s closest friends became Margarete Speer (wife of Albert Speer, later minister of armaments and war production) and Eva Braun, Hitler’s longtime companion. The popular couple even built their own, albeit much smaller, chalet in the shadow of the Führer’s favorite retreat. When their son was born, they named him Karl-Adolf. To this day several home movies, filmed by Eva Braun, survive, showing the close-knit group playing with their children or dogs and cavorting by the shores of the nearby lake, Chiemsee. For the briefest of moments, they appeared like normal, happy people. Then I realized I was still looking at Hitler, Speer, Bormann, Ribbentrop, Heydrich, Himmler, and Karl Brandt.

  As the tide turned in the war, by mid-1944 the Berghof estate was largely abandoned. The Brandts were back in Berlin, at their apartment in the Schlo
ss Bellevue, along with their admired art collection. The Franz von Stuck hung alongside other German works by Hans Thoma and Karl Friedrich Lessing. However, as the Allied bombing of Berlin intensified, Brandt stored most of his art treasures in the safety of the Führerbunker. By 1945, with the Red Army no longer far away, Hitler also spent most of his time in the bunker. Then on April 30, 1945, as the Battle for Berlin raged above him, Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide.

  Karl Brandt tried to escape but was arrested by British soldiers in northern Germany on May 23. He was transferred to a maximum-security prison camp euphemistically called Camp Ashcan. This was no ordinary camp. The Allies had selected this former hotel in the middle of Luxembourg to house and interrogate eighty-six of the most prominent surviving Nazi leaders. Here Generalmajor Karl Brandt of the Waffen-SS found himself reunited with some of the Führer’s cabinet and inner circle, such as Ribbentrop and Hermann Göring. There was Himmler’s precursor, Wilhelm Frick, and some of the most brutal military commanders the war had known, such as Keitel, Kesselring, Jodl, and Von Rundstedt. Others included Seyss-Inquart and Hans Frank, the murderous Governors of the Netherlands and Poland. The vile propagandist Julius Streicher was another inmate.