by Susan Ronald
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Cornelius was the third son born to the nineteenth-century landscape painter Heinrich Louis Theodor Gurlitt, known as Louis, and his third wife, Elisabeth—or Else—née Lewald.6 Else was Jewish, and assimilation into the Christian community was not only common among German Jews of the time, but desirable. In the heyday of Bismarck and German nationalism, anti-Semitism was openly discussed, including among historians like Heinrich von Treitschke, who remarked in 1879, “Die Juden sind unser Unglück”—the Jews are our misfortune.7
Whereas in previous generations Jewish boys were taught to read and write Hebrew before learning German, in the nationalist fervor of the second half of the nineteenth century learning Hebrew became secondary or was ignored altogether. In many immigrant Jewish families, Jewish observance had broken down in favor of the Jewish-German phenomenon called the Haskalah, or Enlightenment. Those who had not given up Judaism altogether developed a bespoke form of Jewishness that echoed the longing for a prosperous, single German nation. Being Jewish had been honed into a fine art of adaptation, perhaps akin to a musical transition, in the fervent hope of escaping the restrictions of Jewish life imposed from outside as well as from within. For the Lewalds, this meant a flight into the intellectual and artistic sphere, sloughing off their Jewish identity for the universally accepted world of the arts.
As elsewhere in Europe, Jews in Germany had been excluded from the mainstream: denied, then given, then denied again their civil rights. It was only after Bismarck’s unifying of Germany’s disparate fiefdoms, principalities, and regions in 1870 that Jews were at long last allowed citizenship.8 Those who still practiced their religion recognized the precariousness of their situation. Increasingly, they tweaked their religious observance, as inspired by the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. In his Reform movement of the Jewish faith, Jews no longer needed to set themselves apart from Christians by their mode of dress, their diet, or their daily routine. Yet marrying into Christian families and converting to Christianity remained viable options for many Jews to prove that they were “good Germans,” too.
In fact, Else Gurlitt’s older sister, Fanny Lewald, had converted to Christianity at the age of only seventeen.9 Else herself, Hildebrand later claimed, converted to the Lutheran faith.10 In these circumstances, it is little wonder that all of Louis and Else’s children were brought up in the religion of their father, utterly devoid of Jewish tradition. There would be six sons and one daughter born to the couple.
With the passage of time, Cornelius cultivated a privileged place among his brothers as the family peacemaker. Judging by his letters, he felt closest to the oldest brother, Wilhelm.11 Six years Cornelius’s senior, Wilhelm was a professor of archaeology at the University of Graz in Austria-Hungary. Relations between Cornelius and the second-oldest brother, Otto, were strained in later life, though this could be expected between a brother who was a banker and one who chose higher education and public service.
Yet there are strong hints in the family correspondence that Otto also resented Cornelius’s favoring of the next-youngest brother, Friedrich. Fritz, as the family called him, was the fourth son, and indeed, very close to Cornelius. Fritz seemed to show some vulnerable character traits from an early age, though whether this was merely the older brothers protecting him from bullying or a true weakness is difficult to say.12
Ludwig, the fifth son, had entered teaching with the zeal of a reformist, and again was not as close to Cornelius, clearly resenting the older brother’s management of Fritz’s affairs.13 The economist Johannes, or Hans, was the sixth son, and was separated from his brothers by their only sister, Else. Whenever there were disagreements within the Gurlitt tribe, Wilhelm always called upon Cornelius to negotiate the peace, as he held the position of “leadership … to constantly build our sense of family and our togetherness.”14
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Thus cast into the role, it fell to Cornelius to sort out the hornets’ nest created by his brother Fritz. Having married the tempting Annarella, daughter of the Swiss sculptor Heinrich Maximilian Imhof, Fritz set up his own Berlin art gallery and shop in 1880, in part with Annarella’s dowry. Three years later, he created the first-ever Impressionist art exhibit in Germany with the assistance of his good friends Carl and Felice Bernstein, who were Russian Jewish émigrés from Odessa.
The Bernsteins were remarkable in that they learned about Impressionism during their long sojourn in Paris from their cousin, the connoisseur and Parisian art critic Charles Ephrussi, and the noted art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel.15 Fritz became the gallery owner of choice for French Impressionists in Germany, while also cultivating a fruitful relationship representing the Düsseldorf school of German Romantic painters, such as Arnold Böcklin, Anselm Feuerbach, and Max Liebermann. Fritz soon became a favorite of the director of Berlin’s Königliche National-Galerie, Hugo von Tschudi.16
Yet despite this auspicious beginning and four children born to Annarella in rapid succession, by 1890 the once-amiable Fritz began to fall out with people, including Böcklin. Annarella alerted Fritz’s family that matters were spiraling out of control, and that the business was now run by Fritz’s assistant, Willi Waldecker. Soon everyone acknowledged that Fritz was showing the distressing signs of severe mental imbalance. At last, in 1892, at Cornelius’s behest, Fritz was moved to Thornberg, near Leipzig, where he could receive the best treatment available at the renowned sanatorium nearby, initially as an outpatient.
As the year progressed, and hopes for Fritz’s recovery faded, Cornelius became aware of Annarella’s overt “friendliness” with Waldecker. He wrote to his brother Wilhelm that “we had long ago realized that Annarella looked around for new men—and that riding pillion behind her in the gallery was that Waldecker fellow.”17 When Fritz faded away gently at nine o’clock at night on March 9, 1893—sooner than Cornelius expected—the most almighty family furor began.
The telegram arrived at two in the morning bearing the sad news, awakening Cornelius’s household. The following morning, Cornelius and Marie went to tell his parents, who were naturally overcome with grief. “At the end of the day, she [Mama] felt that it was fortunate that Fritz had not lived longer with such an infirmity. She was quiet, cried, and lay down to sleep after dinner.”18
Yet in no time the rupture with Annarella poisoned the air. Before Fritz was buried, Cornelius wrote with considerable vehemence to Wilhelm:
Yesterday I learned that there had been a promise of marriage since mid-December between the two [Annarella and Waldecker]. I discussed this with Ludwig and [our sister] Else; and it was agreed that we should say nothing about the matter, so long as Fritz had not been buried. But the evening before the funeral, I could not bring myself to allow Annarella and Waldecker to sit at my table without explaining themselves. I asked her how the matter stood between them, and they conceded that they wished to marry. I called her a whore and asked her to leave my house.… It was then that she admitted “love” for him [Waldecker].… Annarella only denied any infidelity in the truest sense of the word.19
Despite promises from Annarella, the saga continued. Bankruptcy loomed, while Waldecker tried to milk the business dry. The ignominy of Fritz’s madness coupled with Annarella’s infidelity brought about the fourteen-year-long chronicle of bitterness, hatred, and legal wrangling to protect Fritz’s good name, the gallery, and his children’s birthright. In that period, Cornelius placed himself in the role of absent father, constantly fighting on behalf of Fritz’s four children and looking after their well-being. It was only in the summer of 1907, after Fritz’s eldest son, Wolfgang, came of age, that Cornelius wrested the gallery from the clutches of Waldecker and Annarella.20
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Any adolescent boy would have been crushed by the attention given to his cousin Wolfgang at this critical time in his life. Unlike today, however, a child’s feelings were rarely taken into consideration in such family matters. Perhaps it was Cornelius’s concentration on snatching back his nephew Wolfgang’s inheritan
ce that motivated Marie into action that summer. Or perhaps it was simply her desire to open her young son’s eyes to the world of art. More probably, with artist friends like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Erich Heckel—the founders of Die Brücke, or the Bridge, the Expressionist art movement in Dresden—frequenting their home, Marie thought the time was ripe to expose young Hildebrand to the wonders of their art.
Later, Hildebrand wrote, “I will never forget the moment when I and my mother, ‘Madame royal Saxon privy councillor,’ saw the first exhibition of The Bridge in a baroque lamp shop, on a desolate street in Dresden … these barbaric, passionately powerful colors, this rawness, encased in the poorest of wooden frames—aimed to hit the middle classes like a slap in the face. And that is indeed what it did. I, the young schoolboy, was also startled, but ‘Madame privy councillor’ said that we should buy a sample of these interesting works, and she took home one of the most astonishing woodcuts.”21 This was rebellion in a form both he and his parents could applaud. From that moment on, Hildebrand proclaimed his love for modern art.
Hildebrand also recalled his father’s reaction to the woodcuts and quoted Cornelius verbatim: “It may very well be that this art will become as important to your life as the struggle over Hans Thoma, Arnold Böcklin and Max Liebermann was to mine.”22 They were all represented by Fritz Gurlitt.
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In the visual arts, Germans were confident of their superiority, and with good reason. The Munich-based Blue Rider group—Der Blaue Reiter—hosted such greats of modernism as Russian-born Wassily Kandinsky, the Jewish German Franz Marc, and the Swiss German Paul Klee. Led by Kandinsky, their countercultural antidote to Wilhelminism and antibourgeois sentiment set the tone for a community of three thousand artists that attracted even the unknown artist Adolf Hitler to Munich in May 1913. Ignoring the endeavors of the Blue Rider movement, Hitler enthused about Munich, “I was attracted by this wonderful marriage of primordial power and fine artistic mood, this single line from the Hofbräuhaus to the Odeon, from the Oktoberfest to the Pinakothek … if even then I achieved the happiness of a truly inward contentment, it can be attributed only to the magic which the miraculous residence of the Wittelsbachs exerts on every man who is blessed.”23
The Berlin Secession, founded in 1899 and led by Max Beckmann, Lovis Corinth, and Max Liebermann, was complemented by the Bridge in 1905 and five years later by the New Secession, both originally based in Dresden. The Bridge included artists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, and Emil Nolde. Yet even in their striving to new modernist heights, their desire to break away from the constraints of traditional society sounded a declaration of war.
The 1906 manifesto of the Bridge, which derived its name from Nietzsche’s theory that man is the bridge leading to an elevated state for humanity, stated, “Putting our faith in a new generation of creators and art lovers, we call upon youth to unite. We who possess the future shall create for ourselves a physical and spiritual freedom opposed to the values of the comfortably established older generation. Anyone who honestly and directly reproduces the creative force that is within him is one of us.”24
Mirroring the changes in Germany, 1907 became a pioneering year for Western civilization in its quest to humanize the evil of war. All eyes turned to The Hague and the second convention to promote peace. Failure there, so peace activists like Andrew Carnegie claimed, would herald disaster for the twentieth century.
3
FROM THE HAGUE TO VIENNA
Peace is not merely the absence of war.
—JAWAHARLAL NEHRU
The year 1907 was a curious turning point for Hildebrand Gurlitt’s future, too, in part thanks to the successes of the energetic peace campaigner Baroness Bertha von Suttner and the equally remote tribulations of Adolf Hitler. The baroness was devoted to peace, Hitler to hatred and war. Both lived in Vienna that year. Both would change the course of cultural thought in the twentieth century.
Rising up against the tidal wave of isms and aggression, Baroness von Suttner represented the Vienna that Hitler loathed. She was an internationalist, and her city was multilingual and multinational. Vienna abounded with men and women of regal bearing who were proud of their Magyar, Czech, Slovak, Moldavian, and Austrian descent, and who adored the two-thousand-year-old metropolis for its diversity. Hers was a Vienna of assured values and relentless hospitality, a bastion of civilization, where its finely chiseled stone buildings stood as signposts of timeless customs and good taste, refusing to argue with its new modernist architecture and grand, glittering avenues.1 It was a Vienna that would remain as foreign to Adolf Hitler as Bertha von Suttner’s uncompromising quest for world peace.
Her Vienna mirrored the macrocosm of the treasured Habsburg monarchy and palaces. Morning newspapers did not sully their front pages with the military or the political or even the commercial, preferring instead to lead with the repertoire of the imperial Burgtheater or other artistic delights. This magnificent building was where Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro was first performed; where Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, and Rubinstein gave concerts to standing ovations; and where fanaticism for the arts touched people from all walks of life, uniting them despite their diversity.
Though he lived in Dresden, Vienna was a realm that Cornelius Gurlitt readily comprehended. The Gurlitts were leaders in architecture, music, and the arts in the cities where they lived—Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin, and Graz in Austria. Cornelius already enjoyed an international reputation for his defense of baroque architecture. To Bertha and Cornelius, just as to many art historians and artists, true art linked people across national borders and any social milieu.
As a young impoverished aristocratic woman, the baroness was briefly Alfred Nobel’s secretary in Paris, before succumbing to her heartache as an elder Juliet for her youthful Romeo, the future Baron von Suttner. Nevertheless, Nobel and Bertha continued to correspond actively, and his ideas for European peace became firmly impressed on her psyche. They would remain fast friends throughout his lifetime, and eventually she would take up his gauntlet for disarmament.
In 1905, she’d been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize—only the second woman after radium discoverer Marie Curie to receive any Nobel Prize.2 Ever the optimist, Nobel decided to institute the prize at the baroness’s prompting, and wrote to her from his Paris home that “one hears in the distance its hollow rumble already … I should like to dispose of my fortune to found a prize to be awarded every five years” to the person who contributed most effectively to the peace of Europe. Nobel thought that surely after six awards, the prize for peace could terminate “for if in thirty years society cannot be reformed we shall inevitably lapse into barbarism.”3
When President Teddy Roosevelt convened the second Hague Convention that year, Baroness Suttner worked energetically on the task ahead with the American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, pressing for a League of Nations to be formed, believing that the man to establish it was Kaiser Wilhelm. For Carnegie, the kaiser was “the man responsible for war on earth.”4 Though he’d made his money in steel, Carnegie had sold his business years earlier to devote himself entirely to philanthropy.*
Unusually for an American diplomat, Carnegie also understood British concerns that the kaiser was hell-bent on breaking the dominance of the British Navy and the empire. Everyone knew that the kaiser, as the nephew of the British king Edward VII and first cousin of Czar Nicholas II of Russia, envied their empires. Roosevelt, for his part, believed that the German Empire was “alert, military and industrial,… [and] despises … the whole Hague idea.”5
While disarmament was on the agenda, it was never ratified. Still, an agreement of sorts was reached and ratified by all forty-six nations in attendance. Significantly, definitions and protocols about pacific settlements of international disputes, conventions regarding the opening of hostilities, what constituted an army and belligerents, the conversion of the merchant navy to warships, the treatment of prisoners of war and those reporting on the war,
those providing relief to the wounded and prisoners of war, and the treatment of noncombatants were agreed upon.
Though disappointing to the pacifists, the agreement signed on October 18, 1907, provided for a number of safeguards for civilization in the event of war. Article 25 strictly prohibited the attack or bombardment by whatever means of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which were undefended. Sieges and bombardments, according to article 27, must take all necessary steps to spare, as far as possible, buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, providing that they are not being used simultaneously for military purposes. A peculiar anomaly in article 27 made it the duty of the besieged to indicate the presence of such buildings or places beforehand to the enemy by distinctive and visible signs.6 This article would touch Hildebrand’s life in the war that erupted seven years later.
While the Hague Conference of 1907 apparently made no difference to the gathering tempest, buried deep within the protocol finally agreed by all the participants was an annex, “Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land,” in section III of which, “Military Authority over the Territory of the Hostile State,” is the following:
Art 46. Family honour and rights, the lives of persons, and private property, as well as religious convictions and practice, must be respected.
Private property cannot be confiscated.
These articles would soon meet their first great challenge in the conflagration that lay ahead.
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For the artist manqué Adolf Hitler, 1907 was the ultimate determining factor leading toward his loathsome future. This was the year that he moved with his mother, Klara, and half sister, Paula, to Urfahr, a suburb of Linz, Austria, nestled in a picturesque Danube valley. Despite Klara’s best efforts, the forty-eight-year-old widow long ago learned that she had precious little control over her bombastic son. When Adolf left secondary school in 1905, he had not procured the customary high-school diploma, thereby excluding himself from higher education. To compound her worries, he’d refused to settle down and earn a living—something that she would have welcomed on her monthly pension of 140 kronen and the proceeds of the house she’d sold at nearby Leonding.7 Described by his teachers as “notoriously cantankerous, willful, arrogant and bad-tempered … moreover … lazy…” this youthful Hitler was recognizable, already angrily defying the world from his teens.8