It is quite amazing that such a fragile object has survived in such good condition – with a lot of help from conservators – for so many centuries, and in so many incarnations: first as a roll of silk, then as a wedding dress, a Torah Ark curtain and a displaced refugee in exile, until it was rediscovered and reborn, brought back to life by collectors and conservators at the museum.
It was briefly on show in June 2012 for a weekend to celebrate the 250th wedding anniversary of Moses and Fromet, so that their descendants could see it. It won’t be displayed again. It will remain tucked away, a testimony to love, and to survival against the odds.
[The Torah curtain]
It was a very personal gift, made from Mendelssohns wife’s wedding dress, perhaps to celebrate the birth of their daughter, Henriette.
THE NATIONAL GALLERY, ON MUSEUM Island in Berlin, is in what became East Berlin when the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, to divide the city into a western, capitalist sector and an eastern, socialist sector. When the wall went up, some of the National Gallery’s collection ended up on one side of the wall, some on the other. A new national gallery – the Neue Nationalgalerie – was built to house the collection in the west. Both are still there, the old and the new.
A lot of the National Gallery’s collection was taken by the Nazis in their ‘Degenerate Art’ campaign was in 1937. Paintings were burned or, in many cases, sold – auctioned in Switzerland and sold to buyers all over the world. Many paintings have still not been handed back: a lot of the National Gallery’s collection is missing.
One of the best of these missing paintings is The Tower of the Blue Horses (DerTurm derblauen Pferde) by Franz Marc (1880–1916), a German Expressionist painter and printmaker. No one knows where it is; it is listed in the gallery’s catalogues, and there are a lot of rumours, but its location is a mystery. We do know exactly what it looked like however, which is lucky, because it was unusual to photograph in colour at the time. The painting shows four blue horses, one above the other and they are shown in a landscape of boulder-like objects. A rainbow arcs above them, painted in bright colours of red, orange, yellow and green.
Marc was a big fan of van Gogh:
Van Gogh is for me the most authentic, the greatest, the most poignant painter I know. To paint a bit of the most ordinary nature, putting all one’s faith and longings into it – that is the supreme achievement… Now I paint … only the simplest things … Only in them are the symbolism, the pathos, and the mystery of nature to be found.
He painted The Tower of the Blue Horses in the winter of 1913. He used the colour blue to represent masculinity and spirituality, yellow for feminine joy and red for an atmosphere of violence. He loved to paint animals, for they symbolized innocence to him; he believed animals were purer in spirit than man. When he joined the First World War, he found it utterly traumatic. He began to see ugliness in animals, too: in a letter to his wife in 1915 he said that he was no longer able to see the beauty which animals had once represented for him. He adhered to a bizarre school of thought that believed war would purify the universe of all that was bad.
In 1916, he was killed by a shell splinter during the Battle of Verdun. The government had recommended that he be taken out of the army, as he was such a notable artist, but the orders for him to be reassigned did not make it in time.
One of his last letters read:
I understand well that you speak as easily of death as of something which doesn’t frighten you. I feel precisely the same. In this war, you can try it out on yourself an opportunity life seldom offers one … nothing is more calming than the prospect of the peace of death … the one thing common to all. It leads us back into normal ‘being’. The space between birth and death is an exception, in which there is much to fear and suffer. The only true, constant, philosophical comfort is the awareness that this exceptional condition will pass and that ‘I-conciousness’, which is always restless, always piquant, in all seriousness inaccessible, will again sink back into its wonderful peace before birth … whoever strives from purity and knowledge, to him death always comes as a saviour.
In 1919, the National Gallery in Berlin bought The Tower of the Blue Horses, and it stayed there for 18 years, until the Nazis declared it ‘degenerate’ and took it down. It was displayed once in 1937, in a very controversial exhibition called ‘Degenerate Art’ or ‘Entartete Kunst’, put together by the Nazis to mock ‘degenerate’ avant-garde art. Pieces were crammed together in the exhibition space with graffiti-style comments about how much the state had spent to obtain them. The show toured Germany and Austria and three million people saw it. There were complaints about The Tower of the Blue Horses appearing in the show, so it was taken out. Then it disappeared, one of the many countless masterpieces that did so. It may have been destroyed. There are also rumours that it is in a Swiss vault.
In May 2012, an artist, Martin Gostner, created an outdoor installation at the Neue Nationalgalerie on the theme of the missing painting called Der Erker der blauen Pferde (The Oriel of the Blue Horses). He sent out invitations to the show that featured a reproduction of the painting in an oriel, or bay window. Then, in secret, he left four pieces of blue horse dung, outside the gallery. Only some people saw them, others might not have noticed them. He wanted the sculptures to pose questions about the painting: Where is it? Does it still exist? What traces would the four blue horses leave behind? What signal could the horses give their owners?
The painting is still very much in the consciousness of art lovers in Berlin, and still considered a part of the National Gallery’s collection, even though nobody knows where it is.
Back when the painting hung in the gallery, it was a favourite of Hans Scholl, brother of Sophie Scholl, German teenagers in the 1930s. Sophie and Hans joined the Hitler Youth, but their father persuaded them that Hitler was destroying the German people. Their father was later sent to prison for telling his secretary, ‘The war! It is already lost. This Hitler is God’s scourge on mankind, and if the war doesn’t end soon the Russians will be sitting in Berlin.’
Hans and Sophie believed it was their duty as citizens, even during wartime, to stand up for what they believed, and speak out against the Nazi regime. They wrote a leaflet entitled ‘The White Rose’, along with other students and professors from the University of Munich, describing how the Nazi system had imprisoned the German people and was destroying them.
The group wrote six more leaflets and contacted resistance groups across Germany. They wrote graffiti such as ‘Down with Hitler!’ and ‘Freedom!’ in the streets. The Nazis became furious as resistance against them grew stronger. The Gestapo could not initially track down any members of the group, but after several months, Hans and Sophie were arrested at the University of Munich. Hans had a freshly printed leaflet in his pocket.
Four days later, they were put on trial. Sophie Scholl remarked: ‘Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare to express themselves as we did.’ The two siblings were found guilty of ‘conspiracy to commit high treason’ and, that afternoon, after saying goodbye to their parents, they were led to the guillotine. Sophie was 21, Hans 24.
Copies of their final pamphlet were smuggled out of Germany and air-dropped back into the country by Allied Forces, which led to more resistance against the Nazis towards the end of the war. The Scholl siblings have gone down in history in Germany. They tell the story of the ‘other’ Germany, of the artists, the poets and thinkers who believed in the freedom of the human spirit.
[Franz Marc]
According to his first biographer, Alois Schardt, Marc was so ugly at birth that his father, when taking a first close look at his son at baptism, fainted. He looks alright to me.
[The Tower of the Blue Horses]
The painting once hung in the National Gallery in Berlin but it was declared ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis in 1937 and, soon after, it disappeared. It’s lucky it was photographed in colour so we know
exactly what it looked like.
[Hans Scholl (1918–1943) left, and Sophie Scholl (1921–1943) centre]
Back when the painting hung in the National gallery it was a favourite of Hans Scholl, brother of Sophie. The siblings were members of the White Rose, a student group in Munich that was part of the resistance movement in Nazi Germany.
EACH MEMBER OF THE ‘PARTY’ was an MI6 agent. They had come to set up a base in which to make plans in the event of war.
They turned the water tower of the manor house into a listening station and called it Station X, which is what Bletchley Park itself became known as during the war. The X stood for ten, as it was the tenth such listening station established in the country.
I headed up the rickety stairs of the tower and stood inside the original Station X, soaking up the atmosphere: this is where listening in on the enemy began in Bletchley Park. The room is off limits to museum visitors.
After war broke out, more and more codebreakers joined the initial team. They were an eclectic bunch of chess grandmasters, university students, mathematicians and musicians. Some were recruited with the help of the Daily Telegraph crossword. Entrants sat the crossword under exam conditions, and those who completed it in less than 12 minutes were called to Bletchley Park.
At the peak of the Second World War, 9,000 people were working in three shifts around the clock, deciphering 6,000 messages a day that had been scrambled by the German Enigma and Lorenz machines. Enigma was a machine which looked like a typewriter, with keys that lit up, that was used by the Germans to encode their messages. The deciphering team was codenamed Ultra and was kept a secret throughout the war. Churchill referred to them only as his ‘Most Secret Source’. He once described the sharp, bright minds who worked busily at the park as, ‘The geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled.’ Thanks to them his government could anticipate the movements of the enemy. It has been said that the war ended two years earlier than it might otherwise have done because of the work at Bletchley Park.
The codebreakers did not work out the initial solution for Enigma – they were given it by Poland, just before the outbreak of war. The first to work out the code, in 1932, was a young Polish mathematician called Marian Rejewski and it was he who passed on the secret to the British. The code gave everyone at the park a fighting chance of decoding the Germans’ military messages, even though they changed their system of encryption every day.
The Germans had no idea their codes had been broken, even though, at times, messages were being read in England as quickly as they were by their German recipients. Even years after the war, people who worked at Bletchley Park kept their wartime lives a secret.
The ban on talking about Bletchley Park was officially lifted in 1974, but many of the 2,500 veterans still alive won’t talk about what they did there. One couple met during a Scottish dancing party on the lawn of Bletchley Park. They later married but never once discussed their work there in 30 years of marriage.
I met curator Gillian Mason, who has been working on Bletchley Park’s archives since 2010, in Cottage 3, the building in which the first codebreak of the war took place. She explained that the archives of Bletchley Park are still top secret, not because they are classified, but because there hasn’t been time to go through all the cupboards, drawers and rooms packed with papers, telegrams and intelligence that have lain unexplored since the war ended.
At that time, Bletchley Park was abandoned. It was nearly sold to property developers in the 1990s, but was saved by veterans. It was turned into a museum, but until 2010 it was short of funding. Gillian was then hired to begin work on the huge unmined treasure trove of hundreds of thousands of maps and papers.
We had a nose around, pulling drawers open to reveal maps and books full of telegrams. Some folders stuffed full of German intelligence are marked ‘TOP SECRET’ and others are marked ‘MOST SECRET’. ‘What is the difference?’ I asked. It turns out they are the same thing, only the ‘most secret’ files date from before the Americans came into the war. When American codebreakers joined the effort at Bletchley Park, they weren’t sure what ‘most secret’ meant. ‘Is that, like, kind of secret, or what?’ they asked. Bletchley Park agents had to get lots of new rubber stamps, this time marked ‘TOP SECRET’, so everything was crystal clear for their American pals.
In among all the telegrams and files was a message sent by Eddie Chapman, Britain’s most successful double agent, nicknamed Agent Zigzag. Chapman had always been a bit of a bad boy. As the Second World War began, he was in prison in Jersey for a series of robberies. As a member of a ‘jelly gang’, he blew up safes using gelignite – invented by Alfred Nobel. Chapman had made lots of money and, before he was caught, for a while lived it up as a playboy in Soho.
When the Germans occupied Jersey in 1940, Chapman was still in jail. He was desperate to get out and return to England to meet his new-born daughter. He offered his services to the Germans as a spy, saying he wanted revenge on the British, who had put him in prison. Eventually, after much deliberation and questioning, he was hired.
The German Secret Service nicknamed him Little Fritz and trained him up. They wanted him to attack an aircraft factory in Herefordshire which made Mosquito bombers. In 1942, just before Christmas, he was thrown out of a plane above a field in Cambridge and parachuted into a muddy field. Bletchley Park had been reading his telegrams and had named him Agent X. They knew he was about to arrive and had planned Operation Nightcap to find him. They didn’t have to try hard, because as soon as he landed, he knocked on the door of a startled couple that lived in Ely and turned himself into the police. He then became a double agent: Agent Zigzag.
He had been trained to send telegrams back to his German bosses, with a sign that would let them know he had not been captured. The sign was five Fs – ‘FFFFF’ – because of his nickname, Little Fritz. It was vital that he kept using this so that the Germans would believe he was still working for them. He and the British MI5 faked an attack on the Herefordshire factory, using a magician, Jasper Maskelyne, to create an illusion. Even the factory staff believed their workplace had been destroyed. So successful a double agent was he that Agent Zigzag, aka Little Fritz, was awarded the Iron Cross by the Germans, the only British person so honoured.
However, he nearly gave the game away shortly after his arrival in England. At 9.45 on 27 December, he sent a telegram to Germany that read, ‘CALL AT 1000 IF PARIS UNABLE RECEIVE ME. OK FRITZ. HU HA HU HO.’ He sat down in the kitchen to have a cup of tea, and his heart sank: he had forgotten his crucial sign, ‘FFFFF’. He was terrified that his bosses back in Germany would smell a rat and he would be caught out.
He sent another message to cover up his mistake. We found the message in a book, kept in a drawer of the archives. It reads: ‘FFFFF. SORRY DRUNK OVER XMAS. FORGOT FFFFF IN LAST MESSAGE. FRITZ. HAPPY XMAS.’ Fortunately, that one did the trick, and he carried on his double-agent work for Britain, helping the war effort in his own way, alongside the codecrackers in Buckinghamshire.
We also found a lexicon from 1812, a sort of dictionary of code given by Lord Castlereagh, who was foreign minister at the time. Gillian liked the book, as ‘it was the beginning of Britain using code for secret correspondence.’
It wasn’t just coded German messages that were intercepted and deciphered – lots of people worked on Japanese messages too. Codebreakers working on those had to have a crash course in Japanese (on average, it takes two years to learn Japanese, but the codebreakers did it in six months). We found some boxes that were full of flashcards covered in Japanese characters which recruits to the park had used to learn the language.
We opened some drawers and found maps, on tracing paper, showing Japanese convoy routes, the coastline of Europe, and Hungary. Most of the maps were marked ‘ULTRA’. Gillian said it was ‘frustrating but exciting’ to be in charge of the whole archive, because she often can’t find the things she’s looking for but frequently discovers unexpected gems in the process. As we we
re talking, she opened a drawer and said, ‘Hang on is this a map showing Bletchley Park’s communication lines? That’s a bit of a find.’
We stuck our heads into a room filled with wartime memorabilia: toys, clothes, uniforms, ration containers, grenades, gas masks, books – everything from the home front. New things are sent to the museum all the time.
The most touching things I saw in the archives were photographs of winter scenes at the park. In one photograph, young women skate on the lake, while another lady, all wrapped up, plays the accordion. In another photograph, codebreakers are having some time off and having a snowball fight. In the summer, the people working at Bletchley Park played rounders and tennis.
Equally lovely are programmes from shows the codebreakers put on. Some were great singers and actors, and they performed operas and plays. Some of the top codebreakers are listed in the programmes. Barbara Abernathy, one of the original members of Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party, was production secretary in a performance of French Without Tears.
Bletchley Park is a great place to visit. You can see an Enigma machine in the bike shed where Alan Turing, one of the top codebreakers, used to work (it was quieter than his office). Something of an eccentric, he cycled around the countryside in his gas mask to fend off hayfever, and he kept a mug, still there today, chained to his radiator so nobody would steal it, leaving him short of a cup for tea. There are often veterans from the war visiting the park.
The Secret Museum Page 24