The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  Just as previously the state had attracted progressive artists, Thüringen would now begin to draw intelligentsia of a darker ilk. Wilhelm Frick promoted the eugenicist Hans F. K. Günther to professor of race biology at the university in Jena. Günther, who went by the nickname of Race-Günther or the Race Pope, was regarded at this time as the preeminent world authority on race research. Günther’s theories would to a large degree form the basis for Nazi race politics. Another race theorist, the architect and culture critic Paul Schultze-Naumburg, was appointed the head of the Art College in Weimar, which had replaced Gropius’s Bauhaus school. Schultze-Naumburg, who among other works had written the book Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race), felt that real art could only be created by racially pure artists. Frick’s right-hand man, the hard-boiled Nazi and literary expert, Hans Severus Ziegler, was brought in as the political expert for culture, art, and theater. A few years later he became the president of the Schiller Association and the creative director of the National Theater in Weimar.

  An extensive program was also set in motion to “Nazify” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which required a great deal of dexterity and work. Although nationalists had already during the 1800s begun to twist the image of Goethe, he was still known as a humanist and an internationalist—values to which the founders of the Weimar Republic had paid allegiance. Goethe was also enveloped in a range of “uncomfortable” connections, not least of which was the suggestion that he had been a “friend of the Jews,” and even certain rumors that Goethe himself had had Jewish blood. Further still, the Goethe Association and several of the institutions in Weimar with links to the national poet were “infiltrated” by Jews. For instance, Professor Julius Wahle, the previous director of the Goethe and Schiller Archive, was a Jew.

  Fortunately, the then head of the archive, Hans Wahl, was willing to take on the task of “laundering” Goethe and preparing a place of honor for him in the National Socialist pantheon. A few years earlier, Wahl had taken part in the establishment of the Weimar chapter of the Militant League for German Culture.

  Wahl was prepared to go the extra mile to save the honor of Weimar’s great son. As the vice chairman of the Goethe Association, he ensured that non-Aryans were forbidden from becoming new members, and he asserted that the association was “the most anti-Jewish of all literary associations in Germany.”15 In actual fact the literary association did not kick out its Jewish members until the end of the 1930s. The association tried, using its journal, to scour away Goethe’s humanist “aura” by publishing texts on how the poet had predicted the rise of the Third Reich. Hans Wahl suggested that Goethe had been both an anti-Semite and an opponent of Freemasonry, which was a clear lie—the poet had even been a Freemason himself. Wahl made threats to silence any researchers who suggested that Goethe had been a “friend of the Jews.” The chairman of the association, Julius Petersen, took the process one step further when he likened Goethe to Hitler—both were “great” statesmen and artists. When Thomas Mann arrived in the city in 1932 to take part in the centenary of the poet’s death, he noted with distaste: “Weimar is a center of Hitlerism.”16

  The crowning glory of Wahl’s act of mutilation was the new Goethe Museum, the financing of which was personally ensured by Adolf Hitler. The museum opened in 1935, in a building adjoining Goethe’s home. At the entrance, Wahl placed a bust of Adolf Hitler, with a plaque giving fulsome thanks to their patron. On the wall, a “family tree” of Goethe was put up, as a way of pointing to the poet’s pure Aryan lineage.

  Today, every trace of the museum’s patron has been tidied away. The bust has been removed, as has the family tree. But there is still a medallion of Adolf Hitler somewhere in the mortar of one of the cornerstones.

  • • •

  “Everything started with the fire,” says Michael Knoche as he gazes out the window. The room at the top of the house, known as the Green Castle, has a beautiful view toward the Park an der Ilm. Lush July greenery almost presses in through the window, which is wide open. Knoche, a modest-looking man in a gray checkered suit, is the director of one of the most famous libraries in Germany: the Duchess Anna Amalia Library. In 1761, Duchess Anna Amalia of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel had her sixteenth-century castle converted into a library for the collections of the court. The library, furnished in rococo style, is on the list of UNESCO’s World Heritage sites. Today it is a part of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, a foundation that oversees the running of Weimar’s cultural institutions.

  “When I came to Weimar in the early 1990s I did not believe there was a problem here with plundered objects. I had some contacts with Jewish organizations in connection with this matter, but I said to them, ‘There are no problems with it here.’ That was the general view. But the fire changed that,” says Knoche.

  One night in September 2004 a spark shot out from a damaged electrical cable and caught in the dry roof beams. The upper floor of the renowned white rococo library, with tens of thousands of tinder-dry volumes, caught fire. The same went for the oil paintings, portraits of five centuries of royalty in the German Empire. Fifty thousand volumes were lost in the flames, many of them irreplaceable first editions from the 1500s. The Anna Amalia Library, where Goethe worked, housed Germany’s largest collection of editions of Shakespeare and Faust. Thousands of books were also damaged by smoke, heat, and water.

  “Some of what was lost is irreplaceable; other losses will take decades to replace,” says Knoche, who is nonetheless relieved that he managed to save the library’s Gutenberg Bible from the flames.

  The library has been rebuilt, but tens of thousands of books are still being kept frozen while awaiting extremely time-consuming restoration work. The fire not only decimated a part of Germany’s cultural inheritance—in fact, the flames also exposed a much less edifying part of the library’s history.

  “After the fire we started going through every book in the library. We had to form an overall idea of what had been lost. We scrutinized the old journals to check when and how the books had been acquired. The journals did not expressly suggest anything ‘illegal’ had taken place, but there were other signs that raised our suspicions about the books not having come into the collection in a proper manner, if you could put it like that . . . There were stamps, correspondence, and other things that indicated something of that nature.”

  The library’s investigation showed that more than 35,000 books had been added to the collection between 1933 and 1945, the provenance of which was “suspicious.” This new information has forced the Anna Amalia Library and Klassik Stiftung Weimar to completely reassess its own history and the role of the library during the war. Hans Wahl has long been regarded as the savior of Weimar, and he is still a controversial figure in the history of the town—so controversial that recently a whole research conference was held to look into his record.

  After the war, Hans Wahl managed to convince the Soviet authorities of his innocence, in spite of having been a member of the Nazi Party and his repeated assertions of an aggressive anti-Semitism. Wahl not only managed to retain his old job in the new regime, in 1945 he was even promoted to vice chairman of a newly formed cultural body for the democratic rebuilding of Germany, the first task of which was to rid German culture of Fascist influence.17 In 1946 he was also made the head of the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar.

  Wahl’s apologists have suggested that he played a double game during the Nazi era in order to save the cultural inheritance of Weimar. Deep inside, they go on, he was a democrat who steered the town through its most difficult period, in the process making the political compromises that he believed were necessary. After the war Wahl maintained that his purpose all along had been to “keep Goethe’s face clean through this period.”18 On the other hand, the image of Wahl as an “involuntary Nazi” has become increasingly difficult to defend. Five years before the Nazis assumed power in Germany he had already been involved in the formation of the Weimar chapter of Alfred Rosenberg’s Mi
litant League for German Culture.

  New information about the Anna Amalia collection in recent years has further weakened the defense of Wahl. His ability to get off so lightly, not to say wholly without blemish, after the war, is partially explained by the interest of the new regime in gaining legitimacy, much as the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, by making use of Goethe. Yet again the substance of Goethe was going to be cast in a new form. Wahl, who a decade earlier had transformed Goethe into an anti-Semite, would now help conjure the poet into a Socialist hero.

  Hans Wahl died of a heart attack in the Goethe year of 1949. In recognition of his custodianship of Goethe’s spiritual legacy, Wahl was given a state funeral and laid to rest beside Schiller and Goethe at the Historische Friedhof in Weimar. In his honor, the street leading to the Goethe and Schiller Archive on the other side of the Park an der Ilm was named after him, and to this day bears his name.

  “He is still a person who’s much talked about in Weimar. For some people he’s a hero, and for others . . . Well, he’s not a person to be seen in those terms. The truth is that the Communists needed people like Wahl. They needed Weimar. The Red Army trophy brigades stole art and culture all over Germany, but they left the town untouched. As if Weimar were a holy place,” Knoche tells me.

  Today, three experts on provenance investigation are going through the entire Klassik Stiftung Weimar and the millions of books, documents, letters, works of art, and other objects that the foundation holds in trust. I take the elevator down from Knoche’s office on the upper floor. It descends past the entrance lobby, under the cellars, and even farther down. Under the castle, the institutes, the library, the beer halls, and the slanted, cobbled lanes, long straight catacombs extend outward in an underground network. It is quite beautiful, with the reflections of the lamps on the polished floors. The greater part of the collection, nowadays, is kept in this subterranean complex—in controlled conditions in terms of light, air, and temperature.

  Two of the foundation’s provenance researchers, Rüdiger Haufe and Heike Krokowski, show me to a shelf along the wall of a very long corridor. Here they have collected their “finds.”

  No less than the librarians in the Stadtbibliothek in Berlin, Hans Wahl accepted the unique opportunity presented to him of expanding the collection. Haufe and Krokowski take some books from the shelf and show me the beautiful nameplates of Jewish families who once lived here in Weimar. Some of the books were “gifts” from the Gestapo or the party. Others came from the central sorting station of the Preussische Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. A few larger batches were purchased from unscrupulous book dealers who had made good business out of fleeing Jews, from Vienna among other places.

  But Hans Wahl also kept his eye on particular collections—more specifically, those belonging to the Jewish businessman Arthur Goldschmidt, who had made his fortune manufacturing animal feed. However, Goldschmidt’s real passion lay elsewhere, namely in the collection of books. At the time of the Nazis’ assumption of power he had a library comprising about forty thousand books. The jewel of this library was a unique, and well-known, collection of some two thousand antique almanacs from 1600 to the 1800s. Goldschmidt had been fascinated by the proliferation in this era of illustrated almanacs on various themes, everything from ballets and carnivals to insects and agriculture.19 The almanacs were often aimed at certain groups, and referenced important festivals or the dates of flowering of certain plants. Literary almanacs were also issued, featuring poets and authors. Not unexpectedly, Goethe, finding himself interested in the format, had published a few almanacs of his own, of which Goldschmidt had managed to acquire first editions. In 1932 Goldschmidt published a bibliography on the subject, entitled Goethe im Almanach, a publication that Wahl took note of. It just so happened that the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar lacked these precise almanacs in its own collection. A few years later Wahl got his chance when Arthur Goldschmidt’s company was confiscated by the state. For the sake of his own survival, Goldschmidt was forced to sell his collection to the Goethe and Schiller Archive. Goldschmidt himself estimated that the value of the collection was at least 50,000 reichsmarks. Wahl notified him that the archive could not pay more than one reichsmark per almanac. Goldschmidt ought to be willing to “make a sacrifice” to see his collection brought into the renowned archive, Wahl argued.20 Like so many other Jews in 1930s Germany, Goldschmidt did not find himself in a decent bargaining position. It was impossible to get such a well-known collection out of Germany, and the family’s assets had started running dry. Goldschmidt had no option but to accept Wahl’s offer. Wahl, in an internal report, was able to confirm with satisfaction that the whole thing “had been an unusually advantageous affair, resulting in a very desirable addition to the archive’s poor collection of almanacs.” He also mentioned how the archive had managed to purchase the collection at such a modest price: “for the obvious reason that Herr Goldschmidt was a Jew.”21 Toward the end of the 1930s, the family managed to leave Nazi Germany and flee to South America, where Goldschmidt died, impoverished, in Bolivia.

  After the war, the almanacs were moved from the Goethe and Schiller Archive to the Anna Amalia Library.22 The provenance for these valuable almanacs was only indicated by a cryptic A, to denote the owner’s first name. Only in 2006, once the library had begun its investigation, did suspicions arise that something was amiss.

  “With the help of the London office of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe we managed to trace the descendants, who came here to look at the collection,” Rüdiger Haufe says.

  After negotiations the two parties agreed that the collection should remain in Weimar, but that the foundation would compensate the family for the actual value—which eventually led to the library paying 100,000 euros for the collection.

  The Goldschmidt case is the most valuable restitution to date from a German library. But in spite of almost ten years of investigations at the Anna Amalia Library, a lot of work still remains to be done. The library has managed to give back a small number of stolen books, but many more are still hiding in the catacombs under Weimar. “By 2018 we plan to have completed our run-through of the years from 1933 to 1945. But then there will be all the books still to look at that came into the collection after the war, all the way up to the present day. Quite honestly I don’t know how much time it will take, but quite clearly it will go on for at least another decade. Sometimes people speak of this as a process that will take an entire generation,” Michael Knoche tells me before I leave his office.

  The collector Arthur Goldschmidt’s ex libris, an illustration of his own experience as a German frontline soldier in the First World War. Among other items, the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar acquired his valuable collection of literary almanacs.

  Down underground, Rüdiger Haufe and Heike Krokowski carry on taking books from a shelf and placing them on a table in front of me. As in so many other German libraries I am about to visit, they want to separate these books from the rest, also in a physical sense, as if they were contaminated. To cut them away from the main body of the library and keep them in isolation on a shelf, at a safe distance from the rest of the collection, avoiding the risk of contagion. Hundreds of books from hundreds of collections.

  Haufe shows me a book that they recently found, from Arthur Goldschmidt’s library. On the inside is his ex libris depicting a soldier, sitting under a tree, reading. The bookmark is dated 1914–1918. The illustration is of Goldschmidt himself, who fought for Germany in the First World War. Maybe it is a memory of the consolation that books gave him in the wartime trenches, a possibility to escape for a moment in dreams. Every book carries a story of theft, blackmail, and a tragic fate. At best, it may be a story of flight, of bailing out on a life—but at worst a story of people who have left no trace behind except for these books. I ask the two men what they will do with the books that are left behind, unable to find a way home. Haufe and Krokowski look at each other; the th
ought seems never to have occurred to them. They shrug, as if to say, Don’t know. Maybe they’ll just stay where they are, then.

  [ 4 ]

  HIMMLER’S LIBRARY

  Munich

  At first sight, the yellow colossus on Ludwigstrasse in Munich looks like an ominous fortress, with bare facades and small, slit windows. The massive brick building, which houses the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, extends across a whole block. The historian Stephan Kellner, a man with stubbly black hair and a gold ring in one ear, meets me by the entrance.

  “This is the easiest way,” he says, leading me out of the fortress. We go around the building, crossing the unkempt park behind the library. At the far end of it is a little house, half-overgrown with ivy. On the other side of the house one can make out the English Garden, where in 1937 Adolf Hitler inaugurated his museum, Haus der Deutschen Kunst. For the past ten years, in this little house behind the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Kellner and his colleagues have been examining the library’s enormous collection, focusing on thefts from the period of the Third Reich. The library, whose collection numbers some ten million volumes, is built on the royal library of Bavaria and, even as early as the 1500s, was already considered the finest library north of the Alps. Its historical collection is one of the most renowned in the world, with one of the largest collection of books printed before 1500, so-called incunabula. But like so many other German libraries, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek also carries a heavy burden of pilfered stock.

  “This is not a hobby for me, it’s a sort of obligation. It’s about my family history; my grandfather was a Jew. He lived here but he was forced to emigrate to Colombia. That’s why I feel a personal duty to work with this,” Kellner says, showing me into a room where books have been neatly laid out on a large table.