In the Full Light of the Sun

by Clare Clark

  Herr Rachmann,

  I enclose a copy of the letter sent at your request to Julius Kühler-Schultz. As yet I have received no response to my enquiry but I will forward any reply for your consideration. Please find enclosed also the balance of the monies issued yesterday as fees in advance. As your lawyer, it is my duty to represent the best interests of my clients under the law. As a Jew in Germany, I am no longer confident of my ability to do so. It is with a heavy heart, therefore, that I have decided to retire from legal practice with immediate effect. I regret any inconvenience this may cause you and would like to reassure you that all business discussed prior to this termination remains entirely confidential. I would also be happy to provide recommendations for a suitable replacement.

  I am taking this opportunity to return the property taken by police in Düsseldorf on 18 January 1929. I must inform you that during a search of our offices by police this morning, 11 September 1933, the crates were opened and damage sustained to at least one of the canvases contained therein. One item, a wooden case painted with flowers, was destroyed. I enclose the amended dockets, signed by Gunther Holz, building superintendent. Any application for compensation should be made directly to the Prussian State Police Department.

  Sincerely,

  Frank Berszacki

  The case burns slowly, yellow flames licking over the flowers, the willow tree. I watch as the paint blisters and blackens, until the garden is gone. I do not think that Gregor Rachmann will miss it. He does not need a painted box to remind him that people don’t always keep their word.

  Later that afternoon Gerda and I walk to the telegraph office on Oranienburger Strasse. I send a telegram to Sanary-sur-Mer in the south of France.

  CHANGE OF PLAN STOP V AND THE GIRL SAFE WITH ME AND EAGER TO RETURN HOME STOP ASSUME YOU WILL MAKE NECESSARY ARRANGEMENTS

  F BERSZACKI

  Tuesday 12 September

  The telegraph boy arrives early. Köhler-Schultz’s cable instructs me to go to the offices of Alfred Böhm. I go instead to the public telephone box on the corner. Köhler-Schultz accepts the charges. When the call is put through he is shouting. I wait until he stops and then I tell him about Böhm. I set out my terms very clearly. I wish to be reasonable, to act as far as possible within the law, but I will not negotiate. He listens. Then he tells me he will do as I ask. He is grateful, I think, or as grateful as he is capable of being. He gives me his word but I tell him that will not be sufficient, I will require formal assurances, guarantees. He gives me the name of another lawyer.

  Back at the apartment Gerda is waiting for me. When I nod slowly she holds out her hands to me and I take them in mine. I feel numb, like we have come home to find our house burned down and all we own with it. All we have worked for, everything gone, eaten up by the flames. The future too, burned away, nothing but a blank black void beyond the smoke, one could fall for ever into the fear of it, but in this moment none of it matters because we are alive. We can begin again.

  Tuesday 7 November

  The day is cold and damp, the grey sea and the grey sky blurred together beneath a glaze of drizzle. We huddle against a grey wind sharp with salt and the sting of disinfectant. People are still crowding out of the low sheds on to the quay. Stefan says something but I cannot hear what it is. Porters push past us through the crush, trunks balanced on their heads, their shouts drowned out by the blare of horns and engines and the rolling rattle of chains. Above us the ship from the Red Star Line looms, an unscaleable cliff.

  They are all here to see us off, Stefan and Bettina and Mina and the boys, their caps abandoned who knows where and their wet hair plastered to their scalps as they chase one another, squeezing around the mountains of piled-up luggage, the coils of tarred rope. Even the baby, perched on Bettina’s hip, his face round and pink beneath his tufted knitted cap. When he starts to wail Bettina embraces us quickly, one-sidedly, angling him away, but Gerda reaches out for him and takes him in her arms.

  ‘Don’t cry, little one,’ she says, rubbing her nose against his and, startled, he stops crying and stares at her, his eyes shiny with tears. Softly she sings the snatch of an old song, a song she sang in the long-before, and the baby grins and lurches forwards, grabbing at her hair with his starfish hands. When she gives him back to Bettina there are strands of silver tucked between his fingers.

  People are starting to move towards the gangplank. Summoned by their mother, the older boys sidle up to us and stiffen themselves to be kissed. The younger one tugs at his sleeves, wriggling and elbowing his brother. Standing still is a torture to them.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ Stefan says to Bettina. ‘We’ll meet you at the castle,’ and, as she nods, the boys bound away, their skinny legs releasing like springs. They are Antwerp boys already, the Dutch words easy in their mouths. They never speak of Hannover.

  We stand together in silence, the four of us. Mina chews her lip. She has started to learn English. Her Jewish school has ties with a Dutch chemical company, each year they fund two scholarships to America. Mina wants to go to Princeton.

  ‘If it’s good enough for Albert Einstein,’ she said last night and no one else at the table understood why we laughed.

  The rain is falling harder. Stefan pulls his scarf more tightly around his neck. He has lost much of his old bulk since he left Germany. A smaller man in a smaller life. He works hard, long hours, but he is cheerful. He has found them an apartment at the top of a tall thin house in the north of the city. On fine days, he says, you can see almost to the sea.

  ‘We should go,’ I say and Mina’s face crumples as Gerda takes her in her arms, her hands reaching to clasp tightly around her back.

  I hold my hand out to my brother. He takes it, squeezing hard. Without my reading glasses, the lines on his face are smooth. He looks almost like he used to, when we were boys.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says softly. ‘If you only knew how much I wish we could go back and start again—’

  ‘Aren’t we?’

  He is silent. As his grip slackens I take my hand from his. The ship’s horn sounds, a long sombre wail. I touch his arm lightly then, pressing my hand to his shoulder blade, I pull him towards me. His chin sandpapers my ear as he steps closer, his hands hard against my back. The crowd is shifting. In the crush I am pushed against Gerda. I feel the sharp wing of her elbow through the wool of her coat. Then, still holding Mina tight with one arm, she circles the other around me, pulling Mina into the curve between us. Head bowed, Mina tucks herself in against her father. His arm finds her back. We do not speak. We stand together, the joints and curves of us interlocked, as the rain falls and the ship’s wail echoes over the grey sea.

  Later, as we are herded on to the gangplank, I turn. They are standing where we left them. I think it is them. I take off my hat and I wave it. My face is wet. It tastes of salt. Towards the horizon the weather is lifting, a pale streak of light that turns the water to a beaten pewter. Gerda is crying. I take her hand and together we walk towards our next beginning.

  Author’s Note

  I had been toying with the idea of a book about Vincent van Gogh’s sister-in-law, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, when I stumbled on the extraordinary story that inspired this novel. While the exploits of forgers like Tom Keating and Han van Meegeren, the Dutch artist who famously sold a ‘priceless’ (fake) Vermeer to Hermann Goring, have made them notorious, the van Gogh forgery case that rocked Germany in the 1920s and 1930s remains little-known. The tale of Otto Wacker, the dancer from Düsseldorf who turned to art dealing in the aftermath of Germany’s devastating hyperinflation, planted a seed in my imagination. The book that grew from that seed is very much a work of fiction. I have not cleaved to the historical record, in so far as there is one. Most of my characters have no real-life counterpart. I have altered and invented at will. But Wacker’s story, with its many contradictions and gaps, continues to fascinate me. On several occasions I considered drawing on the facts, only to realise how improbable or even fanciful they were. In
stead I chose to make up my own. Fiction, unlike the truth, cannot defy belief.

  Vincent van Gogh died on 29 July 1890. He left behind a body of work that had never properly been catalogued, except perhaps by his brother, Theo, an art dealer, who died only a few months later.

  In the years that followed, the artist’s reputation grew rapidly and, as prices for his paintings rose, the fakes followed close behind. As early as 1899 a fake van Gogh was sold by the Ambroise Vollard gallery in Paris, and in 1901 another Parisian gallery had two paintings removed from an exhibition because they no longer believed them to be authentic. This did nothing to halt the demand for van Gogh’s paintings, which grew more frenzied every year. In 1921, Germany’s pre-eminent art critic, Julius Meier-Graefe, published a vividly imagined life of the artist, painting him as a madman genius and secular messiah. The purpose of the book, Meier-Graefe wrote, was ‘to further the creation of legend. For there is nothing we need more than new symbols, legends of the humanity that comes from our own loins’. In Germany particularly, still reeling from their humiliating defeat in the Great War, the idea of a tormented hero unjustly spurned struck a powerful chord. The book was a bestseller.

  Three years later, in 1924, Otto Wacker began to introduce his collection of previously unknown van Goghs. He refused to disclose the identity of the paintings’ owner, asserting only that he was a Russian nobleman who had been forced to flee Moscow after the 1917 revolution. Several eminent Russian collectors were known to have collected Impressionist works, including the businessman Ivan Morozov who before the war had owned some two dozen van Goghs, and this lack of provenance did nothing to stem demand. Wacker was also careful to seek authentications of all of his paintings from a number of van Gogh experts in Germany and beyond. He sold the paintings to dealers and collectors in Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, gaining a reputation for humility and straight dealing. It was not until 1928 that a gallery in Berlin cast doubt on the authenticity of several canvases received for an exhibition. But even then the tight-knit art world kept its secrets. The story never reached the newspapers. That July Wacker sold a van Gogh drawing to the Nationalgalerie for nine thousand marks.

  By December, however, things were starting to unravel. Jacob Baart de la Faille, the Dutch expert who had worked for a decade on van Gogh’s catalogue raisonné, had re-examined the paintings and announced that he now considered all thirty-three of the Wacker paintings to be fakes. Wacker’s friend and champion Julius Meier-Graefe was robust in his defence of the pictures. Ludwig Justi, the director of the Nationalgalerie, agreed with de la Faille, declaring them all fakes, and bad fakes at that. Experts across Germany and the Netherlands rushed to weigh in on both sides. Many of them were dealers or collectors with financial interests to protect.

  The police struggled for years to put together a compelling case against Wacker. When he was finally brought to trial in 1932, the experts were no closer to an agreement. The prosecution was unable to prove that Wacker had knowingly and deliberately sold fake van Goghs. They also failed to identify the forger. In a dramatic volte-face, de la Faille changed his testimony in court, suddenly claiming five of Wacker’s paintings to be genuine. Foul play was suspected (though never proved). Wacker was charged with fraud and falsification of documents, and imprisoned for a year. At appeal the sentence was upped to nineteen months and a fine of thirty thousand marks.

  In the end the judges were as equivocal as the art experts. While they dismissed the story of the Russian as nonsensical, their judgment concluded that only eleven of the Wacker paintings could be considered definitively to be fakes. Several more they considered to be genuine van Goghs. This left open the possibility that there might be further authentic canvases among those paintings not produced at trial. It was not until 1984 that Wacker’s Self-Portrait at an Easel, purchased in New York by the American industrialist and art collector Chester Dale, was finally declared to be a forgery.

  These days there is not a single expert who is willing to speak out in defence of Wacker’s van Goghs. None of the canvases survive but, as far as one can tell from grainy reproductions of photographs, many were unconvincing. It is hard to imagine how they could have deceived anyone. But van Gogh was, as Meier-Graefe himself admitted, a ‘painter of weak moments’ and, for many, the desire to believe was very strong. By the time Wacker was uncovered many of these experts were too deeply involved, professionally, financially, perhaps even emotionally, to be able to extricate themselves.

  No one has ever proved who painted Wacker’s pictures. Both Wacker’s father, Hans, and his brother, Leonhard, were able artists. Leonhard contributed several times to the annual Düsseldorf art exhibition and, in 1922, exhibited in that city’s international show. In 1929, the studios of both men were raided by police who seized paintings that, according to a Nationalgalerie curator, were unquestionably attempts to mimic the style of van Gogh. However, Leonhard claimed that these canvases had been given to him for restoration and the police were never able to prove that this was not so. He was never charged.

  Otto Wacker joined the Nazi Party in 1932, some months before it became politically pragmatic to do so. After his release from prison he returned to dance, under the name Olinto Lovaël. There are indications that to promote himself he faked reviews of old shows, including a letter he claimed was from Julius Meier-Graefe, by then long dead, comparing his work to the paintings of Rembrandt, El Greco and van Gogh. In 1946 he performed Zouave, a dance that he dedicated to van Gogh. He must have been disappointed that, unlike Vincent van Gogh, the myth of Otto Wacker never managed to ignite.

  Even today the authenticity of many of van Gogh’s works remains in doubt. Twenty years after he published his canonical catalogue raisonné in 1977, Jan Hulsker raised questions over forty-five of the works included in his original list. Among the doubtful paintings were Dr Gachet, owned by the Musée D’Orsay in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum’s D’Arlésienne. Since then, thirty-eight paintings and drawings have been downgraded by museum curators, though eminent British art historian Martin Bailey puts the number of fakes closer to one hundred. A 1998 Channel 4 documentary presented evidence that one of the iconic Sunflowers canvases, acquired in 1987 by Japan’s Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance Company for a record $39.9 million, was a forgery. As recently as 2016 the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam issued a statement strongly denying the authenticity of The Lost Arles Sketchbook, which purports to contain sixty-five previously unknown drawings by the artist.

  Not that these scandals diminish our fascination with van Gogh. According to Bailey, the patch of floor in front of the Sunflowers in London’s National Gallery gets more scuffed than any other part of the museum, and the postcard is their number-one bestseller. Despite all the questions, all the doubts, the work of Vincent van Gogh endures. The myths endure too. They are both too powerful to let go.

  Acknowledgements

  As always, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the historians and writers who have guided and inspired me during the research for this novel. It would take another book to pay tribute to them all but I want in particular to acknowledge two works that underpin all the others and without which I would never have been able to conceive of my story: Solar Dance: Van Gogh, Forgery and the Eclipse of Certainty by Modris Eksteins and A Real van Gogh: How the Art World Struggles with Truth by Henk Tromp. Among a huge number of articles, two by Stefan Koldehoff, ‘Van Gogh and the Problem of Authenticity’ and ‘The Wacker Forgeries’, published online by the Van Gogh Museum Journal, were another key resource, as were Martin Bailey’s ‘Van Gogh: The Fakes Debate’, which appeared in Apollo magazine, and ‘The van Gogh Fakes: The Wacker Affair’ by Walter Feilchenfeldt, in the Dutch journal Simiolus. Feilchenfeldt’s father, also Walter, was managing director of Cassirer’s, the prestigious gallery in Berlin which first raised questions about the authenticity of Wacker’s van Goghs.

  Among the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of volumes I devoured about Berlin in the 1920s and 193
0s, there were a handful I came back to again and again. A Dance Between Flames: Berlin Between the Wars by Anton Gill; Before the Deluge by Otto Friedrich; Weimar Berlin: Playing on the Tips of the Waves by Wayne Andersen; Weimar Eyewitness by Egon Larsen; and Weimar Culture by Peter Gay immersed me entirely in the world of interwar Berlin. The work of contemporary German novelists like Vicki Baum, Alfred Döblin, Gabriele Tergit and Hans Fallada provided the opportunity to step back in time, as did The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg, a brilliantly curated collection of pieces by contemporary journalists, intellectuals and artists which encompassed everything from Bauhaus architecture to Jewish persecution and the rise of the New Woman. Days of Masquerade: Life Stories of Lesbian Women During the Third Reich by Claudia Schoppmann and Allison Brown, and Lesbians in Germany: 1890s–1920s by Lillian Faderman and Brigitte Eriksson offered insight into the challenges faced by gay women in Germany in this period.

  When it came to life under Nazi rule, I relied heavily on Life in the Third Reich by Richard Bessel, A Social History of the Third Reich by Richard Grunberger, In Hitler’s Germany by Bert Engelmann, and Life in the Third Reich: Daily Life in Nazi Germany by Paul Roland. Both Jewish Daily Life in Germany 1618–1945, edited by Marion A. Kaplan, and Nazi Germany and the Jews by Saul Friedländer provided me with detailed and often distressing first-hand accounts of the torments endured by Jews during the Third Reich, as did the personal diaries of Victor Klemperer.

  There are many translations of van Gogh’s extraordinary letters to his brother: Letters of Vincent van Gogh to His Brother 1872–1886 and Further Letters of Vincent van Gogh to His Brother 1886–89, translated by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger (Constable, 1927–1929); Dear Theo: An Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh from His Letters, ed. Irving Stone (Constable, 1937); The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, edited and translated by Mark Roskill (Atheneum, 1963); The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, edited by Ronald Leuw and translated by Arnold Pomerans (Penguin Classics, 1997); and the latest and most complete, the magisterial six-volume Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker (Thames & Hudson, 2009) have all left their mark on this novel. Among the innumerable biographies, I would particularly recommend Van Gogh by Steven Naitch and Gregory White Smith, and Van Gogh: A Power Seething by Julian Bell, as well as editor Kodera Tsukasa’s fascinating collection of essays, The Mythology of van Gogh, which attempts to unpick a century of myth-making and what those myths tells us about ourselves. Martin Bailey’s The Sunflowers are Mine (Frances Lincoln, 2013) is an enthralling study of what is surely van Gogh’s most iconic image. Finally, this list would not be complete without the work of Julius Meier-Graefe, who, though much altered, remains the inspiration for the character of Julius Köhler-Schultz. His book, Vincent van Gogh, A Biographical Study, translated by John Holroyd Reece (Harcourt Brace, 1933), might not always stick strictly to the facts but it contains some of the most vivid and evocative writing about painting that I have ever read.