Causa Kirchner

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Berlin street scene , 1913

The return of the painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner : Berlin Street Scene to the heiress of the former Jewish owner and the resulting reactions are referred to as the Causa Kirchner . In August 2006, the then Berlin Senator for Culture, Thomas Flierl, announced that the State of Berlin would grant the request for the handover of Anita Halpins, the granddaughter of the Jewish art collector Alfred Hess , who lived in Great Britain, and that the painting would be restituted in accordance with the Washington Declaration . The painting was exhibited in the Brücke-Museum Berlin since 1980 . After the return, the "street scene" was auctioned on November 8, 2006 in Christie's New York auction house for almost 30 million euros, the new owner was the private museum of art collectors Ronald Lauder and Serge Sabarsky , the Neue Galerie in New York.

Legal basis for returns

In December 1998, Germany signed the so-called Washington Declaration with eleven guiding principles, thereby undertaking to locate works of art that were confiscated during the Nazi era, to find the rightful owners or their heirs and to quickly take the necessary steps to to arrive at fair and equitable solutions. With this in mind, on December 14, 1999, a “Joint Declaration by the Federal Government, the Länder and the municipal umbrella organizations on the discovery and return of cultural property stolen from Nazi persecution, especially those belonging to Jews” (Joint Declaration) and the international regulation in German law recorded. However, this is not an individually enforceable claim , but a moral obligation that the state has assumed for its public collections and museums.

In the concrete application of the law, this means that the statute of limitations that has expired for years will not be used and that a decision will be made on the return of stolen works of art from Jewish property on the basis of the legal principles of the Allies . As early as 1945 it was stipulated that robbery should be understood as not only the taking away, but also the sale of property that had taken place under the pressure of persecution, through discriminatory tax levies, professional bans and deprivation of property, in order to livelihood or emigration among the steadily deteriorating Funding conditions. The heiress's request for return was negotiated on this legal basis. The state of Berlin should have proven that the widow Hess achieved and actually received a reasonable purchase price when she sold the Kirchner painting and that the deal would have been concluded even without the Nazi regime. The city of Berlin was unable to provide this evidence.

The provenance of the painting

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Berlin street scene from 1913 is one of a total of eleven paintings from the street scenes series that were created between 1913 and 1915, along with the associated sketches, drawings and prints. This cycle is considered to be one of the most important works of German Expressionism .

Alfred Hess, co-owner of a shoe factory in Erfurt , promoter and collector of Expressionist art, probably bought the painting in 1918 from the art dealer Ludwig Schames in Frankfurt am Main. In the Great Depression in 1929, the shoe factory M. and L. Hess AG got into financial difficulties. Alfred Hess died in 1931, his son, Hans Hess , sold the Erfurt villa as the sole heir and solved the inheritance problems. The inherited art collection comprised around 80 oil paintings of classical modernism , 200 drawings and watercolors as well as 4,000 graphics and remained almost untouched until 1933.

Tekla Hess, the widow, moved from Erfurt to Lichtenfels in Franconia to live with her mother and took the collection of paintings with her to her new place of residence. Hans Hess lived in Berlin as a subtenant of the writer Elisabeth Hauptmann and worked for Ullstein Verlag . A few months after the National Socialists came to power , he saw himself threatened by house searches by the Gestapo as well as at his job in a Jewish company. In 1933 he emigrated to London via Paris.

In October 1933 Tekla Hess sent 58 paintings, including Kirchner's street scene, to Basel for a planned exhibition; from 1934 these works of art were kept in the Kunsthaus Zürich . The street scene was offered for sale in the catalogs of the art houses at a price of 2500 Swiss francs.

Under pressure from the Gestapo, which in 1936 threatened Tekla Hess with a lawsuit for foreign currency offenses, she gave the order to send several paintings from the collection in Switzerland to the Kölnischer Kunstverein . According to the files of the Kunsthaus Zürich, which had been processed by the art historian Andreas Hüneke , twenty-one paintings and three watercolors were sent back to Germany between February 5, 1935 and September 4, 1936 at the instigation of Tekla Hess. These were broadcasts to the Kunstverein in Cologne, to the Justin Thannhauser gallery in Berlin and to the Angermuseum in Erfurt; including seven paintings by Kirchner. On March 18, 1937, the Kunsthaus Zürich confirmed the dispatch of seventy works, including 29 paintings; Also in this collection was one by Kirchner. The remaining eight paintings remained in Switzerland until the end of the war. Since this letter was sent to an address in London, Hüneke assumes that the art was also transported to England. By contrast, Christina Feilchenfeldt and Walter Romilly published an article about the Hess Collection that documents from a Swiss forwarding company indicated that this shipment was also sent to the Kunstverein in Cologne. In 1951, six of the works sent to the Kölnischer Kunstverein were returned to the Hess family. After 1943 they were sold to the painter and forger Robert Schuppner by an employee of the association, Josef Jenniges, and in 1950 they were the subject of criminal proceedings. There were two paintings by Kirchner, two by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, one by Otto Mueller and a triptych by Max Pechstein. Four of these works were included in the extensive broadcast of March 18, 1937, so that, contrary to Hünekes' assumption, one must assume that they were sent to Cologne and not to London.

It is undisputed that with the broadcast of September 4, 1936, in addition to three works by Franz Marc and a watercolor by August Macke, four paintings by Kirchner were sent to Cologne and that this broadcast must have included the street scene , despite the confused title . At the end of 1936 this painting was sold to the Frankfurt art collector Carl Hagemann under unexplained circumstances, presumably through the director of the Cologne art association Walter Klug . Hagemann later gave a value of 3,000 without specifying the currency. It could not be determined whether Tekla Hess had placed the order for this sale, although the overall circumstances indicate that she wanted to sell the work in principle. In particular, however, it could not be determined whether she received the purchase price and, if so, from whom and in what amount. Neither the Kölner Kunstverein nor the buyer have received any documents about the transaction. It also remained unclear whether Hagemann knew the origin of the picture. In a letter from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to the art collector on October 30, 1936, however, it is said that the picture “belonged to Jewish people who have to leave”.

Carl Hagemann's heirs gave the Kirchner painting in 1948 as a gift to Ernst Holzinger , director of the Städelsche Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt am Main; there it was on permanent loan until his death. The widow Holzinger sold the painting to the city of Berlin in 1980 for DM 1.9 million. Until its restitution in 2006, it was a highly regarded work in the Brücke Museum there.

The provenance of the picture thus results in a fact that suggests restitution according to the Washington Declaration: The acquisition by Carl Hagemann took place after September 15, 1935, i.e. after the introduction of the Nuremberg Race Laws , and is therefore to be classified as a loss of assets due to Nazi persecution . None of the three cumulatively required rebuttal requirements according to the Allied reimbursement provisions could be proven: neither that a normal market purchase price was agreed, nor that this purchase price was handed over to Tekla Hess in full, nor that the sale of the Berlin street scene at the turn of 1936/37 by Tekla Hess "also without the Nazi rule at this point in time, in this place, would have been concluded under these conditions ”. Legally, the Berlin Senate could have invoked the statute of limitations on the matter, but this would be in contradiction to the Joint Declaration of December 18, 1999 on the Washington Agreement made by the Education Ministers, which is not legally but politically binding, and which in particular regulates the statute of limitations cancels.

This return, known as the "Causa Kirchner", with the follow-up discussions in the institutions involved or affected, in politics and the media, is one of the most public examples of the legal uncertainty that exists in restitution proceedings, which trigger legally non-binding, but politically and morally binding principles can.

Public and legal reactions

The case sparked heated discussions. It was doubted that the painting was sold by the widow Hess in 1936 under the pressure of anti-Semitism and was thus a case of looted art . It was also argued that the financial difficulties of the Hess family were due to the Great Depression of 1929 and that the sale of the picture in 1936 had nothing to do with the persecution of Jewish citizens. In the press there were headlines such as “They say the Holocaust and mean money” and other statements that attributed greed for money to Holocaust victims. The historian Julius H. Schoeps , director of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies (MMZ) at the University of Potsdam, spoke of unmistakably anti-Semitic undertones. In addition, the critics of the restitution asserted that the Washington Declaration had no legally binding effect, so the heir could not sue for the claim and therefore the State of Berlin did not have to surrender the painting.

The Group vice-president, and cultural and media policy spokeswoman for Alliance 90 / The Greens in the Berlin House Alice Ströver threw Flierl after the return before, "in anticipatory obedience" and to promote "moral do-gooders" to have acted with his decision "latent anti-Semitism" . This statement in turn met with sharp criticism from the Central Council of Jews in Germany .

The Brücke-Museum-Förderverein tried to prevent the auction through its chairman Lutz von Pufendorf by means of criminal charges for infidelity against several Berlin politicians, the former Senator for Culture Flierl, State Secretary Barbara Kisseler and Senator for Finance Thilo Sarrazin . The Munich lawyer and art collector Daniel Amelung had also reported the Governing Mayor Klaus Wowereit (SPD) on suspicion of infidelity or embezzling embezzlement. However, the Berlin public prosecutor's office refused to initiate investigative proceedings on the grounds that the return was legally unobjectionable. After a complaint by the notifying party, the proceedings against State Secretary Barbara Kisseler were resumed in 2007 and finally closed on March 11, 2008. Regardless of this, the debate continues, as art historian Christoph Zusatz noted in a keynote lecture at the Brücke Museum in May 2019. He refers to the publication of Lutz von Pufendorf Erworben - Besessen - Vertan: Documentation on the restitution of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Berlin street scene in June 2018, with which he intends to reverse the restitution.

The journalist Stefan Koldehoff shows another aspect of the discussion in the essay Kirchner's Berlin Street Scene - Frankfurt, Berlin, New York , in which he deals with the participating museum director Ernst Holzinger as an “explosive link” in the chain of provenance. Contrary to the public portrayal of Holzinger as the savior of modernism , he was deeply involved in the Nazi art theft system and actively involved in the looting of Jewish collections. The concealment or ignoring of this background makes the Kirchner case a prominent example of the failures of the art trade and the buying practice of museums since the post-war period.

Further restitution cases from the Hess collection

In the 1920s and early 1930s, the Hess Collection was called “the best collection of German Expressionists that ever existed”. It included important works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc , Emil Nolde , Karl Schmidt-Rottluff , Max Pechstein , Otto Mueller and Lyonel Feininger , among others . Like Kirchner's street scene, a number of other paintings from the Tekla Hess collection were sent to Switzerland in October 1933 and some of them were brought back to Germany. When she emigrated to England in 1939, she was able to take some works from the art collection with her; the others were in Switzerland and Cologne, or had been sold from there, the rest of them stayed in Lichtenfels.

With the exception of the works of art rescued in England, the former Hess Collection was nowhere to be found after the war. The experts Gunnar Schnabel and Monika Tatzkow assume that 40 paintings and other works will be lost. In addition to the restitution of the Kirchner painting, the granddaughter of Alfred and Tekla Hess made five further requests for return, four of which have been negotiated since 2006. The painting by Franz Marc: Cat behind a tree was returned by the Sprengel Museum Hannover in March 2009 , but was left there on loan by the heiress.

  • Lyonel Feininger, Barefoot Church in Erfurt. (Barfüßer Kirche I), 1924, oil on canvas
    Provenance: Alfred Hess bought this painting from the artist in 1924, and until 1933 it was on loan at the Erfurt Angermuseum. After it was returned it was sent to Switzerland by Tekla Hess, presumably forwarded as a commission to the Justin Thannhauser Gallery in Berlin in 1935 . Thannhauser was also persecuted as a Jew, he emigrated to Paris, his gallery holdings were confiscated in 1937. Evidence of the painting is only made for 1959, at that time it was in the possession of the industrialist Ferdinand Ziersch, Wuppertal. In 1963 it was acquired by the Stuttgart State Gallery , which still owns it today.
    No restitution: In 2006 the heiress of the Hess Collection submitted an application for restitution, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart had the claim examined, the responsible Ministry for Science, Research and Art of the State of Baden-Württemberg came to the conclusion that the basis for there is no restitution in this case.
  • Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, The judgment of Paris. 1912, oil on canvas
    Provenance: This painting was also sent to Switzerland by Tekla Hess in 1933, from where it was presumably transferred to the Kölner Kunstverein in 1937. Today it is in the Wilhelm Hack Museum , Ludwigshafen.
    Completed restitution: The Wilhelm Hack Museum was able to agree with the heiress to buy the painting below market value. A large-scale donation campaign to finance the painting ensured that it would remain in Ludwigshafen.
  • Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Leipziger Strasse with electric tram. 1914, oil on canvas
    Provenance: Tekla Hess sent this painting to Switzerland in 1933, from there it was sent to the Cologne Art Association in 1936. Today it is owned by the Folkwang Museum Essen.
    Open restitution: The heiress submitted a return request for this picture in 2006 and has not yet been decided.
Franz Marc: The little blue horses
  • Franz Marc, The little blue horses. 1911, oil on canvas
    Provenance: This picture was sent to Switzerland as early as 1933 and exhibited there in October of that year in the Kunsthalle Basel. In 1936 it was sent back for the "Franz Marc Memorial Exhibition" to be held in Germany. It is proven that it was on view in the corresponding exhibition of the Kestnergesellschaft Hanover and at the Galerie Nierendorf in Berlin, but it is disputed whether it was still owned by the Hess heirs at the time. Today it is owned by the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart .
    No restitution: In 2006 the heiress of the Hess Collection submitted an application for restitution, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart had the claim examined, the responsible Ministry for Science, Research and Art of the State of Baden-Württemberg came to the conclusion that the basis for there is no restitution in this case.
  • Franz Marc, children's picture (cat behind a tree). 1910, oil on canvas
    Provenance: This painting was also shown in the “Franz Marc Memorial Exhibition” in the Kestner Society in Hanover. There it was bought by the Pelikan factory in Hanover in 1936 . In later years it became the property of NordLB and was on permanent loan to the Sprengel Museum in Hanover.
    Restitution: A return claim has also been submitted for this picture. In March 2009 it was restituted. For now, however, the heiress has agreed to leave it on loan in Hanover.
  • Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Naked. 1914
    Provenance: disappeared in Cologne, sold in 1994 by a Berlin auction house from the heirs of the Cologne painter Peter Herkenrath ; Acquired in 1999 by the Neue Galerie New York .
    Restitution: In 2016 the heirs reached a restitution agreement with the Neue Galerie New York, according to which the gallery acquires the painting by paying the market value.

The circumstances of the loss of other pictures from the Hess Collection have not yet been clarified. For Christian Rohlf's Türme von Soest , which is on loan from the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in the State Museum in Münster , and for Franz Marc's cows in the Lenbachhaus in Munich, information was initially only asked for.

literature

  • Stefan Koldehoff: The pictures are among us. The business with Nazi looted art. Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-8218-5844-9 .
  • Ludwig von Pufendorf (ed.): Acquired - possessed - missed: Documentation on the restitution of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Berlin street scene . Kerber Verlag, Bielefeld 2018, ISBN 978-3-7356-0488-0 .
  • Gunnar Schnabel, Monika Tatzkow: Nazi Looted Art. Manual. Art restitution worldwide . proprietas, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-00-019368-2 .
  • Julius Schoeps , Anna-Dorothea Ludewig (Ed.): A debate without end? Looted art and restitution in German-speaking countries . Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-86650-641-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Washington Declaration of December 3, 1998, accessed on March 28, 2009: Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste: Principles of the Washington Conference with regard to works of art that were confiscated by the National Socialists (Washington Principles)
  2. Press release of the Senate Department for Science, Research and Culture, from August 17, 2006: artnet.de (PDF; 38 kB) accessed on May 8, 2009
  3. cf. Magdalena M. Moeller : Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The street scenes 1913–1915. Munich 1993.
  4. ^ Gunnar Schnabel, Monika Tatzkow: Alfred (1879–1931), Tekla Hess (1884–1968) and Hans Hess (1908–1975), Erfurt. In: Melissa Müller, Monika Tatzkow: Lost Pictures, Lost Lives. Jewish collectors and what became of their works of art , Munich 2009, p. 63.
  5. a b c d e f Andreas Hüneke : Knowledge status - overview and statement , December 2004 (accessed October 3, 2010; PDF; 58 kB). Due to title mix-ups and incorrect format information, the assignment is not clear, but is based on the context.
  6. Christina Feilchenfeldt and Peter Romilly: The Alfred Hess Collection. In: Weltkunst, article from October 1, 2000 (PDF; 791 kB) accessed on October 3, 2010
  7. ^ Letter from the Kölnischer Kunstverein to Tekla Hess dated March 10, 1951, PDF , accessed on October 3, 2010.
  8. Robert Schuppner . In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 1950 ( online ). See also It's not that easy . In: Die Zeit , No. 40/1950
  9. a b c d e Gunnar Schnabel, Monika Tatzkow: Expert opinion - historical and legal bases for the return of the painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner "Berlin street scene" ( memento from August 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) from May 25, 2007; Retrieved October 3, 2010
  10. Press release of the support group of the Brücke-Museum Berlin, August 13, 2006: artnet.de (PDF; 15 kB) accessed May 8, 2009
  11. see FAZ, January 10, 2007: One says the Holocaust and means money. Villa-Grisebach boss Bernd Schultz on savvy lawyers and the return of works of art. berlin-brauch-buerger.de (PDF; 508 kB)
  12. Quoted from Wilfried Weinke: Raubkunst: On the German way of dealing with expropriated art . In: grandstand. Journal for Understanding Judaism , 2007, Issue 1, p. 125.
  13. ^ Press release of the Central Council of Jews in Germany of September 12, 2006: Central Council stands behind Senator for Culture Flierl in the dispute over the return of the Kirchner painting .
  14. Brigitte Werneburg, TAZ , November 6, 2006: The raid of the art market. The Berliner Brücke-Museum loses one of its main works: the collector's heir, Hans Hess, has it auctioned. January 2, 2020 from the author's homepage.
  15. Spiegel online May 30, 2007. Press release of the Förderkreis Brücke-Museum from March 13, 2008: fkbm.org , both accessed on May 8, 2009
  16. Christoph Zusatz: Art and Art Policy in National Socialism - Attempting a Research Review of the Last 20 Years , Lecture at the Brücke-Museum Berlin, May 16, 2019
  17. Rose-Maria Gropp: Lesson for improper action. Review in the FAZ, November 23, 2018
  18. Stefan Koldehoff: The pictures are among us. The business with Nazi looted art. , Frankfurt am Main 2009, pp. 115-136
  19. Gabriele Sprigath: Art does not spoil, do the Cid , in: Ossietzky. Biennial for politics / culture / economy, edition 16/2010
  20. Edwin Redslob: From Weimar to Europe. Berlin 1972, p. 155.
  21. ^ German Loss of Cultural Property Center: Provenance research in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and in the Landesmuseum Württemberg
  22. Kirchner Ludwigshafen: The Kirchner case. Retrieved August 27, 2018 .
  23. ^ German Loss of Cultural Property Center: Provenance research in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and in the Landesmuseum Württemberg
  24. Art Magazin online: Marc's “Kinderbild”: return to previous owner. from March 23, 2009 art-magazin.de ( Memento from May 28, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on March 28, 2009.
  25. ^ New gallery Returns Painting Seized by Nazis and Then Rebuys It in Settlement , New York Times on September 27, 2016, accessed on September 28, 2016