Marburg Central Collecting Point
The Marburg Central Collecting Point , also Marburg Central Art Collecting Point , was the first post-war art collecting point in Germany . This was set up by the US military government in the university town of Marburg in order to collect the art objects stolen or evacuated from museums, libraries, archives, castles, etc. before and during the Second World War and to return them to their rightful owners. The collection point existed between May 1945 and mid-August 1946.
prehistory
In 1943 the American government set up the "American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas". This commission, unofficially named "Roberts Commission" after its chairman Owen Roberts , had lists drawn up of the buildings worthy of protection in Europe, which were to be protected from further damage immediately after the withdrawal of the military units. For the practical implementation, a special military unit called Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section , or MFA & A for short, was founded, whose art protection officers were informally referred to as "Monuments Men" because of their work. In addition, the unit should collect the cultural goods that had been stolen by German units from the occupied countries and return them to their original owners.
In the autumn of 1944 the first officers following the Allied front line, which was slowly moving eastward from France, reached German soil. During their stay in war-torn Aachen, George Leslie Stout and Walker Hancock became aware of a large warehouse for art in a former iron ore mine near Siegen . During their inspection of the Hainer tunnel at the beginning of April 1945, the two officers discovered almost 600 paintings, hundreds of sculptures and other objects in a separate and guarded room, which were already strongly attacked by mold due to the prevailing high humidity . To secure the works of art, Stout and Hancock decided to evacuate them as soon as possible. At the end of May, two weeks after Germany's surrender , they took a number of objects, including the relics of Charlemagne, to Cologne and Aachen.
Establishment of the collection point
Since Marburg was in the American zone of occupation , suffered only minor war damage and various other depots were now known in the American catchment area, the headquarters decided in consultation with Hancock to set up a collection point. As early as April 1945, on his inspection tour through Hesse and Thuringia , Hancock had registered three buildings suitable for this purpose in the university town: the State Archive , completed in 1938 , the so-called Jubilee Building , which was built on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the University of Marburg and the archaeological one to this day , the prehistory and early history as well as the art history seminar, plus musicology , the photo archive Photo Marburg and the university museum, as well as the Marburg Castle . To this end, he had the buildings declared “Off Limits”. Hancock set up his office in the State Archives, which, for reasons of capacity, was to become the main building of the Collecting Point. Official activities began with the delivery of the first Berlin objects from the depot in Bernterode immediately after the peace agreement.
Institutions and activities involved
With the help of the remaining employees of the State Archives and six workers assigned by the employment office, the objects that arrived almost daily were stored in a magazine. For the inventory of the works of art, Hancock asked for support from Richard Hamann , who was both head of the art history seminar and the photo archive of Photo Marburg and who was willing to provide his staff. The picture archive was commissioned to produce index cards for each object and to provide them with self-made photographs. It was Hamann, too, who, together with the then mayor Eugen Siebecke and the university rector Julius Ebbinghaus , spoke out in favor of organizing an exhibition at the military government. After the approval was granted, a first exhibition of 30 masterpieces of European painting that came from the Collecting Point opened in the University Museum on November 15, 1945. Before the art collection point was closed, others followed in the museum and in the state archive.
In order to secure the historically important buildings in Hesse and to provide additional support for the recording of the objects, Hancock also recruited the staff of the former Hesse Provincial Curator Friedrich Bleibaum . Bleibaum had actively secured structures and evacuated valuable Hessian stocks during the Second World War and remained responsible in these areas on behalf of the Americans, for example for the works of art he himself stowed in the bunkers in Bad Wildungen .
Objects
The most important goal of the Americans was the restitution of the collected holdings, which is why art protection representatives such as the Belgian Raymond Lemaire , the American Edith Standen and the French Rose Valland came to Marburg and inspected the works of art for suspected cases. However, contrary to the expectations of stolen objects everywhere in Germany, apparently only a few such objects appeared in Marburg. A total of around 50 works, including the treasure of Metz Cathedral , came to Marburg from various depots and were returned to the original owners or brought to Wiesbaden for further investigation. It should be noted here, however, that due to a lack of staff and time, no active provenance research could be carried out in Marburg , so that any objects wrongly acquired by museums or private individuals during National Socialism remained undiscovered. Most of the more than 4,000 art objects, more than 14,000 books and more than 17,500 meters of files came from German museums, churches, archives or private collections, including various Berlin collections, the Essen Museum Folkwang , the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf , etc.
Dissolution of the Marburg collection point
After it became clear that the State Archives did not have the necessary capacity for the storage of the deliveries still to be expected and the separation of the objects at different locations in Hesse (at the Collecting Points in Marburg and Wiesbaden, the Offenbach Archival Depot and the Bad Wildungen depot ) seemed inadvisable for security and personnel reasons, the MFA & A officers responsible for Hessen decided to merge the collection points in Wiesbaden. From the spring of 1946 objects were transferred from Marburg to the Wiesbaden Museum , in which the US military government under MFA & A officer Walter Farmer had set up another art collection point and which offered a larger storage area. At the same time, the works of art , which the Americans had illegally evacuated from the British occupation zone, were brought to Düsseldorf and to Dyck Castle (this particularly affected the objects from the Siegen ore mine). Immediately after the last delivery to Wiesbaden in mid-August, Francis Bilodeau , who had replaced Hancock as director in December 1945, announced the end of the Marburg Collecting Point.
Cooperation with German institutions
The MFA & A was chronically understaffed. In Marburg only Walker Hancock acted and the New York restorer Sheldon Keck assisted him at times . Hancock was therefore dependent on local support, which is why he resorted to the State Archives, the University, the State Monuments Office and the Building Authority. Even if the cooperation only lasted one year, the cooperation, which Hancock reported, made the Marburg Collecting Point methodically the model for the collection points that were subsequently established in Munich and Wiesbaden . Representatives of the other art warehouses such as Walter Farmer (head of the Wiesbaden Collecting Point) and Gustav André (active in the British Zonal Fine Arts Repository ) traveled to the central Hessian university town to see the procedure at the collection point and to exchange ideas about the joint work.
Trivia
The German-American feature film " Monuments Men - Unusual Heroes ", which was released in 2014, deals with the history that led to the founding of the Marburg art collection point. After visiting the Siegen mine, however, the film changes abruptly - leaving the viewer in the dark about the further fate of the Siegen works of art - to the events in Bavaria that led to the establishment of the Munich Collecting Point .
literature
- Marco Rasch: State Archives Art Collection. The Marburg Central Collecting Point . In: Archive news from Hessen 17/1, 2017, ISSN 1865-2816 . Pp. 60-62.
- Marco Rasch: The “Monuments Men” in Marburg . In: Yearbook of the Marburg-Biedenkopf district 2015, Marburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-9811350-7-7 , ISSN 0938-8060 . Pp. 251-254.
- Walker Hancock: Experiences of a Monuments Officer in Germany . In: College Art Journal 5: 4, May 1946, doi : 10.2307 / 773217 pp. 271-311.
- Walter I. Farmer: The Keepers of the Heritage. The fate of German cultural assets at the end of the Second World War , revised and provided with a foreword by Klaus Goldmann. With an introduction by Margaret Farmer Planton. Translated from American English by Henning Kunze, Schriften zum Kulturgüterschutz, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-89949-010-X .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Short biography of George Stout on the website of the Monuments Men Foundation , accessed on January 10, 2015 (English)
- ^ Digitized version of the exhibition catalog , accessed on January 12, 2015
- ↑ Short biography of Sheldon Keck on the website of the Monuments Men Foundation , accessed on January 10, 2015 (English)