As Fritz waited for the war to grind to a halt, he had plenty of time to examine his options—and what role the Dresdner Bank might play in it all. His father was still in overall control of the bank, but at age seventy-eight Eugen had increasingly shifted day-to-day operations to his son Herbert and to Henry Nathan, a trusted friend and longtime board member. Sooner rather than later, the unthinkable, yet inevitable, would happen when Eugen relinquished control. Fritz had always got on well with his brother and Nathan, but he had lost almost four years on the Isle of Man. Now, at age thirty-one, it seemed likely that if he rejoined the Dresdner, he would be relegated to a somewhat minor role in the bank, perhaps indefinitely.
Just four days before Fritz’s thirty-second birthday, the war ended.
While celebrating in Amsterdam, Fritz and Louise met a thirty-three-year-old Hamburg-born banker and stockbroker named Ernst Proehl, and his Austrian Jewish wife. The two young couples, who both had small children, quickly took to each other. Proehl, a naturalized Dutch citizen with a seat on the Amsterdam stock exchange, was, like Fritz, intelligent, sophisticated, and urbane. They also shared a passion for art.
Proehl was a shrewd businessman with an eye for opportunity. Both he and Fritz saw that neutral Holland stood to benefit from the financial paralysis that would engulf postwar Germany. He understood also that Fritz’s international banking experience and his position in what was still Germany’s second-largest bank could be an invaluable asset. Proehl proposed that Fritz remain in Holland and that they go into business together. They were thinking along the same lines. Fritz found it an attractive notion, a chance to achieve independence, to live his own life out from under the shadow of his father and his older brother.
Of no small importance was that Fritz liked Holland. A constitutional monarchy, liberal by tradition, and with a rich artistic and cultural heritage, the Netherlands was a peaceful place. Holland’s last war had been back in 1830 against Belgium, and that hadn’t really been a war at all. Fritz liked the people and he liked the countryside. After the inner torment of years of incarceration, his soul was soothed by the flat and endlessly serene Dutch landscape. It may have been somewhat dull compared with Paris or London, or even prewar Berlin, but for a man with a young and growing family, Holland suited him perfectly.
Fritz returned to Berlin to greet his father and announce his decision to the family. Happily, Fritz’s idea to settle in Holland also appealed to Eugen and the Dresdner. Until Germany could shed its pariah status among foreign investors and get its economic house in order, the Dresdner desperately needed a neutral-based affiliate that could channel foreign credit to the bank—and how fortunate that the affiliate would be headed by someone of unquestioned loyalty and trustworthiness.
So in early 1919 the firm Proehl & Gutmann was registered with the Dutch government and the Amsterdam stock exchange, with offices on the fashionable Gouden Bocht (Golden Bend) stretch of the Herengracht, a canal in Amsterdam. Firma Proehl & Gutmann would specialize in short-term bank acceptances, international lines of credit, and stock issues—much of it in collaboration with the Dresdner Bank.
Fritz’s decision to go into business in Holland had been fortuitous. Dozens of other German banks would also open affiliate offices in Amsterdam to escape the postwar chaos and credit restrictions imposed on Germany, but Firma Proehl & Gutmann had been among the first, and it prospered. Later Eugen, as retiring chairman, purchased a controlling share in the firm for the Dresdner in 1920. Technically, Fritz was thus again answerable to the family business, rendering his period of independence brief, but there were compensations. With the buyout, Fritz and Ernst Proehl were suddenly very wealthy men.
Fritz and Louise leased an elegant town house on the Koningslaan, overlooking the Vondelpark, in the heart of the city, and began to live their lives together—for the second time. Fritz’s family flourished. Daughter Lili was born on July 17, 1919, this no doubt to the childish annoyance of her five-year-old brother, my father. After the long years of separation, Bernard was just getting to know his father. He had always imagined his father returning with a long beard, like an explorer. Bernard was having to make serious adjustments when, suddenly, there was a new center in Fritz’s universe—Lili, bubbly and precocious, Daddy’s perfect little angel. In a photograph of Lili that survives, she is age four, dressed in a mink-lined coat and muff, a mirror of the young Louise. As Fritz adored Louise, so he adored little Lili.
Young Bernard had a somewhat more difficult time. Quiet, deliberative, and extremely close to his rather indulgent mother, he suddenly had to deal with a new authority figure when his father returned home. Fritz, though loving and affectionate, could at times also be demanding and impatient. In contrast to his sister, a photograph of Bernard at age nine shows him dressed in the still-obligatory sailor suit, with his arms stubbornly crossed, and his dark eyes staring almost defiantly at the camera. Additionally, Bernard was left-handed, which was then considered something of an affliction—one to be corrected. His being forced to write with his right hand at school no doubt contributed to the slight stutter he developed as a child, which would in times of stress manifest itself throughout his life. However, his being a natural lefty in a right-handed world left him almost completely ambidextrous, often an advantage in what was Bernard’s primary passion—sports. Unlike his father, Bernard was a gifted athlete, excelling from a young age in ice-skating. The winter-frozen canals of Holland were an ideal training ground. Soon he added skiing, tennis, ice hockey, and even cricket to his list of achievements, and still later javelin and discus throwing.
Both children were as Dutch as any of their school chums and spoke the language like natives, but the legal reality was more complicated. Lili was by birth a Dutch citizen, as well as, through her parents, a German citizen, while Bernard was still both German and British, and Fritz and Louise remained, technically, Germans. Fritz simplified the situation in 1924 when, after the required five-year residency period, he and Louise—and through them, young Bernard—officially renounced their German citizenship and became naturalized Dutch citizens. For Fritz, always a man of the world, it was an emotionally liberating moment. Germany had begun to feel claustrophobic. He had never felt as German as his father, Eugen, who was German down to his very soul.
Dutch citizenship had various practical advantages, but I suspect that deeper down Fritz desired to further insulate himself and his new family from the bitter, and often violent, upheavals now escalating in Germany. Under the generally well-intentioned, but fatally weak governance of the Weimar Republic, the chaos that had immediately followed the end of the war continued unabated into the mid-1920s. Strikes, political street fights, assassinations, left-wing revolts in the Ruhr, and right-wing revolts in Berlin and Munich were ripping the country asunder. The Munich revolt included, ominously, an attempted “putsch” by a tiny party called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, led by an obscure ex-corporal.
Perhaps the most grievous blow to the nation was the infamous hyperinflation of the early 1920s—a period of printing-press insanity that at its worst point saw the German currency decline to roughly 4 trillion marks to the dollar. A loaf of bread that had cost one mark before the war now suddenly cost, incredibly, 200 billion marks. The inflation wiped out the savings of millions of Germans. The country devolved into essentially a barter economy, with hausfraus selling their shoes to buy bread and their family heirlooms to buy coal. Inflation was finally brought under control in 1924 with the help of Hjalmar Schacht, a former Dresdner Bank executive.
Schacht was, by then, the Weimar government’s commissioner of currency. However, the nation’s moral foundations had been badly shaken. Crime, prostitution, divorce, suicide, and corruption all soared. And, as always in Germany during times of crisis, so did anti-Semitism. Mobs in Berlin on at least one occasion ransacked several Jewish-owned shops amid cries of “Kill the Jews!” Fritz could only watch Germany with increasing apprehension from the relative peace of Holland.
The Dresdner Bank, like all German banks, had suffered during the inflation madness, but it survived under the capable direction of the team Eugen left behind. One added burden was the need to take on hundreds of extra bank employees just to handle the huge piles of million-mark and later billion-mark notes then in circulation. Among those new employees, and by all accounts not a particularly good one, was a frustrated writer named Joseph Goebbels. His Jewish girlfriend had helped him get a job as a clerk in the Cologne branch.
Eugen had retired in 1920, taking on the mostly honorary position of chairman emeritus. His seminal role in the bank’s history was memorialized with a life-size bronze bust by the noted sculptor Hugo Lederer. The original was installed in the great banking hall of the Berlin headquarters, with copies placed in every branch office.
Embracing his newfound freedom, Eugen spent less and less time in Berlin. He enjoyed visiting the luxury resorts and spas in the more healthful climes of the Black Forest and the Swiss Alps, and taking the healing waters at Bad Gastein in Austria. Worn down by the war and the shocking collapse of the old Germany he had known and loved, Eugen had grown increasingly frail in his later years. A photo I found shows him with hair and mustache brilliantly white, sitting dignifiedly erect, but with his obviously expensive suit hanging in loose folds over his thinning frame. Still, he retained his sense of humor and love of children and family. My father, then eleven, later remembered how his grandfather had doted on him and little Lili when they had visited him at his hotel in Interlaken—and how the old man, still up to his old tricks, had delighted in cheating them at cards.
Eugen maintained an enormous fortune in relatively inflation-proof real estate, foreign currencies, and securities—as well as the famous silver collection. In his waning years, he gave considerable thought to how to pass that fortune along. Ultimately Eugen decided that rather than dividing it equally among his six children—great fortunes divided tend to be frittered away piecemeal—he would create a family trust to be nurtured and grown, presumably in perpetuity, for the benefit of not only his children, but subsequent generations as well. Suspicious as ever of decisions by committee, he also had to decide which of his sons would administer his financial legacy. (I suppose given the mores of the era, his daughters were not even considered.) Max or Kurt, of course, simply wouldn’t do—which left Herbert or Fritz.
Max, a lovable and popular fellow but certainly no businessman, continued to devote his time to the music salons of Rome and Berlin. Included among his many well-known friends were Winifred and Siegfried Wagner, the son of the legendary composer, and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, sister of the famous philosopher. All of this was more than a bit curious given that Winifred Wagner was a well-known anti-Semite and a close personal friend of the leader of the Munich putsch, Adolf Hitler. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche was also a noted anti-Semite, whose late husband had been an early advocate of “pure Aryanism” in Germany. Ironically, anti-Semites in Germany commonly spouted the most vicious diatribes against Jews in general while assuring their actual Jewish friends and associates, “Of course, we don’t mean you!” Perhaps an equally insidious and fatal corollary was a tendency among some German Jews, particularly the wealthy and well connected, to respond to such anti-Semitism by deluding themselves with the assertion “Of course, they don’t mean us!”
Max even numbered among his many acquaintances the Vatican’s ambassador to Berlin, Archbishop Eugenio Pacelli, who would later become Pope Pius XII. The future pope was an inveterate socialite who would host numerous parties at his Tiergarten home. On more than one occasion Max, a frequent guest, would play the piano, flawlessly it was said. The future pope’s favorite piece was the “Death of Isolde” (sometimes known as the “End of the World”) from Wagner’s famous opera Tristan and Isolde. This connection to the Vatican, and his sister Lili’s closeness to other members of the Italian nobility, would later prove crucial when Max found himself on the run in Italy.
Kurt Gutmann, although charming and affable, was also not an inspired businessman. After the war, Kurt served as an assistant to family friend Walther Rathenau when he became Germany’s first Jewish foreign minister. Rathenau’s subsequent assassination in Berlin in 1922 by right-wing thugs was a terrible blow for Kurt. Disillusioned, Kurt and his wife, Vera Herzfeld-Gutmann, turned to the film business, of all things. Vera’s father, a Berlin entrepreneur and notorious wheeler-dealer, had become known as the Potash King for his near-monopolization of that vital fertilizer. Hugo Herzfeld’s spectacular success brought with it the inevitable accusations of “Jewish conspiracy.” When Herzfeld died suddenly in 1922 of a heart attack, the Berlin stock market nearly collapsed. Vera and Kurt quickly sold a large share of his holdings and invested, instead, in Universum Film AG (UFA), the famous studio that was home to such stars as Marlene Dietrich, Henny Porten, and actor-directors Fritz Lang and Kurt Gerron. Lang was director of the expressionist masterpiece Metropolis, the most expensive silent movie ever made—which may help explain why the film company was nearly bankrupt by 1927 and the stockholders, including Kurt and Vera, were deeply in the red. Evidently, Kurt was not the sort to whom a family fortune could reasonably be entrusted.
Herbert, as the eldest son, might have seemed an obvious choice as executor of the Gutmann estate. After all, he had been successful as director of the Deutsche-Orient Bank, which, after the disruption of the war, had been able to reopen its branches in the Middle East in 1923. He was a powerful player in the Dresdner hierarchy, and he was a director on the boards of three dozen major German companies. Yet, for all his accomplishments, Herbert was also something of a risk-taker, a man who enjoyed the fast life. Eugen had sometimes shared such traits, but he knew they did not lend themselves to the careful preservation of a family fortune.
Stable and cautious in money matters, Fritz was also the family diplomat. As he neared forty, it was decided that he would become executor of Eugen’s estate and director of the Gutmann Family Trust. Incorporated in Amsterdam, the trust developed into a multimillion-dollar financial concern. Fritz also became caretaker of the famous “silver collection,” which still included such priceless pieces as the Lencker ewer, Abraham Drentwett’s three exceptional globes, in silver and vermeil, supported by Saturn, Atlas, and Hercules, and the enigmatic Orpheus Clock. My grandfather could not have known it then, but those responsibilities would eventually cause Fritz, his children, and even my generation no end of conflict and grief.
Sadly, in 1925 while in Munich, Eugen died of congestive heart failure and general decline at the age of eighty-five. Remembered and honored as one of the great financial figures of his time, his obituary appeared in newspapers from London to New York to Hong Kong. A thousand people attended his funeral in Berlin. The rather large new family tomb, designed by the noted architect Franz Seeck, in the Urnenfriedhof, survives to this day.
Whenever I’m in Berlin, I make it a point to stop by this cemetery and spend a few moments with my great-grandfather and hope his soul is at peace. As I stand in the shade of the linden and oak trees, I’m always struck by how, as with the Jewish cemetery in Dresden, the Gutmann family tomb somehow escaped both desecration by the Nazis and destruction from bombing during World War II. I can only wish, ironically, that the living had been as fortunate as the dead.
After his father’s death, Fritz began clearing up the matters of the estate. Eugen’s country retreat, Schloss Zeesen, was leased to Ernst Goldschmidt, another banker and family friend. Meanwhile, perhaps because of Fritz’s Dutch connections, the grand Gutmann villa on the Rauchstrasse was sold to the Dutch government, which used it as their embassy until World War II.
Like so many other beautiful homes in the Tiergarten, the Gutmann villa was later blown to flinders by Allied bombs and probably some Soviet artillery. The castle at Zeesen was taken over by a Nazi actor. It survived the war, but was neglected afterward by the East German government; the last I heard it was a boarded-up, empty shell.
As for the silver collection, a few of the lesser pieces were sold off, but the more valuable and exquisite Renaissance and Mannerist silver pieces—which also included the fierce Silver Cat by Hans Utten, the exotic Jamnitzer beaker, and hundreds of other objects—were kept intact as undivided property, owned equally by Eugen’s children. Fritz moved the collection to Holland, where he had built a special walk-in safe hidden behind the men’s smoking room in his home. It would remain there, safe for the time being.
• • •
Perhaps expectedly, as a wealthy man with a growing family, Fritz by 1924 had found the town house on the Koningslaan in Amsterdam, while absolutely delightful and convenient for his work in the city, not quite adequate for the family’s lifestyle anymore.
His search for a new home led him to a once-grand, but somewhat neglected, manor house twenty miles outside the city.
The estate of Bosbeek is situated in bucolic parkland by Heemstede, near Haarlem and due west of Amsterdam. Bosbeek in English means Forest Brook. Originally it was a seventeenth-century country retreat built for a wealthy Amsterdam merchant seeking refuge from the dreaded “canal fever” that festered in summer along the old canals of Amsterdam. In 1736 the estate was purchased by the mayor of Amsterdam, who commissioned Jacob de Wit, the famous Dutch painter, to completely renovate the manor house. By the late eighteenth century, when Bosbeek was sold to the Hope banking family (of Hope Diamond fame), it had become one of the most sought-after properties in the region. Adrian Elias Hope, who was something of a hoarder, packed the manor house with magnificent Italian Renaissance art treasures before going incurably insane and being confined in a straitjacket. Poor Adrian Hope was locked in a small upstairs bedroom of his grand house, where he died in 1834.
In more recent times, the estate’s thirty-room manor house has had a more checkered history. When I first visited as a small boy, the house was being used as a nursing home. Elderly people in hospital gowns shuffled around the once-beautiful grounds. The elegant ornamental ponds were surrounded by wheelchairs. But in the 1920s and ’30s, Bosbeek was where Fritz and Louise found a life of almost golden happiness in that all-too-brief time between the twin catastrophes of both World Wars.
Fritz and Louise made Huize Bosbeek and its ten acres of woodland, lawns, and surrounding gardens bloom again. Lovingly, they remodeled the main house, taking great pains to restore the original De Wit artworks. Two centuries of grime were removed from the magnificent painted ceiling of the grand salon. The huge ceiling oil canvas, entitled Bacchus and Ceres in the Clouds, depicted the Roman god of wine airborne with the goddess of fertility, surrounded by winged putti flying about. Among other distinctive touches brought back to their original splendor was the gilt-framed De Wit grisaille called Autumn (a large trompe l’oeil painting resembling a grayscale sculpture), which was placed over the doorway to the stateroom. Fritz and Louise reoriented the interior to look outward to the reflecting pools and newly lush gardens.
In addition to the grand salon were a large formal dining room, a library, and a drawing room for Louise. Behind the gentlemen’s smoking room, which was decorated in red velvet, was the custom-built strong room. Fritz placed Eugen’s treasures here. Rarely, he would allow the glittering marvels to be viewed by friends or art scholars and, on the most special occasions, by the next generation of Gutmann children. Bernard and Lili’s favorite was the Golden Ostrich automaton, which would flap its wings on the hour while, at its feet, a little, gilded monkey beat a drum.
Fritz and Louise’s dressing rooms were on the second floor, along with the children’s rooms. The butler, cook, governess, and maids—seven in all—were quartered in the spacious attic. The house was decorated in the classic style with Louis XV tables and sofas, gilded-framed mirrors, seventeenth-century Savonnerie carpets, and Aubusson tapestries. The cabinets were filled with eighteenth-century Meissen and Chinese porcelain vases.
Fritz also added a service building near the estate entrance to house the groundsmen and two chauffeurs with, what would become, a small fleet of luxury cars. My grandfather’s favorite car was a 1925 Isotta Fraschini coupe, at the time one of the fastest cars in the world. It had a guaranteed top speed of ninety-three miles per hour. Perhaps the grandest automobile was a 1928 Hispano-Suiza Berline de Voyage touring car. Meanwhile, Louise cut a dashing figure in a 1927 LaSalle convertible. Perhaps curiously, Louise seemed to enjoy the cars most. Fritz, always dignified and perhaps a little staid, was usually driven to and from the bank by the chauffeur, whereas the vivacious and daring Louise would sometimes hop into a convertible and drive alone, at breakneck speed, her scarf flying in the wind, into the city or even on long road trips to Paris or Baden-Baden.
Fritz and Louise together traveled extensively throughout Europe. During a 1926 visit to Paris, they posed, fashionably, for portraits by Man Ray in his Montparnasse studio. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, the avant-garde artist had also become one of the preeminent portrait photographers of the day.
Fritz’s portrait shows him in quarter profile, clean-shaven, his dark, glossy hair combed straight back—perhaps not so staid after all. Nearing forty, he had not yet grown stout, but his face is not quite as lean as it once was. As always, there is that suggestion of a smile. Louise is also looking away from the camera, slim and elegant in an ivory crepe-de-chine dress, with pearl earrings and a single-strand pearl necklace. Her dark hair is cut short in the bobbed fashion of the twenties. At thirty-four she is strikingly beautiful. In another portrait by Man Ray, which I cherish to this day, she is wearing an ankle-length fur coat while nonchalantly smoking a long cigarette. Fritz and Louise were a glamorous couple, leading a glamorous and exciting life. Yet despite the obvious temptations, they remained a loving couple, in marked contrast to Eugen and Sophie’s tempestuous relationship.
For young Bernard and Lili, life at Bosbeek had an almost magical quality. The well-manicured, but still rural qualities of the estate provided endless places to play. A photo survives of Bernard and Lili lolling about in the grass with their beloved Scottish terriers. At one point at least ten white Westies wandered about the estate. Lili and Bernard were provided with material luxuries that other children could only dream of. For their birthdays, they each received from a family friend a 1928 Baby Bugatti. These were perfect half-scale, electric-powered versions of Ettore Bugatti’s famous Type 35 racing car—an extravagant gift perhaps, given that only some five hundred Baby Bugattis were ever produced.
In the evening, the guests for dinner would consist of a not-too-surprisingly well-heeled crowd. On a given night the diners might include Wilhelm and Margarethe von Humboldt, the famous conductor Erich Kleiber, some of the Bentincks, the sculptor Georg Kolbe, Fritz’s niece Marion von Goldschmidt-Rothschild and her husband, Albert, and on occasion Heinrich Thyssen, a member of the German industrialist family and an avid art collector. The Gutmanns loved fine cuisine, and their chef served the most refined French dishes. However, Fritz cherished one prosaic hangover from his otherwise not-so-happy stay in Britain: he loved kippers. Once a month he had a box of kippers flown in by an airmail carrier. A Berlin society column got hold of this information and decided to paint Fritz as the epitome of self-indulgence—fair comment, perhaps, if it were not for the underlying anti-Semitism.
Fritz and Louise entertained in a style that would also delight any child. Lili remembered that for her tenth birthday her parents hired an entire circus troupe—clowns, lion tamers, trapeze artists, and all—to perform for several hundred guests under a big top on the Bosbeek grounds. When the famous German rider Carl von Langen and his horse, Draufgänger (Daredevil), won gold medals in dressage at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, Fritz and Louise invited von Langen and the entire German equestrian team, including Draufgänger, to Bosbeek to be feted at a gala celebration ball.
There were, however, certain expectations. The children were rigorously schooled in the arts, history, science, and languages. By the time Bernard went to boarding school at the exclusive Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz in Switzerland, and Lili went to finishing school in Florence, they were already fluent in French, English, Italian, and, of course, German and Dutch.
As children of the twentieth century, unlike their nineteenth-century counterparts, Bernard and Lili were allowed at a certain age to dine with their parents and their guests. It went without saying that the children exhibited the proper manners and were suitably dressed, as their parents always were. My father never saw his father sit down to dinner in anything less than either an impeccably tailored three-piece suit, the pocket handkerchief arranged just so, or more usually a dinner jacket and, for formal occasions, tails.
Although children were still expected to be seen rather than heard, Lili and Bernard thrived with the erudite and stimulating dinner conversation of a constant stream of friends and visitors from around the world. Lili would later describe it as “a very international life.”
From the moment they arrived in Holland, Fritz and Louise quickly developed close friendships with other socially prominent couples. Fritz’s business partner, Ernst Proehl, and his wife, Ilse, were good friends, as were Franz Koenigs and his wife, Countess Anna von Kalckreuth. Koenigs was another German-born banker, cofounder of the Rhodius-Koenigs bank in Amsterdam, and his wife was the daughter of the famous painter. The Koenigs lived with their five children in a grand villa by the Florapark in Haarlem, not far from Bosbeek. An older couple from Amsterdam, Dr. Otto Lanz and his wife, Anna, were also dear friends. Otto was a wealthy and highly respected Swiss-born surgeon, known equally for his medical innovations and his magnificent collection of Italian Renaissance art. Another friend was a young Dutch Jewish art dealer, Jacques Goudstikker, whose gallery was conveniently located next door to the Proehl & Gutmann offices on the Herengracht. Goudstikker was a collector in his own right and widely known as Holland’s most important dealer of old masters.
The flamboyant and controversial Fritz Mannheimer was another friend. It was he who gave little Lili and Bernard the Baby Bugattis. The German Jewish banker was director of the Amsterdam branch of the powerful Mendelssohn & Co. private bank. He was also a key player in Germany’s postwar economic reconstruction.
Mannheimer was known for his ostentatious lifestyle and flashy, rather un-banker-like manner. He draped himself in jewelry and infamously installed a solid-gold bathtub in his palatial Amsterdam home for one of his many mistresses. Also known and widely mocked for his excessive corpulence, when Mannheimer did finally marry at age forty-nine, at a ceremony attended by dignitaries from throughout Europe, his best man was Paul Reynaud, the future Prime Minister of France.
It was a shock to all when Mannheimer collapsed while waddling down the aisle. After he was revived with two injections to his heart, the wedding took place. Just two months later, he died under somewhat suspicious circumstances, leaving behind his monumental art collection.
Fritz and Louise were also close socially to their neighbor Catalina von Pannwitz. Young Bernard and Lili knew her as Aunt Käthe. Catalina was a strikingly beautiful, German-born daughter of an enormously wealthy German Argentinean cattle baron. Her much older husband, Walther von Pannwitz, a prominent and equally wealthy Berlin lawyer, had served as close legal adviser and confidant to Kaiser Wilhelm II. When the Emperor was forced into exile in Holland, the Von Pannwitz family had dutifully followed.
The Kaiser, who had barely escaped being extradited from Holland and tried as a war criminal by the Allies, often left his Dutch estate in Doorn to visit Von Pannwitz at his Hartekamp estate. After Walther died in 1920 and left the still-beautiful Catalina a widow, Wilhelm’s visits became even more frequent. Suggestions of an illicit affair between the former Kaiser and the heiress were rife.
Fritz and Louise also had connections in Holland with members of the former German and future Dutch royal families. Eugen had been a financial counselor to the Kaiser before the war, and brother Herbert remained a friend and benefactor of Crown Prince Wilhelm’s family in Berlin. As a result, Fritz often provided financial services and advice for the former Kaiser in Holland and saw him frequently at gala dinners at Hartekamp and occasionally at Bosbeek. All of which seems a bit curious. Wilhelm’s anti-Semitism had been apparent even when he’d surrounded himself with his Kaiserjuden advisers before the war. During his exile, it had only grown and festered. The deposed monarch was frequently heard blaming “Jewish parasites” for Germany’s defeat. He even, infamously, suggested that to “gas” the lot of them would be the best and final solution. Again, it appeared to be another perverse example of “Of course, we don’t mean you.”
Fritz was not in awe of his former sovereign. In Germany it had been protocol at dinners with the Kaiser for the footmen or butlers to remove a course setting as soon as Wilhelm finished, regardless if the other guests were still eating. The still-haughty former emperor took this etiquette with him into exile. Fritz quite rightly thought this was ridiculous and notoriously made the point at a dinner at Hartekamp by waving off the waiter and loudly declaring, “I’m not done yet!” One can imagine the uncomfortable silence as Fritz finished his soup while the aging Emperor fumed.
Later, Fritz, Louise, and their children were also friends and hosts to Prince Bernhard zur Lippe-Biesterfeld, another deposed and somewhat impecunious German royal who was courting Catalina Pannwitz’s beautiful daughter, Ursula (an older friend to Lili). However, Prince Bernhard later married Dutch Crown Princess Juliana and became Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, a connection that would have a significant impact on my father during the Second World War.
Almost all of my grandparents’ friends were deeply involved in art, often as connoisseurs and scholars, as well as collectors. Many assembled significant collections, each according to his or her individual tastes and expertise. Dr. Lanz specialized in Italian Renaissance works. Ernst Proehl had an extensive collection of old-master paintings, including Lucas Cranach the Elder’s life-size, early-sixteenth-century Venus, said to be the most sensual and erotic painting of the German Renaissance. Fritz Mannheimer amassed a fabulous collection of Renaissance bronzes, crystal, silver, and gold as well as numerous paintings. Franz Koenigs had what was perhaps the world’s greatest single collection of old-master drawings, more than twenty-six hundred of them, as well as paintings and, later, select Impressionist works. (These included Van Gogh’s now famous Portrait of Dr. Gachet.) And Catalina von Pannwitz’s Hartekamp estate was a virtual art museum, combining her late husband’s extensive collection of ancient bronzes, Meissen, and other porcelain treasures with her own equally extensive collection of fifteenth- to eighteenth-century European paintings. These art collectors all moved in the same circles, went to the same art auctions, and used the same internationally known art dealers for advice and counsel: Goudstikker and Helmuth Lütjens in Amsterdam, Kurt Bachstitz in The Hague, the Van Diemen Gallery and Paul Cassirer & Co. in Berlin, and Ambroise Vollard and Jacques Seligmann in Paris, among others. Their passion for collecting went far beyond their obvious appreciation of high culture. Relentlessly, they bought, sold, traded, and searched for pieces to embellish their collections.
Fritz moved easily and knowledgeably within this circle. As the legal custodian and, in effect, the artistic curator of the Gutmann silver collection, Fritz was already in possession of an internationally famous collection of objets d’art. Since his arrival in Holland, Fritz had also begun to assemble his own rather magnificent collection of paintings, a collection that would consume not only his own passions, but also eventually his son’s, and now, to this day, mine.
• • •
Fritz, drawn by the pull of tangible history, began his art collection with the old masters of Italy. The scope of his taste would soon widen in a somewhat eclectic manner to encompass all of Western Europe. His first acquisition, from Count Trotti in Paris shortly after the end of the First World War, was a large, fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance cassone panel called The Siege of Veii, a marvelously detailed and wonderfully colorful depiction of an ancient Roman battle by Florentine painter Biagio d’Antonio. Later he added several paintings by Francesco Guardi, the eighteenth-century Venetian painter known for his architectural fantasies and atmospheric depictions of the Venetian landscape. Prophetically, one of those Guardis, Paesaggio di Fantasia con Isola della Laguna, portrayed an area in the lagoon of Venice where Fritz’s son, my father, would later drown.
Other early acquisitions included an Italian Baroque pair of gouache capriccios by Marco Ricci, another master of the architectural fantasy. Through a tortuous chain of events, these two works, along with a portrait of a veiled Spanish lady by eighteenth-century French painter Jean Barbault, would one day wind up in our family house in Shepherd Market. I didn’t know how important this painting was to my father, yet I remember being fascinated by it when I was a child.
Works by artists of the Northern Renaissance were also one of Fritz’s special passions—a passion that would, tragically, later be shared by some of the leading Nazis. Like his friend Ernst Proehl, Fritz acquired several works by Lucas Cranach the Elder, one of the most important German masters. These paintings reflected the various subgenres of that artist’s work: the allegorical Melancholy, the biblical Samson and the Lion, and, Cranach’s most common subject, portraiture—in this case Portrait of Johann Friedrich the Magnanimous, Elector of Saxony. Normally the electors (or princes) of Saxony were portrayed as stern Protestant patriarchs, but in this atypical portrait the prince was resplendent in his nuptial finery. A fifteenth-century Madonna with Child by Hans Memling, one of the leading masters of the early Netherlandish style, was a particularly exciting acquisition for Fritz, given the beauty and rarity of Memling’s work.
The collection of old masters that covered the walls in the Bosbeek estate grew each year. Aunt Lili remembered that her father hardly ever returned from a trip without bringing another artwork home with him. Two were early-seventeenth-century landscapes by Jan van Goyen, one of the most prolific landscape artists of the Dutch Golden Age. In Switzerland, Fritz found a rare portrait by the sixteenth-century German Renaissance artist Hans Baldung Grien, Portrait of a Young Man, which bore one of those generic titles that cause researchers endless frustration. Another painting was, in retrospect, an important part of my personal history. It was Portrait of Isaac Abrahamsz. Massa by Frans Hals. This was the painting that my father stared at wistfully years later when he brought me to the San Diego Museum of Art. Another was the descriptively titled Small Portrait of a Young Man with a Red Jerkin by Giovanni Dosso Dossi, court artist to the dukes of Ferrara, which would one day wind up in Hermann Göring’s Carinhall estate.
Interestingly, old masters rarely signed or named their paintings, so the names and even the attributions of paintings vary widely over the years. Fritz’s fifteenth-century panel Adoration of the Magi was painted by an anonymous German artist known simply, after the artist’s most famous work, as “the Master of the St. Bartholomew Altarpiece.” One more late-fifteenth-century portrait of an Austrian archduke was by yet another anonymous German artist known cryptically as “the Master of the Mornauer Portrait.” Both of these artists, along with Cranach and Memling, would one day stir the Nazi soul.
The early-sixteenth-century head of the Madonna, originally part of a pentaptych altarpiece by Augsburg artist Hans Holbein the Elder, was another exceptional find for Fritz. A fifteenth-century masterpiece, The Argonauts Leaving Colchis, was by the sadly short-lived Ercole de’ Roberti, who was also from Ferrara. According to Vasari, Ercole’s “extraordinary love of wine” led to a sudden demise at the age of forty. Then there was an eighteenth-century portrait of a young woman by Thomas Gainsborough, best known as the painter of The Blue Boy. Two exquisite still lifes were painted in the last days of the eighteenth century by Swiss French artist Jean-Étienne Liotard. A delicate chalk self-portrait by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, the most important female painter of the eighteenth century, was one of the few works by woman artists in Fritz’s collection.
Perhaps the most curious of Fritz’s old-master acquisitions was a small oil painting barely more than ten by eight inches, The Temptation of St. Anthony, by Hieronymus Bosch. On a trip to Madrid in 1926, Fritz bought the Bosch, known as El Bosco, from a private collector. Years later, when I was barely ten, my father sat me in front of the massive Garden of Earthly Delights, known aptly as Between Heaven and Hell, to contemplate El Bosco’s masterpiece in Madrid’s Prado. Bosch was the early-sixteenth-century Dutch master famed for his surrealistic, even nightmarish, visions of hell, death, sin, and other religious subjects. His paintings were populated with fantastic animal and human forms in surreal situations that were symbolic of various contemporary social and religious themes. Fritz’s St. Anthony—one of two paintings by Bosch that featured the hermit Egyptian saint—certainly fit that description, showing a cloaked and hooded Saint Anthony surrounded by, among other odd things, a frog rigged up with sails, an archer shooting an arrow from inside a broken eggshell, and a kneeling, naked man with his head in a bag, his foot in a jar, and what appear to be swallows flying out of a funnel protruding from his backside. The Bosch was a somewhat bold acquisition on Fritz’s part, considering that Bosch did not loom nearly as large among art scholars and the general public as he does today. In fact, when St. Anthony was displayed on loan from Fritz’s collection, alongside 450 other old-master paintings, at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the New York Times seemed confused by its inclusion. Describing it as the “queerest painting” in the exhibition, the newspaper primly suggested that it more appropriately belonged with Salvador Dalí’s Dream of Venus exhibit—which perhaps it did, given that Dalí and other modern-day surrealists were heavily influenced by Bosch.
Other significant artists that Fritz added to the collection included Fra Bartolommeo, François Boucher, Adriaen Isenbrandt, Hercules Seghers, Luca Signorelli, Adriaen van Ostade, and Paolo Veronese. Eventually his collection of old-master paintings would number well over sixty, which easily placed Fritz among the most important private collectors in Holland. It was all quite impressive—except that at least one member of the Bosbeek household was not always impressed.
Young Lili, schooled in the appreciation of art from the earliest age, spent many hours perusing her father’s extensive collection of art books, acquiring a budding connoisseur’s eye. She remembered how once an art dealer came to Bosbeek to try to sell Fritz what was purported to be a painting by Raphael, but when he unveiled the work, Lili took one look and declared, “Das ist kein Raphael!” (“That is no Raphael!”), which, as it turned out, it wasn’t. The embarrassed dealer made a quick exit.
Meanwhile Lili, despite her precocious knowledge of art, found some of Fritz’s collection rather dreary, especially the German Renaissance portraits. They were “hideous” and “boring,” she said. Many had “dreadful noses.” Whenever he brought home yet another painting of some poor German, dead for four centuries, she would complain vociferously in the way that favored daughters could. Lili recalled that her father often told her, “Ah, you do not understand them. They are really quite beautiful.” But she remained unconvinced when Fritz explained to her the finer points of composition, perspective, and brushwork. She insisted that the paintings were old and ugly and boring, and she wanted to know why Papi never brought home anything that was new and fresh and exciting. Louise agreed they needed something more contemporary, so starting in 1928, Fritz began to expand his painting collection beyond old masters.
Fritz had long been exposed to modern trends in art, both in Berlin and in Paris. However, the Expressionist movement in Germany was so angst-ridden, it reminded him why he didn’t like to live there anymore. The new, fractured world of cubism was almost as unsettling.
So, during a visit to the Paul Cassirer Gallery in Berlin in 1928, Fritz bought a small (eighteen-by-fifteen-inch) oil called Le Poirier, or The Pear Tree (in Bloom). It had been painted around 1871 by one of the earliest and greatest figures of the Impressionist movement, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. For Renoir, a prolific painter best known for his nudes and portraits, it was a less typical piece portraying, as the name simply suggested, a pear tree in the then-rural area of Louveciennes, located west of Paris. Renoir’s vibrant use of light and free brush style offered a sensation of movement. This ephemeral, windswept landscape set in springtime seemed to reflect the new optimism of the period immediately after the Franco-Prussian War.
The following year, during a visit to the famous Ambroise Vollard in Paris, Fritz acquired the 1880 pastel Femme se Chauffant or Woman Warming Herself, by another great and prolific figure of French Impressionism, Edgar Degas. Two years later, through his agent at a Paris auction, Fritz bought yet another Degas, a landscape simply known as Paysage and later deceptively reincarnated in English as Landscape with Smokestacks.
Both Degas paintings were quite beautiful, with vivid colors and deep luminescence, and, in the case of Paysage, somewhat rare because his landscapes were not well-known. Degas himself, on the other hand, was anything but beautiful. Ever since the Dreyfus affair, he had become increasingly withdrawn, until even his best friends viewed him as a cranky misanthrope. First he drove away all his Jewish friends, such as Pissarro, and then even his closest friends, such as Renoir. Fritz knew that Degas had turned into a notoriously outspoken anti-Semite. Nevertheless, Fritz was not the sort to judge art by the beliefs of the artist—and as a German Jew, albeit a converted one, he was more or less inured to such things. No doubt to Lili’s and Louise’s delight, the Renoir and the two Degas paintings took their places among the underappreciated old masters on the walls at Bosbeek. Mother and daughter agreed that they certainly brightened up the house.
Apart from some sculpture, Fritz made one other foray into Modernism that is worth noting. In 1929, during a trip to Munich, he purchased a startling work by Bavarian Symbolist painter Franz von Stuck, whose work was considered a precursor of Art Nouveau. Painted in 1891 and variously titled Die Sünde (The Sin) or Die Sinnlichkeit (The Sensuality), it portrayed a Garden of Eden theme with a seductively posed naked woman embraced within the coils of an exceedingly large and decidedly evil-looking snake.
It seemed an odd acquisition on Fritz’s part, even though Stuck’s mentor Franz von Lenbach had painted portraits of Fritz’s parents as well as Louise’s grandmother and aunt.
Artistic significance was always crucial to Fritz, but ultimately he always bought only pieces that he liked. Unfortunately, just as I imagine how Sensuality caught Fritz’s eye, years later it would also catch the attention of one of the worst Nazis who ever lived.
• • •
How much was Fritz’s collection of art worth? It’s perhaps a crass question, but probably inevitable. It’s also difficult to answer, especially almost a century later. Artists and artworks have waxed and waned in popularity—and thus in price—among collectors and dealers over the decades. The value of an individual piece by a given artist also varies widely based on numerous factors: the subject, the period of the artist’s life in which it was painted, the strength of its composition and provenance, its physical condition, and, of course, the economy at the time. As always, size matters. For example, at a 2011 auction in London, a forty-seven-by-eighty-inch veduta by Francesco Guardi titled View of the Rialto Bridge was sold for an astonishing $42 million. A year later, a pair of Venetian vedute also painted by Guardi, each measuring just seven by eight inches, were sold for $660,000 at auction.
In today’s superheated art market, we are accustomed to seeing tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, dollars spent on paintings. It was all rather different in Fritz’s day. Obviously, then as now, the collecting of art masterpieces was a rich man’s obsession, but the real cost of being such a collector then was still considerably less than it is now. For example, Portrait of a Man with Arms Akimbo by Rembrandt sold for $33 million in 2009. In 1930, it had sold at auction for roughly $72,000, or the equivalent of just under $1 million today. The Van Gogh Portrait of Dr. Gachet, which went for $82 million in 1990, had been sold by Van Gogh’s own sister in 1897 for a paltry three hundred French francs (about $1,000 today). In 1938, Fritz’s dear friend Franz Koenigs paid about $50,000 for it, which was about $800,000 today. Suffice it to say that the paintings in Fritz’s collection were worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars then, and several millions of dollars today.
All things considered, the 1920s were a happy time for Fritz and Louise. They were wealthy, popular, good-looking, still relatively young, blessed with two healthy and intelligent children, surrounded by art and culture and music, and living in a stable and peaceful country. Yet, as the 1930s dawned, Fritz and Louise could not remain immune to the turmoil and tumult of history, any more than they had in 1914. While neither they, nor anyone else, could fully understand or accurately predict just how terrible the implications, they could not help but see that a catastrophe was rising just over the border.
