Before the war, the many descendants of Eugen had come to rely on Fritz for financial support. Now with Fritz gone, it would fall to my father to handle not only his parents’ estate, but also what remained of the Eugen Gutmann Family Trust—a task that, given the disruptions of the war and the ponderous pace of bureaucracies, would take many years. But first the Dutch State had to confirm Bernard as the executor of his father’s estate and of the family trust. With the final hearings in Dutch court still several months away, at best, Bernard headed for Paris.
Pa found a room above Le Berkeley restaurant, on the avenue Matignon. Le Berkeley had been a favorite of Fritz’s in the thirties, when he would tour the great art galleries, such as Bernheim-Jeune, just a few doors down. A helpful man at the British Embassy directed Bernard the next day to the Commission de Récupération Artistique (Commission on Art Recovery). The new commission’s offices had been set up initially in the Jeu de Paume. Symbolically this would be where the Allies would start returning all recovered French artworks.
Bernard was ushered into the offices of the former Résistance leader Albert Henraux, now director of the CRA. “Ah, Monsieur Gutmann! We have been waiting for you.” Unfortunately Henraux didn’t have good news for my father. As best he could, the director began to explain what had happened to the Graupe Gallery and the collections entrusted to its care. In 1941, Hitler’s art agent, Karl Haberstock, had arrived at the gallery with orders to collect from the Gutmann collection eight major paintings (including the Memling, one of the Cranachs, and the Holbein). Then, when Paul Graupe fled to Switzerland, and his associate, Arthur Goldschmidt, to the south of France, what had been left in the gallery had been seized by a branch of the Nazi Party known as the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (or ERR), including the Pietà statue and the Veronese, I would later discover. Meanwhile, the other Gutmann artworks had been put in storage on the boulevard Raspail and filed under the pseudonym “Muir.” The strategy was that a Scottish name such as Muir might go undetected by the Nazis, whereas they would certainly pursue anything listed under a typically Jewish name, such as Gutmann. Henraux believed these artworks included the three Impressionist paintings. Ultimately, they would suffer the same fate as the other works when the ERR discovered them in 1942.
Henraux next handed Bernard an envelope containing three negatives. He explained that they had been taken in late 1942 by Henraux’s colleague Rose Valland (now Captain Valland). During the years of German occupation, Valland was the only remaining French official at the Jeu de Paume Museum, which had become the depot for the art that the Germans were looting. Undercover for all of that time, and at great personal risk, she was working for the French Resistance. She was indeed a remarkable woman. At night, Valland secretly cataloged and photographed as many artworks as possible before they were shipped to Germany—including, as we discovered, some of my grandparents’ paintings. Amazingly, Valland was barely noticed by the Germans. They were not even aware she was fluent in German.
A shiver ran up my father’s spine when he realized he was in the very same building at that moment.
Henraux explained that so far none of the Gutmann paintings seemed to be among those the Allies had already found. However, Rose Valland was, at present, in Munich, at the new Central Collecting Point, busily looking for any pieces taken in France by the Nazis. Henraux, or Valland herself, would contact my father as soon as they had found something. Henraux pointed out it was early days yet—they had “thousands” of artworks to sift through.
• • •
The scale of the Nazi art looting of Europe in World War II beggars the imagination. Hundreds of thousands of pieces—paintings, sculptures, antiquities—were stolen outright or “purchased” under duress and usually transported back to Germany, not only by top Nazis such as Hitler and Göring but by all levels of Nazi officials and military men. From France alone, thirty complete train convoys packed full with masterworks (approximately 140 wagons with over twelve hundred crates) left Paris for Germany between the end of 1940 and July 1944. As the war neared its end, the bombing of Germany increased and the Allies closed in from the west and the east. Out of fear of detection and no doubt to safeguard these valuables (along with German gold reserves), the Nazis hid the priceless treasures in more than a thousand repositories across Germany and Austria—in castles and cathedrals, in cellars and warehouses, in underground bunkers and huge salt mines.
What they hoped to accomplish with this subterfuge is uncertain. Perhaps they thought the Allies would not find these vast troves of art and gold. Perhaps some of the top Nazis, Göring in particular, thought that after the war they would actually be allowed to keep the thousands of artworks they had “legitimately” collected from the occupied territories. Whatever the Nazi thinking, it was delusional. As the Russians swept through eastern Germany, the Red Army’s “trophy brigades” swept up countless artworks and unabashedly shipped them back to Russia—works not only stolen by the Germans during the invasion of the Soviet Union, but artworks stolen by the Nazis from other European countries as well. Hundreds of thousands of artworks disappeared, seemingly forever, behind what would soon be known as the Iron Curtain—a small measure of restitution, the Russians felt, for the terrible destruction they had suffered in the war.
To this day, the Russians still refuse to return stolen artworks or even, in some cases, acknowledge that they had even taken them. The Western Allies, to their credit, took a more humanitarian approach at the end of the war. Alarmed by reports of the Nazis’ cultural rape of Europe, in 1943 the American government initiated a joint Allied military unit called the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) group, a collection of museum professionals, art historians, art dealers, and other experts in uniform. The task of the so-called Monuments Men was to protect significant cultural structures such as cathedrals and museums from wartime destruction, and to recover and return to their rightful owners the artworks the Nazis had stolen. As Allied armies uncovered stashes of looted art, Monuments Men rushed to secure the artworks and to begin the process of repatriating them. At the same time, the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA, set up an Art Looting Investigation Unit, charged with tracking down the art vultures who had orchestrated the thefts—men such as Mühlmann, Hofer, Haberstock, Böhler, Wendland, and scores of others.
The Monuments Men, whose story, until recently, had rarely been told, performed their work admirably, with dedication and courage. The task they faced, however, was overwhelming, especially for a unit that at its height numbered less than four hundred men and women. Perhaps it was inevitable that thousands of stolen artworks that had escaped destruction in the war would remain undiscovered.
Nevertheless, pieces of Fritz’s stolen art collection started turning up. In the vast underground Austrian salt mine at Altaussee, the Monuments Men found more than ten thousand paintings and artworks. Alongside Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna, Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (known as the Ghent Altarpiece), and Jan Vermeer’s The Astronomer, which had been Hitler’s most cherished painting, were several paintings that had been stolen from the collection of F. B. E. Gutmann. Among this vast horde, slated for the Führermuseum in Linz, were at least one Cranach, two Liotards, one Van Goyen, the Jakob Elsner, the Nicholas Maes, and the Isenbrandt, all from Fritz’s collection. Then in bunkers and on a freight train, hidden in an abandoned railway tunnel near Berchtesgaden, Allied soldiers found thousands of artworks from Göring’s collection. Among these looted pieces were many from the collections of Fritz’s friends Franz Koenigs and Jacques Goudstikker, as well as the fourteenth-century Pietà sculpture that Fritz had sent to Paris in 1939, and several pieces from the Gutmann silver collection. However, the Dosso Dossi portrait, which had been taken from the Wacker-Bondy storage on the boulevard Raspail for Göring’s private collection, was nowhere to be seen.
Meanwhile, the bulk of the Gutmann silver collection, which had been sent to Munich, was found near Lake Starnberg. Böhler’s business partner, Hans Sauermann, had hidden it all, including the Reinhold Clock and the Orpheus Clock, in the cellar of his home. An October 1945 report on the find by a US army lieutenant urged that “this property should be placed under [military] control immediately as an attempt was to be made to loot this property”—a warning that, as we’ll see, came a little bit too late.
Eventually, many pieces from the Fritz and Eugen Gutmann collections would be found by the Monuments Men, and not just paintings and silver works but even fragile, little Meissen teacups. A large amount of Gutmann Meissen porcelain and antique French furniture was found in the cellars of Mad Ludwig’s castle Neuschwanstein, perched on a rugged hill in the Bavarian Alps. Much of the French Rothschild collection was also there, in conveniently marked crates. Still more Gutmann antiques were found in the enormous Baroque monastery of St. Florian, in Upper Austria.
Those and the tens of thousands of other artworks recovered by the Allies were initially sent to various “collecting points,” the largest being the Munich Central Collecting Point, housed in the former Nazi Party headquarters. They would be cataloged and their owners identified, if possible. (Identification proved in many cases to be easy, since the Nazis kept meticulous records of their thefts—perhaps because, as we have seen, they did not regard them as thefts at all.) Ultimately the Monuments Men would process as many as 5 million cultural artifacts through the collecting points.
However, for logistical reasons, the Allies had decided that instead of returning stolen artworks directly to individual owners (many of whom had perished in the war), they would instead be returned to the governments of the countries from which they had been taken. Sadly the Monuments Men unit was disbanded in June 1946. No doubt it was assumed the new governments, in the former occupied territories, would work as tirelessly to ensure that the stolen art was returned to its legitimate owners. That was unfortunately an extremely optimistic assumption.
Tens of thousands of pieces of looted art recovered by Allied armies were turned over to the Dutch Stichting Nederlandsch Kunstbezit (Dutch Art Collections Foundation, or SNK), including most of the recovered pieces identified as coming from the Gutmann collection. The SNK did not, however, go out of its way to track down and notify the owners of the returned artworks—or more likely, in the case of stolen Jewish-owned art, their surviving heirs. Instead, the owners or heirs had to file official claims with the SNK, specifically stating what pieces had been taken from their families and requesting their return.
That may sound simple enough, but it was not, particularly with paintings. One could not simply request the return of, for example, a “Tavern scene by Van Ostade” or a “Seascape by Van de Velde” and expect the SNK to hand it over. Dozens of paintings could fit those general descriptions. Instead, claimants had to describe their stolen painting in detail, including if possible the canvas measurements—an important identifying point in paintings—and provide documentation of prior ownership.
Under ordinary circumstances that might have been reasonable. But how could a claimant provide documentation of ownership when, often, those documents had been dispersed, destroyed, or taken by the very people who stole the painting in the first place? Even when those documents still existed, claimants often could not access them because the captured Nazi records of looted artworks had been classified and sealed by the Allied armies, as had the Allies’ own records of recovered looted art—and they would remain classified for decades. It was a perfect example of what would later be known as a “catch-22.”
• • •
In Amsterdam, Bernard and Lili tried their utmost to comply with the new rules and regulations. They compiled list after list, initially from memory, of as many, as possible, of the paintings and other artworks that had disappeared from Bosbeek. Delving into art catalogs, exhibition catalogs, and auction catalogs, they did their best to document the painting and silver collection. They sought the testimony of eminent art historians, such as Bernard Berenson and Max Friedländer. Eventually they filed hundreds and hundreds of claims with the Dutch government.
Meanwhile, thanks to the painstaking work of the Monuments officers, many of these works were now in the possession of the SNK in Amsterdam. We now know that over nine hundred pieces from both the Fritz Gutmann and Eugen Gutmann collections were turned over to the Dutch authorities from the Munich Collecting Point alone, mostly in 1946. Among these artworks were the paintings by Hans Memling, Hans Holbein, and Samson and the Lion by Lucas Cranach, as well as over two hundred pieces from the Gutmann silver collection found near Lake Starnberg. Bernard and Lili formally requested the artworks’ return.
But there was another catch. If the Nazis had simply confiscated all of Fritz’s artworks outright, it might, ironically, have been easier to secure their return. Instead, as we have seen, the Nazis had disguised their art thefts with a cloak of legality and bogus money transfers. Under Dutch law, ownership of any artworks, or other property, sold by Dutch citizens to the Nazis during the occupation was technically transferred to the Dutch government, on the grounds that the Dutch government-in-exile had declared such sales illegal during the war. After the war Nazi dealers, such as Haberstock, obstinately claimed their transactions had been legitimate, blithely ignoring the severe circumstances Jewish collectors suffered. But even more startling was that postwar Dutch officials seemed to agree with this revisionist Nazi scenario. Technically only involuntary sales were eligible for restitution under the new 1945 rules, and the Dutch authorities were insisting that Fritz Gutmann had willingly sold his artworks to the Nazis and had been paid for the sale—this despite the fact that the money “paid” to Fritz by Haberstock, Böhler, and other Nazis had been deposited in Nazi-controlled accounts. Meanwhile, the little money that had actually been paid into the Gutmann Trust account (the only account left open by the Germans) was withdrawn by a Nazi-appointed Treuhänder (trustee) named R. Leuchtmann, on August 18, 1944, just as the German army was retreating before the advancing Allies.
The SNK was adamant that only artworks that had not been involved in any “sale” would be returned. Bernard and Lili felt they had no alternative: they would have to take the Stichting Nederlandsch Kunstbezit to court.
Fortunately, at the same time, Rose Valland had been busy reclaiming several other pieces from the Gutmann collection. The confiscations by the ERR had been classified as outright theft, so the bureaucrats had no gray area to hide behind. Bernard went back to Paris eager, this time, to meet the heroine of the Resistance he had heard so much about. Instead he was greeted by a hard-smoking, drab, bespectacled woman, almost fifty, in a frumpy uniform. Although a little taken aback, he was grateful for the opportunity to thank Captain Valland personally. The first two paintings to come back were the Luca Signorelli and the little Barbault (originally thought to be by Goya). Thanks to Valland’s indefatigable efforts in Germany, Bernard and Lili welcomed the first successful recovery of any of Fritz’s artworks.
Rose Valland, later, also recovered one of the Van Goyen landscapes and five magnificent Louis XV armchairs. Unfortunately, because the Van Goyen had been part of the first “sale” to Haberstock, Valland felt obliged to send it to Holland and let the Dutch government sort out the legalities.
Then in October 1947 there was actually some progress on the legal front. The Dutch government had finally declared my father the official heir to Fritz’s estate. However, the ownership of the Bosbeek property was still in question. Its legal ownership had been seized by the Nazis in August 1942, while Fritz and Louise were still living there, and assigned to the Nazis’ “Dutch property management office.” Later, while Fritz and Louise were imprisoned in Theresienstadt, it had been “sold” to the German National Socialist Volkswohlfahrt (NSV), a Nazi “social welfare” organization.
By mid-1948 the authorities conceded that they might be prepared to void the Nazi sale of Bosbeek. Bernard was ecstatic for just a brief moment before the other shoe inevitably fell. There was of course a catch. If the state restored the Gutmann family’s title retroactively back to 1942, then the Gutmann family would concurrently be liable for all back taxes and unpaid mortgages. Bernard’s heart sank. What choice did he have? After talking it through with the family lawyer, he decided they had to go back to court.
Meanwhile, as the proceedings were getting under way, at the beginning of 1948 the Dutch authorities finally removed all the Nazi children from Bosbeek. That same month I was born.
Then there was more good news. Among the papers that were turned over from what remained of Fritz’s last business, Firma F. B. Gutmann, was a storage receipt. Apparently at least one of Fritz’s former employees had remained loyal. Bernard was profoundly moved when he entered Fritz’s previously undiscovered Amsterdam Storage facility (belonging to the De Gruyter’s Shipping Co.) only to find over a hundred pieces originally from Bosbeek and Fritz’s office on the Herengracht. Among this unexpected windfall were six minor (but beautiful) paintings, a mahogany dining table with armchairs, Persian rugs, Japanese porcelain, and a complete silver service. (My father happily brought many of these things back to London. I remember fondly, as a child, the lovely Dutch seascape hanging in the hall near the entrance to my bedroom.)
Other documents (from Firma F. B. Gutmann) listed stocks in England and the United States that the Nazi trustee had not been able to touch. Bernard was relieved to find some real liquid assets. The family’s tireless lawyer, Albert Gomperts, who had also fled to London during the war, had not been paid in over a year. Also poor Uncle Max had been sending urgent cables from Italy hoping for some funds—the wonderful stamp collection had run out a long time ago. Bernard cabled him finally saying if he could come to Holland, there would be something for him.
Max had been effectively stateless since before the war, when his German citizenship (like that of so many others) had been canceled. When he received my father’s cable in early 1948, Max was in a quandary—his papers were still not fully in order. He decided the safest plan would be to fly to Belgium and then slip across the Dutch border. On December 6 he boarded a Douglas C-47 in Milan bound for Brussels. The small plane crashed during takeoff in a dense fog, killing all aboard. Bernard had been waiting for him in Amsterdam when he got the news; both he and Lili were devastated. Just a few weeks earlier, another uncle, Luca Orsini, had also died after a long illness.
Not until 1950 did the Dutch authorities officially determine what should have been obvious: that the seizure and sale of the Bosbeek estate had been forced by the Nazis, and therefore illegal, and that Bernard and Lili were the rightful heirs. Sadly, there was no legal way to avoid the unconscionable penalties that came attached with this modicum of justice. The title to the estate came burdened with much dubious debt, such as wartime tax bills and mortgages, along with various liens and other legal encumbrances. Bernard, with Gomperts Sr. and Jr., had argued quite reasonably, but vainly, that when a sale has taken place (albeit in wartime), then all previous liens must be settled at the same time. Furthermore they reasoned, at least on moral grounds, that Dutch Jewish citizens who had been barred, by the state, from working or accessing their assets should not be liable for any wartime dues, especially to the state. Not surprisingly the Ministry of Justice did not see things so clearly.
This new Kafkaesque ruling ensured that my family would only own Bosbeek, once again, for a regrettably short time. At the end of 1950 Bosbeek had to be sold to the sitting tenant. The new owners, the Catholic Congregation of the Sisters of Providence, turned the manor house into an insane asylum and later a retirement home for elderly nuns.
Meanwhile, the courts had now also confirmed Bernard as executor of the Gutmann Family Trust. This ruling had taken until almost five years after the end of the war. Again this seemed more like a Pyrrhic victory. During all this time the 220 pieces from the Eugen Gutmann silver collection, so carefully recovered by the Monuments officers at the end of 1945, had been languishing in a Dutch government warehouse. Since their arrival in Amsterdam in August 1946, the SNK had been biding their time. Then only months before my father was granted control of the Gutmann Family Trust, the SNK decided to release the family treasures to a court-appointed trustee. This so-called trustee quickly sold between sixty and seventy pieces from the collection before my father was able to get rid of him. On paper the functionary was merely paying expenses, his no doubt, but others also dating back to the Nazi occupation.
What followed was perhaps even sadder. The remaining 150 pieces of silver had triggered a backstabbing battle among Eugen’s qualifying heirs. Suddenly my father found himself at odds with his own cousins. It was one thing to fight against a callous bureaucracy or an avaricious museum, but Bernard had no stomach for fighting against what little was left of his own family. Reluctantly he yielded to his cousins. The remaining undivided artworks from the Eugen Gutmann collection were sent to New York in the early 1950s. There they would be sold, piece by piece, by a well-known antiques dealer who specialized in Fabergé eggs. To say the results were disappointing doesn’t begin to describe my father’s and my aunt’s reactions. The famous Jamnitzer Becher or goblet, which had made some of the worst Nazis salivate, had been valued, despite depressed 1945 values, at fifty thousand Reichsmarks, or at least $20,000, at the end of the war. When it was finally sold in New York, ten years later, the family received exactly $5,273.78. The superb little statue entitled A Flagellator of Christ, made by Alessandro Algardi around 1630, was sold for the astonishing price of $78.95 (after commission). Originally thought to be by the great Bernini, the silver statue now stands proudly on display in the National Gallery in Washington.
The meager proceeds were then divided among Eugen Gutmann’s feuding heirs—including Bernard and Lili, their two aunts, and Uncle Herbert’s children. Divided so many ways, the sums were derisively inconsequential. Bernard sank into a deep gloom as he reflected on the enormous lengths to which his father had gone to protect the Silbersammlung Gutmann. If only poor Fritz had a grave, he would surely be turning in it.
After another two years, Bernard’s next battle with the Dutch State came to a conclusion. The court ruled, in 1952, that even though the purchase agreements for Fritz’s “sales” to Böhler and Haberstock had not been concluded under direct coercion, they had still been concluded “under the influence of . . . exceptional circumstances” and were therefore eligible for “restitution.”
Yet again there was a twist. The heirs were allocated the right to restitution on condition that the sales prices “received” during the war be handed over to the state. In a nutshell, if Bernard and Lili wanted their family heritage returned, they would have to buy it back from the Dutch government.
It is more than merely astonishing. The facts were plain: Bosbeek had been stripped bare, the bank accounts had been emptied, and then Fritz and Louise had been murdered.
Even though Fritz’s sale of the artworks to the Nazis had been made under obvious duress, and even though neither Fritz nor his estate ultimately benefited from money the Nazis supposedly “paid” for the artworks, Dutch officials insisted that Bernard and Lili “repay” the government money that they had never received. Furthermore, the Dutch government insisted on “repayment” even though it had never expended any of its own money for these artworks.
Bernard and Lili were not the only heirs of Dutch Holocaust victims to be treated this way. Throughout the postwar years the Dutch government, as well as other Western European governments, displayed a fundamental disregard for the special circumstances in which Jews found themselves during the German occupation. In the name of democracy, the new Dutch State claimed it could not make special laws just for Jews. As a result it made no distinction between a Dutch citizen’s sale of property to the Germans and a Dutch Jewish citizen’s coerced sale during the occupation. Jews knew that if they refused to sell their property (at hugely discounted prices), it would be taken anyway. Like Fritz, they sold their possessions not for gain, but out of desperation.
Following the court ruling it took the Ministry of Finance another year to assemble the artworks from the Fritz Gutmann collection and price them for sale. Ultimately the ministry only offered my father and aunt about five hundred out of the seven hundred or so pieces the Monuments Men had returned to Amsterdam, although my father was not aware of the discrepancy. So, at the beginning of 1954, after years of negotiation and litigation, Bernard and Lili raised what capital they could to buy back as much of Fritz’s collection as was being offered. This amounted to sixteen major paintings, including the Memling, the Isenbrandt, the Holbein, the Cranach Samson and the Lion, one Guardi, and the Fra Bartolommeo, along with nearly 170 antiques and artifacts.
But as with the Bosbeek estate, now that Bernard and Lili owned the art pieces, they could not afford to keep most of them. My father was able to bring home, among others, several pieces of Chinese porcelain, some silver, and the pair of Hubert Robert Roman fantasy paintings, which I remember so vividly in our house in Shepherd Market. Meanwhile, Lili took back to Italy a portrait by Gainsborough, three bronzes, and a Franz von Lenbach family portrait that the Dutch authorities decided not to charge us for. The rest was put on the art market in Amsterdam to pay the legal bills. Unfortunately, in a deeply depressed art market, the results were not impressive. For example, the Hans Memling Madonna with Child, a work that might today be worth a million dollars or more, went for around $4,000—even though, ten years before, Haberstock had offered it to Hitler for over one hundred thousand Reichsmarks (or $40,000).
Unbeknown to Bernard and Lili, the SNK kept countless pieces from Fritz’s art collection, along with some of the silver collection that belonged to Fritz personally, without bothering to tell them that it had them. The Dutch government had, in effect, stolen the artworks that had been stolen by the Nazis. That secret would remain uncovered for the next forty years.
Much later, in his brief 1991 memoir of the Gutmann family (which Eva sent me just before he died), my father would sum up the postwar struggle over the Gutmann estate and the recovered artworks this way: “The entire affair lasted years, and very little came out of it. Only the lawyers made money.”
• • •
Sadly, as so often happens in such matters, the drawn-out liquidation of the estate and the Eugen Gutmann trust, and the troubled sale of the artworks and silver pieces, caused further disruptions and divisions among the Gutmann family, pitting nephew against aunt, cousin against cousin, even brother against sister. Perhaps Lili was right to compare the silver collection to the Nibelungen gold—maybe it was cursed. There were accusations, recriminations, complaints by one party or the other that he or she had somehow been shortchanged in the division of the various estates’ insufficient remains. Angry words were followed by years, decades, of angry silence. Even my father and Lili, once so close, did not speak to each other for years and years following a dispute after some of Louise’s jewelry was discovered in Switzerland. Not until the late 1960s, while I was traveling through Italy as a student, was I able to help bring about a full reconciliation between my dear father and aunt.
The burden of all this family turmoil fell most heavily on Bernard. The role of family executor is seldom enviable, especially when one has to explain to the other heirs that their expectations are unrealistic. In the usual nature of family feuds, the divisions persisted long after the precise reasons for them had been forgotten, even into my own generation. It was why, as a boy, I had never met my aunt or many of my cousins. I had barely been aware they existed, even though several lived just a few miles away in London. My mother had relatives, but otherwise my family consisted of my parents and my brother. This, I’m sure, was one of the reasons why, for much of his life, my father was so lonely.
Perhaps he would have got over it if the matter of his father’s art collection and other assets had all been firmly wrapped up, if there hadn’t been so many loose ends, so many questions unanswered. But my father knew at least thirty paintings were still missing, that he remembered—paintings that had never been found by the Allies after the war or, if they had been found, were never returned.
Rose Valland continued, valiantly, to look for the two Degas pastels, the Renoir, and the portraits by Dosso Dossi and Baldung Grien. But even she had given up on the Botticelli. The two fantasy landscapes by Guardi, last seen in Switzerland, had slipped out of the Allies’ jurisdiction. Others such as the Adriaen van Ostade, the Hercules Seghers, a second Jan van Goyen, the strange Franz von Stuck called The Sin, and so many others had just disappeared. Last seen in Munich in 1943 was the wonderful Renaissance cassone panel (originally attributed to Uccello) that had been Fritz’s first acquisition.
The idea that paintings stolen from his murdered father’s prized collection were hanging on someone else’s wall, perhaps even in the home of some ex-Nazi, ate away at Bernard, tormented him, and eventually obsessed him.
At this point my father’s secret life must have begun, the secret life that had so mystified me when I was a boy—the unexplained trips, the constant correspondence to and from foreign governments and overseas lawyers, and the mounting sense of frustration and inner rage.
He traveled relentlessly through Europe, to Holland, Belgium, and France, to Spain and Italy, to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Endlessly he would search museums and galleries, attend auctions, and search those records that hadn’t been sealed and classified, looking for any hints of his father’s missing art treasures.
In my early childhood, my family sometimes all went to Europe together. However, my parents would often leave my brother and me alone with our nanny, by a beach in Holland or in Italy by Lake Como. I remember having fun, but sometimes Nick and I were lonely. On occasion, my mother would come back first and we would all wait for Pa together. When we were old enough to start school, my mother took a job in London, and my father continued his journeys alone.
When at home, Bernard would lock himself away in his study and write letters by the hundreds. Letters to the French Service de Protection des Oeuvres d’Art, to the German Bundesamt für Äussere Restitutionen, to the Interpol section of Scotland Yard, to solicitors and art dealers and museum curators, letters pleading for help, letters demanding action, letters that, as the years went by, became increasingly indignant and frustrated.
“Bear in mind that we are not refugees being dictated to by what might be for all I know ex-Nazis,” he angrily wrote in a letter referencing a claim against the German government. In another letter to Paris concerning a report that two of his father’s missing Guardis had been sighted in Switzerland, he impatiently declared, “It is not clear to me whether . . . you have started a new inquiry at Geneva as I have repeatedly requested. I have a feeling that you may not have entirely understood my previous letters.”
In the end, it all came to almost nothing. In 1967, after years of negotiations, Bernard and Lili agreed, very reluctantly with their lawyers, to a restitution settlement with the West German government that paid them a paltry $7,500 each for four stolen and still-missing paintings that had disappeared somewhere in Germany during the war. Officially they were being paid 50 percent of the 1945 values. Apparently, if my father wanted the other half that was due, he would have to go behind the Iron Curtain and get Communist East Germany to pay the rest. For the West German officials, twenty years after the end of the war, it was a convenient resolution for what to them was essentially a nuisance lawsuit. For Bernard and Lili, the settlement barely covered the legal fees.
For all his travels, all his letters, and all his years of searching, my father never found another of his father’s missing paintings. As the decades went by, as the war and the Holocaust receded in time, government officials, and others, were less and less interested in recovering a few stolen paintings. Most of Germany had become part of the new alliance, and now the authorities were focused on a different enemy, the Soviet bloc. Officials would say what happened was all quite regrettable, most unfortunate, but there was nothing they could do about it—it was time to move on.
Increasingly, my father’s letters went unanswered. But he could never let it go. Others might forget, but for my father that was never an option. Despite substantial successes immediately after the war—my father and aunt recovered far more than most other comparable families—the failure of the last three decades to redeem his family’s lost legacy had irrevocably changed him. Slowly, bit by bit, the once cheerful, gregarious, fun-loving young man from Cambridge, the loving young father who had lifted me on his shoulders to see the King’s funeral procession, turned into the silent, withdrawn, broken man I came to know.
As his marriage to my mother slowly fell away, their breakup came not with shouts or angry words, but more by silences that grew ever longer. After their divorce my father took a bachelor flat in Chelsea, a rather cramped place with well-worn carpets and bookcases stacked with art books and museum catalogs, where he just slipped into obscurity. Each time I visited, he seemed to have barely moved from his armchair.
My father’s otherwise almost nonexistent social calendar had one annual highlight. Each year the “old boys” from his school in Zuoz, the Lyceum Alpinum, would gather for a reunion in the Engadine valley, by St. Moritz, high in the Swiss Alps. My father never failed to attend. Surrounded by his old school friends, once the sons of bankers and industrialists and counts and barons, now bankers and industrialists and counts and barons in their own right, he seemed able for the moment to put aside the tragedies and disillusionment of the last forty years, to immerse himself in happier memories. His dinner jacket and tails still dated from that period. If his wealthy friends noticed that his collars were a bit frayed, his suits a bit worn, they were too nice to say anything about it. One quirk also set my father somewhat apart from the other Zuoz alumni—his utter refusal to speak the common language of the school, which was German. If anyone addressed him in German, he would respond in English—not because he had forgotten the language of his youth, but because he detested the country it came from. This stand made what happened next all the more surprising. At a school-reunion dinner in 1978, my father, then sixty-four, met and quietly fell in love with a younger woman named Eva Schultze-Dumbsky. What was even more startling was that Eva was German and had been born in Germany just as Hitler was taking power. After the Zuoz school went coed in the 1950s, she had been among the first females to graduate. The dinner was held at the fashionable Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in St. Moritz—coincidentally one of Fritz’s favorites that summer in 1913, when he had fallen in love with Louise. The result was that not only did my father start speaking German again, but in the early eighties he left London and moved to Eva’s hometown of Tübingen, in southwestern Germany.
At the time, Nick and I were stunned. When I had the opportunity to ask my father what it was like living in Germany, he just shrugged and said it was fine. I think, after all that had happened, he liked being called sir again in German and being treated with the deference he was originally accustomed to. Obviously Nick and I were pleased that Pa had found some measure of happiness in his later years.
Yet, despite this apparent accommodation with the past, my father never abandoned his search for the missing paintings. He continued to study art catalogs and auction listings, to haunt museums and art galleries, to write his letters, albeit much less frequently. As Eva later told us, when the Berlin Wall finally came down in 1989, followed in short order by the lifting of the Iron Curtain throughout Eastern Europe, he had happily slapped the breakfast table and announced, “Das ist die Wende!” “This is the turning point!” Ever since its creation, East Germany had consistently refused to restitute property seized by the Nazis. Suddenly East Germany no longer existed. In October of 1990, German reunification became a reality. Bernard quickly summoned the courage to resume his long-dormant correspondence with the Federal German authorities. Convinced now that the paintings had disappeared into East Germany or the Soviet Union, he hoped that finally, after four decades of searching, he would at last be able to track them down.
But it was not to be. In 1994, during a trip to Venice, my father and Eva spent the night of his eightieth birthday in happy celebration at the famous Harry’s Bar, a familiar haunt from his younger days. The next day he went swimming at the Lido and sank without a sound.
My father had never been able to express his pain. Like the ghost of an unfulfilled spirit, I believe, part of this pain was passed on. Then two months later, in Los Angeles, those dusty old boxes arrived at our doorstep.
