In late 2019, I flew to Tel Aviv to visit my German girlfriend for a week. She was working as a reporter in Israel and in the Palestinian Territories for a month, subbing for a colleague on leave. One evening in early December, we visited the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, a labyrinthine building with a mix of brutalist and modernist architecture. At the recommendation of a friend back in New York, we went to see an exhibition by the American artist Raymond Pettibon. The weather was still warm. And yet, upon arriving at the exhibition, I felt a chill run down my spine. Just before we entered, I noticed a list of names written in German and Hebrew on the wall. Above the names was a sign: THE GALLERY OF THE GERMAN FRIENDS OF THE TEL AVIV MUSEUM OF ART.
Between surnames listed beneath the sign, such as Gottesdiener and Gleitman, a few especially notable ones jumped out at me. Near the top: Gabriele Quandt. Gabriele, the granddaughter of Magda Goebbels and the daughter of Harald Quandt, the heir who grew up in the Goebbels household but never became a Nazi Party member — who tried to look to the future but could never escape the tragedies of his past.
At the very bottom of the list: Ingrid Flick, third wife of Friedrich Karl Flick, the man responsible for Germany’s largest postwar corruption scandal and the third and youngest son of Friedrich Flick: the mightiest and most ruthless of all German industrialists, who was convicted at Nuremberg and rose to become Germany’s wealthiest man in three different eras. Friedrich Flick, who couldn’t let go of his creation, causing his empire, and his family, to fall apart. Friedrich Karl, who like his father refused to ever pay compensation to any of the tens of thousands of people used as forced or slave labor at Flick factories and mines; thousands died there, many of them Jews brought in from concentration camps. Friedrich Karl took his billions and fled to Austria, leaving the family’s ghosts for his niece and nephews to publicly reckon with. Meanwhile, Ingrid Flick continues her late husband’s tainted work. Still, she maintains a foundation in the name of her late father-in-law, a convicted Nazi war criminal who stole the livelihoods of so many to expand his empire.
To see the names Quandt and Flick honored in an Israeli museum, their names spelled out in Hebrew, was, as the Germans might say, unheimlich, eerie. The reigning generation of heirs still has the chance to alter course before passing their empires along — to commit fully to historical transparency and moral responsibility, and to strive, unconditionally, to repay to society the enormous debts their fathers incurred. Those heirs’ children, in turn, will have the chance to use their power and wealth to help create a better world, one in which their grandfathers would have no place.
Beneath Gabriele’s and Ingrid’s names were those of their children: Gabriele’s sons, now in their early thirties, and the Flick twins, the world’s youngest billionaires, now in their early twenties. They are the next generation — my generation. “We will do better,” I said to no one in particular. My girlfriend smiled at me. We skipped the exhibition and walked out of the museum, into the warm December evening and a new decade.