BERLIN – Nobody knows why Felix Hildesheimer, a Jewish music retailer, bought a precious violin built by Cremonese master Giuseppe Guarneri in January 1938 at a store in Stuttgart, Germany. His own store lost its non-Jewish customers because of Nazi boycotts, and his two daughters fled the country shortly thereafter. His grandsons say it is possible that Hildesheimer hoped he could sell the violin in Australia, where he and his wife, Helene, wanted to build a new life with their younger daughter.
But the couple’s efforts to obtain an Australian visa failed and Hildesheimer killed himself in August 1939. More than 80 years later, his 300-year-old violin – worth about $ 185,000 – is at the center of a dispute that threatens to return Germany’s commitment to Nazi looted objects.
The government’s advisory commission on the return of Nazi looted cultural property ruled in 2016 that the violin was almost certainly sold under duress by Hildesheimer, or seized by the Nazis after his death. In its first case concerning a musical instrument, the panel recommended that the current holder, the Franz Hofmann and Sophie Hagemann Foundation, a music education organization, pay the merchants’ grandsons a fee of 100,000 euros, approximately $ 121,000; in return, the foundation was able to retain the instrument it planned to lend to talented violin students.
But the foundation refuses to pay. Having first said that it could not raise the funds, it now raises the committee’s decision. In a January 20 statement, the foundation said current information suggested Hildesheimer would not be forced to give up his business until 1939 instead of 1937, as previously thought. So, the statement reads, “we have to assume that the violin was sold as a retail product in his music store.”
Last week, the Advisory Commission lost patience and issued a public statement aimed at increasing pressure on the Hagemann Foundation to comply with its recommendation.
“Both parties have accepted this as a just and equitable solution,” the statement said, accusing the foundation of not having a ‘serious commitment to comply with the commission’s recommendation.’ The attempt to challenge the recommendation – four years after it was issued – by proposing that the Jewish trader sell the violin under normal circumstances means that the foundation is not only violating the existing principles for the restitution of Nazi looted art, said the panel. “It also ignores accepted facts about life in Nazi Germany.”
The foundation’s refusal to pay jeopardizes a system for dealing with Nazi looting art claims that has existed for nearly two decades and led to the restoration of works of public museums and in 2019 two paintings from the German government’s own art collection. .
Lawmakers set up the panel in 2003 after signing the Washington Principles, a 1998 international agreement, calling for “fair and just” solutions for pre-war owners and their heirs whose art was confiscated by the Nazis. The families of Jews whose possessions were expropriated seldom succeed in recovering plundered cultural property in German courts, because of the statutes of limitations and rules that protect property owners from buyers of stolen goods. Thus, the advisory commission, which is arbitrary between the victims of spoilage and the holders of controversial cultural property, is often the only appeal to plaintiffs.
But the commission is not a court and has no legal powers to enforce its recommendations, Hans-Jürgen Papier, chairman of the panel and a former president of the German constitutional court, explained in an interview.
“Instead, it has the function of a mediator,” he said. “So far we have been able to count on public institutions to submit to the commission’s processes and apply its recommendations,” he added. “If it no longer works, it is unacceptable from our perspective.”
After the purchase of Hildesheimer, the songs of Guarneri’s violin disappeared until 1974, when it reappeared in a store in the city of Cologne, West Germany, and was purchased by violinist Sophie Hagemann. She died in 2010, bequeathing it to the foundation she set up to promote the work of her composer and support young musicians.
The Hagemann Foundation, which has since restored the violin, began investigating its ownership after her death. With the notice of the origin gap from 1938 to 1974, it registered the instrument on a German government database of Nazi looted cultural property in hopes of finding more information about the Hildesheimer family. An American journalist tracked down the music dealer’s grandsons and the foundation agreed to file the case with the Advisory Commission.
When the commission ruled in 2016 that the violin was probably forcibly sold or seized after Hildesheimer’s death, the Hagemann Foundation accepted its terms and also promised that the students to whom it lent the violin would perform regularly in concerts. Hildesheimer would give. memory.
But the statement from the Advisory Commission said last week that the foundation had no “serious will” to raise € 100,000 in compensation. The foundation’s persistent description of the Guarneri violin as an instrument of understanding on its website is ‘particularly inappropriate’, the panel said because it refused to pay the heirs.
The foundation’s president, Fabian Kern, declined an interview request, but issued a statement saying the foundation “has made numerous efforts over several years to carry out the commission’s recommendation.”
David Sand, grandson of Hildesheimer, California, said in a telephone interview that the family “was very accommodating and even offered the foundation back-and-forth fundraising in emails over the past four years.”
“If the commission can be opposed without consequences, I do not see how these matters can be handled in future,” he added.
Papier, the committee chairman, said he hoped the panel’s decision to tell the media about the fact that the foundation did not comply would make legislators and the public aware of the issues. The Hagemann Foundation is a private entity, but he has close ties to the University of Nuremberg, which is owned by the German state of Bavaria, he said.
He said he had already sought the support of the Bavarian government, “but in the end nothing happened. Perhaps there will be political pressure to ensure that this settlement, which is considered fair and just by all involved, is finally implemented. word. ”
But a spokesman for the Bavarian Ministry of Culture said it was “up to the private foundation to address the recommendations of the Advisory Commission. The Bavarian state has no legal basis to influence private owners.”
A spokesman for the Federal Ministry of Culture in Germany paid tribute to these sentiments. The ministry has “no tools available to force a private foundation to carry out a commission recommendation,” he said.
All this leaves the commission “high and dry”, said Stephan Klingen, an art historian at the Central Institute for Art History in Munich.
“The commission’s only options are to hope that politicians somehow get them out of this mess, or to resign en masse,” Klingen said. “It simply came to our notice then. If there is no political support, German restitution policy has reached the end of the line. ”
“If heirs cannot have confidence in carrying out the commission’s recommendations,” he added, “then why would they take their case there?”