Expropriated, confiscated, sold: Foundation publishes academic anthology Provenire 3

Prof. Dr. Gilbert Lupfer, Ex­ec­u­tive Board of the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion: “The var­i­ous meth­ods and strate­gies by which works of art and oth­er cul­tur­al as­sets were con­fis­cat­ed by the state in the So­vi­et oc­cu­pa­tion zone and the GDR have still not been suf­fi­cient­ly elu­ci­dat­ed. The Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion is help­ing to close this gap by fund­ing ba­sic re­search projects. This new­ly pre­sent­ed an­thol­o­gy re­ports on the re­sults of such projects, en­rich­ing them with fur­ther in­ves­ti­ga­tions. It will sig­nif­i­cant­ly ex­pand the knowl­edge base in this field.”

Al­most 30 re­searchers, along with de­scen­dants of the in­di­vid­u­als af­fect­ed, ex­am­ine the his­to­ry of the con­fis­ca­tion of cul­tur­al as­sets, cov­er­ing the land re­form in the So­vi­et oc­cu­pa­tion zone, the deal­ings of state-owned for­eign trade com­pa­nies – the com­pa­ny Kun­st und An­tiq­ui­täten GmbH alone gen­er­at­ed around DM 400 mil­lion on be­half of the SED state from the 1970s on­wards – and the han­dling of un­re­solved prop­er­ty is­sues af­ter re­uni­fi­ca­tion.

Al­though mu­se­ums, archives and li­braries in East Ger­many have re­turned tens of thou­sands of works of art and oth­er cul­tur­al as­sets to their orig­i­nal own­ers since 1990, unan­swered ques­tions still re­main. What about claims for resti­tu­tion brought by in­jured par­ties long af­ter the statu­to­ry time lim­its have ex­pired? What types of con­fis­ca­tion were prac­tised? And how many such con­fis­cat­ed works of art are now to be found in West Ger­man mu­se­ums and col­lec­tions? In the small­er East Ger­man mu­se­ums as­sessed to date, even af­ter the resti­tu­tion pro­ce­dures car­ried out by the fi­nance of­fices, up to 8 per cent of the hold­ings in­di­cate prob­lem­at­ic ori­gins even at first glance. Larg­er in­sti­tu­tions such as Klas­sik Stiftung Weimar will have to de­cide how to man­age a vol­ume of prove­nance re­search that would in­volve as­sess­ing about nine times more ac­qui­si­tions for the years be­tween 1945 and 1990 than oc­curred dur­ing the Nazi pe­ri­od.

The book: En­teignet, ent­zo­gen, verkauft. Zur Au­far­beitung der Kul­turgutver­luste in SBZ und DDR, edit­ed by Math­ias Dein­ert, Uwe Hart­mann and Gilbert Lupfer, is the third vol­ume in the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion’s se­ries Provenire pub­lished by De Gruyter (326 pages, nu­mer­ous colour il­lus­tra­tions, EUR 39.95). In its se­ries Provenire, the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion pub­lish­es aca­dem­ic pa­pers re­lat­ing to the field of prove­nance re­search.

The cur­rent an­thol­o­gy in­cludes talks held at the au­tumn con­fer­ence VEB Kun­st – Kul­turgutentzug und Han­del in der DDR (‘Art as a pub­licly owned as­set – the con­fis­ca­tion of cul­tur­al prop­er­ty and trade in the GDR’), which the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion or­gan­ised as a dig­i­tal sym­po­sium in 2020.