Nazi-looted cultural property

MARKK Hamburg examines selected inventories for collection, acquisition and object history

At Hamburg’s Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt (MARKK), a provenance research project funded by the German Lost Art Foundation began in June 2021. In this context, the inventory groups “Object transfers held by public institutions after 1945” and “Judaica objects” are the subject of examination, as well as the clarification of ownership status relating to previously identified individual bundles.

In each case, the his­to­ry of col­lec­tion and ac­qui­si­tion prac­tices, as well as the his­to­ry of in­di­vid­u­al ob­jects and spe­cif­ic prove­nance char­ac­ter­is­tics, are re­searched.

The project fo­cus­es on in­ven­to­ries that are al­ready known or rec­og­nized as sus­pect. For ex­am­ple, among the trans­fers in the MARKK are sil­ver ob­jects from Jew­ish own­er­ship that had to be forcibly sur­ren­dered in Ham­burg in 1939. In 1961, these were trans­ferred by the Ham­burg Fi­nance Au­thor­i­ty to var­i­ous Ham­burg mu­se­ums as resid­u­al in­ven­to­ry. The MARKK in­ven­to­ry in­cludes 44 ob­jects, which are as­signed to the Eu­rope and Amer­i­ca de­part­ments.

Ju­daica ob­jects from the col­lec­tion are checked for their sta­tus of re­ceipt, such as pur­chase, do­na­tion, loan, etc., as well as pre­vi­ous own­ers and bear­ers.
The re­sults of the project will be pub­lished on the mu­se­um’s own web­site, as part of the suc­ces­sive on­line pre­sen­ta­tion of the col­lec­tions, and in a pre­sen­ta­tion of the re­sults.

The MARKK is one of the largest ethno­graph­ic mu­se­ums in Eu­rope with re­gion­al col­lec­tion ar­eas re­lat­ing to Africa, the Amer­i­c­as, Eu­rope/North Asia, East and South Asia, Ocea­nia and West and Cen­tral Asia/North Africa.
Project de­scrip­tion