Zum Nachhören: „Persecuted and robbed. The Sultan family and their property seized by the National Socialists“ | Kolloquium Provenienzforschung

Research is undertaken by a team at Freie Universität Berlin led by Dr Meike Hoffmann. For the first time, the team works directly with a third generation descendant: Barani Shira Guttsmann, the heir representative of the Berlin entrepreneur Adolf Sultan. The Sultan family had many gifted members: among others, a successful entrepreneur, an eminent physician, a world-wide renowned pianist and a noted economist and social scientist. Many fled the country, were murdered or took their own life. While the research project focuses on the cultural property seized from the family’s last German home in Berlin-Nikolassee, the story of the individual Sultans is coming to the fore.

This particular collaboration between the university and a member of the third generation of descendants yields unexpected opportunities. The students, who are being trained in provenance research by Meike Hoffmann at FU, are actively involved in the project and have the unique chance of working face to face with a member of the family whose fate they are investigating. For the descendant, being closely integrated in the professional research and the training program is an opportunity to reveal a long-forgotten family history in detail, and to observe how the sometimes arduous process of tracing looted art eight decades after the fact is handled at a German academic institution and supported by government funding. Working this way changes the narrative and lays the groundwork for new collaborations. In historical research poring over archival records, all participants gain insights in the especially sensitive human aspects of this type of scholarly endeavour and contribute thus to shaping a common culture of remembrance.