BERLIN – No one knows why Felix Hildesheimer, a Jewish musical material dealer, bought a precious violin built by the Cremonese master Giuseppe Guarneri in a store in Stuttgart, Germany, in January 1938. His own store had lost non-Jewish customers because of boycotts Nazis, and his two daughters fled the country shortly afterwards. His grandchildren say it is possible that Hildesheimer had hoped to sell the violin in Australia, where he and his wife, Helene, planned to build a new life with their youngest 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 – valued at about $ 185,000 – is at the center of a dispute that threatens to undermine the violin from Germany. commitment to return objects looted by the Nazis.
The government’s Advisory Committee on the return of looted cultural property by the Nazis determined in 2016 that the violin was almost certainly sold by Hildesheimer under duress or seized by the Nazis after his death. In the first case concerning a musical instrument, the jury recommended that the current holder, the Franz Hofmann Foundation and Sophie Hagemann, a music education organization, pay the concessionaire’s grandchildren an indemnity of 100,000 euros, about US $ 121,000; in return, the foundation could keep the instrument, which it planned to lend to talented violin students.
But the foundation refuses to pay. After first saying he couldn’t raise the funds, he is now casting doubts on the committee’s decision. In a January 20 statement, the foundation said “current information” suggests that Hildesheimer was not forced to give up his business until 1939, instead of 1937, as previously thought. Therefore, the statement added, “we must assume that the violin was sold as a retail product at its music store”.
Last week, the Consultative Committee lost patience and issued a public statement aimed at increasing pressure on the Hagemann Foundation to comply with its recommendation.
“Both sides accepted this as a fair solution,” said the statement, accusing the foundation of not showing “a serious commitment to comply with the commission’s recommendation”. Efforts to challenge the recommendation – four years after it was issued – suggesting that the Jewish dealer sold the violin under perfectly normal conditions means that “the foundation is not just violating existing principles on the restitution of art looted by the Nazis,” he said. the panel. , “It is also to ignore accepted facts about life in Nazi Germany”.
The foundation’s refusal to pay is putting at risk a system for dealing with art claims looted by the Nazis that has existed for almost two decades and led to the return of works from public museums and, in 2019, two paintings from the government’s own art collection German.
Lawmakers created the panel in 2003, after endorsing the Washington Principles, an international agreement of 1998 that required “fair and just” solutions for pre-war owners and their heirs whose works were confiscated by the Nazis. Jewish families whose possessions were expropriated are rarely able to recover stolen cultural properties in German courts because of statutes of limitation and rules that protect bona fide buyers of stolen goods. Therefore, the Consultative Commission, which arbitrates between victims of plunder and the holders of the cultural assets in dispute, is usually the only remedy of the claimants.
But the commission is not a court and has no legal powers to enforce its recommendations, explained Hans-Jürgen Papier, the panel chairman and former president of Germany’s Constitutional Court, in an interview.
“Instead, it serves as a mediator,” he said. “So far we have been able to count on public institutions to submit to the commission’s processes and implement its recommendations,” he added. “If that doesn’t work anymore, it’s unacceptable from our perspective.”
After the purchase of Hildesheimer, the Guarneri violin tracks disappear until 1974, when it resurfaced in a store in the city of Cologne, western Germany, and was purchased by the violinist Sophie Hagemann. She died in 2010, leaving him to the foundation she had created to publicize the work of her composer husband and to support young musicians.
The Hagemann Foundation, which has since restored the violin, began investigating its previous property after his death. Observing the gap from 1938 to 1974, he registered the instrument in a German government database of cultural assets looted by the Nazis, hoping to find out more about the Hildesheimer family. An American journalist tracked down the music dealer’s grandchildren, and the foundation agreed to submit the case to the Advisory Committee.
When the commission determined in 2016 that the violin would probably have been sold under duress, or seized after Hildesheimer’s death, the Hagemann Foundation accepted its terms and also promised that students who lent the violin would give regular concerts at the Hildesheimer memory.
But the Advisory Committee’s statement last week said it detected no “serious will” by the foundation to increase the € 100,000 compensation. The continued description of the Guarneri violin’s foundation as “an instrument of understanding” on its website is “particularly inappropriate,” the panel said, given the refusal to pay the heirs.
The foundation’s president, Fabian Kern, declined the interview request, but issued a statement saying that the foundation had “made countless efforts over several years to implement the committee’s recommendation”.
David Sand, Hildesheimer’s grandson who lives in California, said in a telephone interview that the family has been “very accommodating and has even offered to help the foundation to raise funds in e-mails for the past four years”.
“If the commission can be challenged without consequences, I don’t see how these cases can be handled in the future,” he added.
Papier, the committee chairman, said he hoped the panel’s decision to tell the media about the foundation’s non-compliance would raise awareness among lawmakers and the public about the issues at stake. Although the Hagemann Foundation is a private entity, it has close links to the Nuremberg University of Music, which belongs to the German state of Bavaria, he said.
He said he has already sought support from the Bavarian government, “but in the end nothing happened. Perhaps some political pressure will arise to ensure that this agreement, which was seen by all concerned as fair and just, is finally implemented. “
But a spokeswoman for the Bavarian Ministry of Culture said that “it was up to the private foundation to comply with the recommendations of the Consultative Committee. The state of Bavaria has no legal basis for influencing private owners. “
A spokesman for the German Ministry of Culture shared these sentiments. The ministry “has no tools available to compel a private foundation to implement a recommendation from the commission,” he said.
All of this leaves the committee “up and running,” said Stephan Klingen, an art historian at the Central Institute of Art History in Munich.
“The commission’s only options are to wait for politicians to somehow get them out of this mess, or to resign en masse,” said Klingen. “This puts the commission’s future on the razor’s edge. If there is no political support, the German restitution policy has come to an end. “
“If the heirs cannot have faith in the implementation of the committee’s recommendations,” he added, “then why would they take their cases to it?”