[CPProt.net] Restitution: Broken Promises; Germany pledged to find and return art looted by the Nazis that is now in German public institutions, but the policy has been stymied because it is unenforceable.

[MSN and CPProt list (Ton Cremers)]

Restitution: Broken Promises

Germany pledged to find and return art looted by the Nazis that is now in Ge
rman public institutions. But the policy has been stymied because it is unen
forceable BY MARILYN HENRY 

THE BERLIN AUCTIONEER MAX PERL WAS worried. Less than two weeks remained
before a big sale in his Unter den Linden gallery, and the Reich Chamber of
Culture was seizing and destroying art that failed to reflect Nazi views.
Perl knew that the auction, scheduled for February 26 and 27, 1935, would be
his last of German Expressionist paintings. 
“I had considerable trouble in connection with these pic¬tures,” Perl wrote
in a letter of February 15. A German maga¬zine had refused to publish an ad
for the auction, which included nearly 1,000 artworks from the collection of
Ismar Littmann. “Furthermore, because of these pictures, I was or¬dered to
the Reich Chamber for Fine Arts, and I experienced considerable problems
with them, too. I hope that nothing fur¬ther will happen and that I will not
be forced to withdraw the pictures about which I received complaints,” he
wrote. “I am determined, in order to avoid incalculable damage, not to
auc¬tion any more pictures of this type. The same will most likely apply to
all other art dealers.” 
His fear was well founded. Days before the sale, the Gestapo seized 64 works
exhibiting “cultural¬Bolshevistic tendencies” from Perl. Most of those
“degenerate” paintings were from the Littmann collection. Number three on
the list of seized paint¬ings was Karl Hofer’s Seated Nude on Blue Cushion. 
The Hofer had been painted seven years earlier, when Littmann was still a
prominent Jewish art collector and attor¬ney in Breslau (now Wroclaw,
Poland). Soon after the Nazis came to power, Littmann was barred from his
profession. He committed suicide in 1934, leaving a wife, four children, and
a collection of 289 paintings as well as 5,800 works on paper, primarily
German Expressionist works. 

Artnews report, March 2005, FULL REPORT:

http://www.cpprot.net/germanymarch2005.pdf