Expropriated, confiscated, sold: German Lost Art Foundation publishes scholarly anthology on the reappraisal of the loss of cultural property in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR

Some lost works of art – others were robbed of their entire livelihood: in the GDR, whole collections were extorted from private individuals, art dealers were forced to go out of business, and public museums were coerced into handing over works of art so that the notoriously poor state could sell them to the West for foreign currency. The injustice affected castle owners and refugees alike: many cases have since been settled by rule of law, but no thorough reappraisal has been carried out. For this reason, the German Lost Art Foundation in Magdeburg is bringing out an anthology entitled Enteignet, entzogen, verkauft (‘Expropriated, confiscated, sold’) which will be officially published on 21 March 2022 and sheds scholarly light on the state-organised confiscation of cultural property in the Soviet occupation zone and the GDR.

Prof. Dr. Gilbert Lupfer, Director 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 east­ern 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 mu­se­ums in east­ern Ger­many 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 the 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 Na­tion­al So­cial­ist 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.

The Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion (Deutsches Zen­trum Kul­turgutver­luste) in Magde­burg, found­ed on 1 Jan­uary 2015 by the Fed­er­al Gov­ern­ment, the Län­der and the lead­ing mu­nic­i­pal as­so­ci­a­tions, is the cen­tral point of con­tact in Ger­many for ques­tions con­cern­ing un­law­ful­ly seized cul­tur­al prop­er­ty. The Foun­da­tion’s main fo­cus is on cul­tur­al as­sets seized un­der Na­tion­al So­cial­ism as a re­sult of per­se­cu­tion, es­pe­cial­ly Jew­ish prop­er­ty. The Foun­da­tion’s fields of ac­tiv­i­ty al­so in­clude cul­tur­al prop­er­ty and col­lec­tions from colo­nial con­texts and items re­lo­cat­ed as a re­sult of war, as well as cul­tur­al prop­er­ty con­fis­ca­tions that took place in the So­vi­et Oc­cu­pa­tion Zone and the GDR. Since 2017, the Foun­da­tion has fa­cil­i­tat­ed ba­sic schol­ar­ly re­search on cul­tur­al prop­er­ty loss­es in the So­vi­et Oc­cu­pa­tion Zone and the GDR through an­nu­al col­lab­o­ra­tive projects.