"Provenance research must not be made available for disposal"

Against the back­drop of the coro­n­avirus cri­sis, the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion warns against mak­ing sav­ings on prove­nance re­search in Ger­man cul­tur­al in­sti­tu­tions: "Prove­nance re­search is a per­ma­nent task that must not be put up for dis­pos­al, even in times of tight pub­lic bud­gets," says Gilbert Lupfer, Ex­ec­u­tive Board of the foun­da­tion in Magde­burg.

It is in the in­ter­est of mu­se­ums, li­braries, archives and their spon­sors to in­ves­ti­gate whether their col­lec­tion hold­ings orig­i­nate from a con­text of in­jus­tice, i.e. whether they were seized from their right­ful own­ers dur­ing the Nazi era, for ex­am­ple. "Ger­many has a spe­cial his­tor­i­cal re­spon­si­bil­i­ty here," the schol­ar said. Clar­i­fy­ing the ori­gin of ob­jects should be a mat­ter of course for cul­tur­al prop­er­ty preser­va­tion in­sti­tu­tions, he said.

"Prove­nance re­search should be per­ma­nent­ly an­chored in­sti­tu­tion­al­ly in the states and mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties. It must not be sac­ri­ficed to tem­po­rary fi­nan­cial bot­tle­necks," says Gilbert Lupfer. He refers to the eth­i­cal com­mit­ment that was laid down in the "Joint Dec­la­ra­tion" in 1999. In it, the fed­er­al, state and lo­cal gov­ern­ments com­mit them­selves to en­sur­ing that in­sti­tu­tions search for cul­tur­al prop­er­ty seized as a re­sult of Nazi per­se­cu­tion and, if nec­es­sary, find fair and eq­ui­table so­lu­tions with the de­scen­dants. The search for cul­tur­al prop­er­ty that came to Ger­many un­der ques­tion­able cir­cum­stances dur­ing the colo­nial era is al­so sup­port­ed by the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion. The Foun­da­tion is cur­rent­ly fund­ing prove­nance re­search projects in around five dozen mu­se­ums, li­braries and archives for a max­i­mum pe­ri­od of three years. "How­ev­er, this can­not ful­ly re­place a firm an­chor­ing of this long-term task in the col­lec­tion in­sti­tu­tions," says Gilbert Lupfer.

The Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion is the cen­tral na­tion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al point of con­tact on is­sues of un­law­ful seizure of cul­tur­al prop­er­ty. It pro­motes prove­nance re­search through fi­nan­cial grants. The Foun­da­tion's main fo­cus is on cul­tur­al art ex­pro­pri­at­ed as a re­sult of Nazi per­se­cu­tion, es­pe­cial­ly from Jew­ish own­ers (so-called Nazi-loot­ed art). For more than 20 years, cul­tur­al prop­er­ty loss­es from this area have been doc­u­ment­ed as search re­quests and found-ob­ject in the pub­licly ac­ces­si­ble database "Lost Art."

In ad­di­tion, the Foun­da­tion's fields of ac­tiv­i­ty in­clude cul­tur­al prop­er­ty re­lo­cat­ed as a re­sult of war (so-called loot­ed prop­er­ty) as well as cul­tur­al prop­er­ty lost dur­ing the So­vi­et oc­cu­pa­tion and in the GDR. Since April 2018, the Foun­da­tion has al­so been deal­ing with cul­tur­al prop­er­ty and col­lec­tions from colo­nial con­texts. The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, the states and the three cen­tral mu­nic­i­pal as­so­ci­a­tions es­tab­lished the cen­ter on Jan­uary 1, 2015 as a foun­da­tion un­der civ­il law with le­gal ca­pac­i­ty, based in Magde­burg.