2016 - News - Detail Page - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

Salutations,

In the long shared history of Germany and Russia, the past 20th century was undoubtedly a special one with very dark but also brighter days. There was unimaginable suffering and inconceivable crimes that emanated from German soil and were committed in Germany's name. But it was also reconciliation and understanding that created the basis for a common future for our countries towards the end of this difficult century.

21 June 1941, the day of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, stands for the dark side of our shared history. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990, on the other hand, mark the beginning of a completely new era between Germany and Russia.

You, Honourable Federal President von Weizsäcker, but also you, Ambassador Falin, you were both witnesses to this history. The Second World War shaped both of your youths, and it was certainly these experiences that turned your political careers into a vocation. You both played a decisive role in the development of your countries after 1945, also and especially with regard to German-Russian relations. In this respect, we consider ourselves fortunate that you will both be speaking to us today. We would also like to thank you, Valentin Michajlovič, for travelling to Berlin to be with us today. Once again, thank you both very much!

Between the end of the Second World War and German reunification, there were a whole series of important steps that brought our peoples closer together again, regardless of whether they related more to the GDR or more to the Federal Republic. These steps also included an event in 1958, which we would like to commemorate today - 50 years later - namely the return of around 1.5 million works of art from the Soviet Union to their original, legitimate storage locations in Germany.

Even in ancient times, wars brought not only the destruction and enslavement of people and the devastation of their material goods, but also the plundering and destruction of works of art and cultural artefacts. This remained the case until the early modern period. Although there were the first signs of a rethink on this issue during the Enlightenment, by the Napoleonic Wars people no longer wanted to know much about protecting cultural assets in armed conflicts. On the contrary, the Louvre became the first major museum of looted art, and it was only after Napoleon's final defeat that the restitution of looted artworks could begin.

However, it was these events that anchored the reprehensibility of the unrestrained looting of cultural property in the public consciousness of the peoples and branded it as a crime, reinforced by the plundering of artworks by the European powers in their colonial territories. All this was to come to an end as it became increasingly clear what a central role cultural heritage plays in the national identity of peoples. In 1907, the international community agreed in the Hague Land Warfare Convention that works of art and science were exempt from confiscation by the belligerent and occupying states. This Hague Land Warfare Convention was respected during the First World War and is still in force today.

Here, too, it was National Socialist Germany that added the breach of this taboo to the barbarity of the war of conquest and extermination that it had unleashed. In the territories occupied by the Wehrmacht, works of art were looted on a grand scale and other artefacts were deliberately destroyed in order to erase them once and for all from the cultural memory of the people. The Soviet Union, which was subjected to an unprecedented racial-ideological war of extermination, was particularly affected by this, as was Poland, while in the West certain rules were still observed, albeit often only in appearance.

Hitler's cultural theft far surpassed that carried out by Napoleon in its planning and execution. A gigantic "Führer Museum" for world art was to be built in Linz, a plan that, in its perfidious lunacy, fitted seamlessly into the National Socialist programme of world change.

And yet the looting organisations of the Third Reich worked in secret, whether the "Sonderauftrag Linz" enterprise, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the Sonderkommando Künsberg at the Foreign Office or the "Ahnenerbe" organisation of the SS. As we know today, this unprecedented cultural theft took place with the active participation of renowned German academics. And - what is particularly painful - the then directors-general of the Berlin State Museums and the Prussian State Archives, the directors of the Art Library and the Palace Museum and many other museum experts were also involved.

After the defeats at Stalingrad and in the Kursk Bulge and the subsequent accelerating retreat of the Wehrmacht, the strategy of the responsible Nazi authorities changed: The removal of the looted artworks, books and archives to depots on Reich territory was accelerated, and what could not or did not want to be taken was usually destroyed. The Germans were well aware of how hard they were hitting the enemy with the theft and destruction of their cultural heritage. It is not easy for us Germans to talk about this because it shames us deeply, but we must also remember this today.

After the end of the war, the Western Allies took over the depots of looted art treasures on their territory, brought them together in several collecting points and restituted them from there to their countries of origin. Over half a million objects were returned to the Soviet Union, but the loss remained horrendous.

The confiscation of millions of artworks, books and archives in Germany and their transport to the Soviet Union by specially established trophy brigades of the Red Army towards the end of the war must be seen not only, but also against this background. The planning for this, which was carried out on Stalin's direct instructions, dates back to 1943, and Soviet specialists drew up extensive lists with great expertise of everything that was to be taken to the Soviet Union as compensation and exhibited there in a large world museum for looted art.

Particularly in the first few months after the end of the war, German cultural and scientific institutions and their depots were ransacked in an extremely systematic manner. Over 2.6 million works of art, more than 6 million books and kilometres of archive material were sent eastwards in hundreds of railway wagons. The Museum Island in Berlin was not only massively destroyed by the effects of the war, it was also empty, robbed of its contents and its meaning, and 80 other German museums suffered the same fate.

The madness of a war of extermination based on racial ideology emanating from Hitler's Germany struck back with full force. The people who were unable to prevent the criminal acts of the Nazi regime now saw their own country reduced to rubble, had to mourn millions of deaths themselves, felt morally discredited and were also robbed of their intellectual and cultural heritage. None of these were favourable conditions for believing in a new future.

The Soviet leadership always realised that the economic and political aid for reconstruction in the western and eastern occupation zones, from which two German states emerged in 1949, would eventually have to be followed by the repatriation of the removed works of art and knowledge archives, even if this was not initially on the agenda. They were aware that every nation, including the Germans - despite all their crimes - had a human right to cultural and intellectual identity.

And the Soviet leadership did not deny us Germans this right. In 1955, Foreign Minister Molotov spoke of the "cultural heritage of the GDR for temporary storage in the USSR". In the same year, over 1,000 paintings were returned to the Dresden Gallery, having previously been exhibited in Moscow's Pushkin Museum to great acclaim from the Soviet population.

After this return, the question inevitably arose as to what to do with the other treasures from German museums, libraries and archives held in the Soviet Union. As early as 1957, the USSR government promised the GDR the return of further extensive holdings, and in autumn 1958, a total of over 300 railway wagons from Moscow and Leningrad arrived in Berlin with around 1.5 million works of art, including the frieze panels of the Pergamon Altarpiece, the Praying Boy, Donatello's Madonna and Child, Botticelli's illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy, Menzel's Iron Rolling Mill and many other masterpieces of world art.

The National Museums in Berlin, and the Museum Island in particular, would not be what they are today and would not be able to attract millions of visitors from all over the world every year if it had not been for this repatriation in 1958. But the Green Vault or the Dresden Gallery would also be unimaginable without Raphael's Sistine Madonna. But not only Berlin and Dresden, but also museums and collections in Dessau, Gotha, Leipzig, Potsdam and Schwerin received important pieces back, and even the West German city of Aachen, whose holdings had been relocated to Saxony during the war, was considered: a thaw in the middle of the Cold War, and on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But not only works of art found their way back, around 3 million archive units, historical manuscripts and books were also restituted to the Berlin State Library, the Dresden and Dessau State Libraries and the Potsdam Central Archive, as well as the Humboldt collection originally held in Tegel Palace, including Alexander von Humboldt's travel diaries. The Berlin State Library commemorates these 1958 restitutions in an exhibition on display today.

This generous restitution was certainly part of a political strategy on the part of the Soviet Union. The GDR joined the Warsaw Pact in 1955 and, particularly after the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the aim was to reconsolidate the communist camp in Eastern Europe. It was probably no less important to make the GDR culturally visible as the second German state alongside the Federal Republic, which was integrated into the Western alliance systems.

But despite all this, we should not forget that the deep wounds of the war were far from healed in 1958. And if we consider how present the crimes committed by the Germans were to the people of the Soviet Union at the time, then this restitution - despite all the political calculations - must also be seen as a great act of cultural policy for which we are grateful.

In the GDR, the 1958 restitution was celebrated as a great gesture by the allied Soviet Union, which was effusively thanked for the rescue and proper safekeeping of the artworks and archives. In the Federal Republic of Germany, on the other hand, this event met with only restrained sympathy. If it was mentioned at all in the West German media, there was an immediate and sometimes aggressive demand for the return of further looted art, with no trace of gratitude.

But it is true that not everything was returned. An estimated 1 million art objects, including 200,000 high-quality exhibits, over 4 million books and around 3 kilometres of archives are still in Russia today.

After German reunification in 1990, German-Russian relations took on a special quality, with both countries becoming partners in solving many international problems. However, in the case of the cultural assets relocated from Germany as a result of the war, talks have stagnated, and not just since the passing of the Russian Duma law in 1998.

However, there are always symbolic gestures, such as in the case of the windows from St Mary's Church in Frankfurt/Oder, which - because they belong to the church - are exempt from the Duma Law. Conversely, Germany has restored the Amber Room and the Church of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary in Novgorod with considerable support from the private sector and presented a bronze cast of the "Praying Boy" to Peterhof Palace. And whenever individual works of art of Russian provenance that had been relocated as a result of the war came to light, the German side immediately restituted them. This will continue to be the basis of German action.

To be merely disappointed that the Russian side did not act in a similar way would be to fall short of the mark. Even today, more than 60 years after the end of the war, we must not lose sight of the injustice committed by Hitler's Germany. At best, we may be disappointed by secrecy, concealment and mistrust, and it must be our common concern to counter this with clarification, co-operation and trust.

The German-Russian Museum Dialogue, which was founded on the initiative of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg, the Dresden State Art Collections and the Cultural Foundation of the Federal States, has committed itself to precisely this goal. All German museums and collections affected by the loss of looted art are members of the dialogue. The most important aim of the dialogue is to intensify professional contacts and cooperation between German and Russian museums.

The initiatives are manifold: a scholarship programme is intended to promote the exchange of German and Russian museum curators, a project for the joint evaluation of transport lists by German and Russian scientists is intended to finally provide clarity about the existence and condition of collections relocated as a result of the war, because international science can no longer do without them. And exhibitions such as the one on the archaeology and history of the Merovingians in 2007, which will be followed by another on the Bronze Age in Europe in 2010, offer opportunities to present attractive topics of our common early history to the public. We cannot show these exhibitions in Germany - for well-known reasons - but we are happy to enrich them with important artefacts from German collections in order to turn them into major events, at least in Russia. This is also part of a vision of how we envisage German-Russian co-operation in the 21st century.

Regardless of legal positions, I say that we Germans cannot give up our cultural heritage, and I know that the Russian people in particular understand this very well. It is up to the governments to negotiate what a solution might look like one day, and many things are conceivable. Until then, the preservation and research of the collections is our priority, and it is crucial that German and Russian scholars do this together and in close consultation with international experts.

I am not giving up hope that what still seems to separate Germany and Russia today can become something that will unite us even more closely in the future than ever before. I think it would be worthwhile for both nations to make the attempt.

Contact:

Dr Britta Kaiser-Schuster
Kulturstiftung der Länder
Project Manager German-Russian Museum Dialogue
Lützowplatz 2
10785 Berlin
T. +49 30-893635-31
F. +49 30-8914251
E-mail
Website

Dr Matthias Henkel
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Generaldirektion
Head of Press, Communication, Sponsoring
Stauffenbergstr. 41
10785 Berlin
T. +49 30-266-3231
F. +49 30-266-3254
E-mail
Website

Dr Stefanie Heinlein
Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz
Press and Public Relations
Von-der-Heydt-Str. 16-18
D 10785 Berlin
T. +49 30-25463-206
F. +49 30-25463-268
E-mail

This press release as PDF document (PDF, 68 KB, not barrier-free)