2016 - News - Detail Page - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

Washington was a revolution". This is how US diplomat Stuart Eizenstat describes the conference in the new SPK magazine, to which the then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright invited representatives from over 40 countries in 1998 in order to come to terms with the Nazi art theft. The signatories agreed on eleven principles for dealing with "cultural property seized as a result of Nazi persecution". To date, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation has restituted over 350 works of art and more than 2000 books on this basis.

The new SPK magazine, which is being published these days, is dedicated to the entire spectrum of research work in reports, interviews, background reports and essays and shows many examples of fair and equitable solutions that often lead to restitution to the rightful owners. Numerous additional interviews and the English version of the magazine can be found online:

<link newsroom dossiers-und-nachrichten dossiers magazin-ns-raubkunst.html>www.preussischer-kulturbesitz.de/newsroom/dossiers-und-nachrichten/dossiers/magazin-ns-raubkunst.html"

The reappraisal of National Socialist art theft is still not complete, even though a lot has happened in recent years. The SPK magazine is being published to coincide with the follow-up conference to the Washington meeting in Berlin at the end of November and aims to take stock of research and restitution to date, but above all to show what we need for the future: Transparency, networking, mediation," says Foundation President Hermann Parzinger. The magazine could not have been realised without the Prussian Cultural Heritage Board of Trustees, which has supported the SPK with selected projects since 2014.

In her text,Nicola Kuhn traces the development of the museums' "awareness process" after the Washington Conference. Ralf Hanselle searches for traces in the Swabian Alb to remember the fate of the Jewish collector family Saulmann, who were expelled and robbed by the Nazis in 1936. The 15th century relief "Three Angels with the Christ Child" from their collection was identified in the Bode Museum and was eventually restituted and bought back for the collection. Julien Chapuis presents this unusual sacred sculpture.

Michaela Scheibe talks about provenance research at the Berlin State Library and describes the dimensions of the reappraisal: "If I were to work with ten employees for a hundred years, we could do it." Gilbert Lupfer from the German Lost Art Foundation (Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste) also speaks out in the SPK magazine in favour of establishing provenance research as a permanent task: "Short-term projects alone cannot solve this mammoth task." In a guest article, the lawyer Sophie Schönberger pleads with the Bundestag to accommodate the victims of Nazi persecution and their heirs with a restitution law: "This would also allow parliament to explicitly recognise once again that it is taking responsibility for Nazi injustice and wants to contribute to its reparation."

Sven Felix Kellerhoff uses the example of the great Berlin publisher Rudolf Mosse to show how German institutions are working together with the descendants of victims of Nazi art theft in a public-private partnership and jointly reconstructing one of the most important art collections. BertholdSeewald looks at works of art from Göring's country estate Carinhall, which are identified in the search for foreign property in the Collection of Classical Antiquities of the National Museums in Berlin and still raise questions. The magazine is rounded off with an exemplary series of images on "fair and equitable solutions" from the past twenty years - from a late medieval alabaster relief from the Fuld Collection to the "Self-Portrait with Yellow Hat" by Hans von Marées from the Silberberg Collection.

The SPK magazine is published by the Media and Communication Department of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. The magazine, which was realised with the publishing house Res Publica, will be included in the art magazine "Monopol" on 22 November 2018, the political magazine "Cicero" on 29 November 2018 and in partial editions of the "Tagesspiegel" and the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" on 31 November 2018. Press copies at pressestelle@hv.spk-berlin.de