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Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation restitutes manuscripts from the music library of Arthur Rubinstein
Press release from 05/05/2006
Today, the Foundation has handed over a collection of 71 pieces of music from the former estate of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein to his four children. The fate of this collection reflects the drama of the past century: the arbitrary rule of the Nazi era, the raids of the initially victorious German army, followed by those of the Soviet army, the partial return of cultural assets from Russia to the GDR in the 1950s, the reunification of Germany and the Prussian cultural heritage in the 1990s and the accessibility of Russian archives for Western researchers. With the return of the collection, including several compositions dedicated to the pianist, its chequered history has come to a happy end; a comparable solution has yet to be found for other music from Arthur Rubinstein's former estate that is still in Russian archives. The restitution took place on the initiative of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. It was based on provenance research by the Berlin State Library and international musicologists. This is the first time that a once Jewish possession from the State Library has been returned to its rightful heirs.
The musical items include autographs, copies, photocopies of copies and prints by various composers, some of which are personally dedicated to Arthur Rubinstein. For example, there are several autographs by Berlin-born Stefan Wolpe and the French composer Germaine Tailleferre, who was a member of the Parisian group Les Six and achieved international fame not least through Rubinstein's interpretation of her works, as well as copies of works by Heitor Villa-Lobos and autographs by other South American composers.
Arthur Rubinstein, whose 120th birthday is on 28 January next year, moved with his family to the United States of America in autumn 1939, shortly before the German troops invaded Paris. In the same year, the "Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg" confiscated the world-famous Jewish pianist's Parisian possessions and brought his private library to the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin. Although Arthur Rubinstein was able to return to Paris in 1947, his flat there was not returned to him until 1954; he spent his last years in Paris and Geneva, where he died in 1982. In 1945, the confiscated and now restituted holdings of the Reich Main Security Office were transported to the USSR by the Red Army. They were returned to Berlin in 1958/1959 in the course of the repatriation of some of the German cultural assets by the Soviet Union. They were assigned to the music department of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (East), where they remained for years as a collection of unprocessed music sources. With the reunification of the Berlin collections, they came into the care of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in 1991. Due to a lack of institutional provenance information on the individual pieces, they could not be categorised until recently. It was not until 2003 that they were successfully categorised in the former collection of Arthur Rubinstein, whereupon the Foundation contacted the heirs.
The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation restitutes collection items, particularly if a loss without compensation is determined to have been caused by persecution. It does this regardless of whether it is a mandatory consequence of a legal regulation. In addition, it does not only react to restitution applications, but has actively begun to examine its holdings for cultural property formerly owned by Jews. However, the practice of restitution is much more difficult for books and library collections than for works of art, as privately owned books rarely bear clear provenance markings. In the present case, the first indications of the provenance of the holdings emerged in the course of looted art research by a group of German experts at the Glinka Museum in Moscow in 2003, which had been initiated following a tip-off from the Dutch musicologist Willem de Vries. Thanks to the good co-operation between German and Dutch scholars and the activities of the Foundation, this return of formerly Jewish book holdings from the State Library was made possible. Another one is currently being organised.
Foundation President Klaus-Dieter Lehmann said at the Second Hanover Symposium "Jewish Book Ownership as Looted Property" in May 2005: "No German library should call books from Jewish ownership its own that came into its collection directly or indirectly through extortion, robbery and murder!" This goal is being pursued by the Berlin State Library. A project is currently underway to research the "Reichstauschstelle" (Reich Exchange Office), which is intertwined with the Prussian State Library and aims to uncover possible involvement in the theft of books. During the Nazi era, this Reich authority was dedicated to the reconstruction of destroyed German libraries, among other things. In addition to duplicate holdings, "donated books" were also used for this purpose and all available academic literature in Germany and the occupied territories was purchased. It has not yet been possible to answer the question of whether these were forced and therefore illegal purchases or looted property in individual cases. It is to be hoped that this research into the role of the library during the Nazi era and the interplay between government departments, suppliers and libraries will also lead to suitable approaches for identification and the allocation of ownership in detail.
