Detail page - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and its President Hermann Parzinger are taking part in the #WeRemember campaign organised by the World Jewish Congress to commemorate the victims of the Shoah on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

"With this campaign, we are commemorating the murdered Jews of Europe. At the same time, we are speaking out against the rampant anti-Semitism - no matter what form it may take. Anti-Semitism is not an opinion, just as racism is not an opinion. Anti-Semitism is a warning sign for our society. As cultural institutions, we are called upon to educate people," says Hermann Parzinger.

Locations or objects that play a role in the project "Art, Looting and Restitution - Forgotten Life Stories" have been selected for the campaign photos. Together with the Bavarian State Painting Collections and the broadcasters rbb and BR, the foundation is commemorating people of Jewish origin who once enriched cultural life. They were then persecuted, robbed, expelled and murdered by the National Socialists. Many of the looted artworks and books ended up in public collections. When museums, libraries and archives research the origins of their artworks, they often come across the fates of the persecuted people.

Their life stories are told on the website www.kunst-raub-rueckgabe.de: Who were these people, what happened to their artworks? And what does it mean to their descendants when a stolen work of art is returned?

The website has recently gone online with the first stories. Further life stories and films are already in progress and will follow. A media centre of remembrance is being created with a variety of stories, which of course can only be examples of countless fates of persecution.

There is the Guttsmann family, for example. Friedrich Guttsmann came from a Jewish family. He lost his job and his home in 1936. The family was forced to part with almost all their possessions and send their two young sons abroad to Sweden to avoid being persecuted as so-called 'half-breeds'. Parents and sons only saw each other again years later. Or the Jewish lawyer Michael Berolzheimer: he was able to leave Nazi Germany just in time in 1938. However, the collection of prints he left behind was misused by the National Socialists to finance the notorious 'Jewish property tax'. The prints were auctioned off and dispersed, and to this day only a small number of the works have resurfaced and been returned to their descendants. The same applies to the Rudolf and Emilie Mosse collection: the publisher was one of the great personalities of Berlin's economic and social life of his time. After his death, his daughter and her husband continued to run the company. As Jews and owners of a liberal publishing house, they were targeted by the National Socialists at an early stage. The family left the country in 1933, the publishing house was aryanised and the extensive art collection was forcibly auctioned off.

The impressive stories on the website are supplemented by didactic material sets for schools and extracurricular education, which were developed under the leadership of the project partners Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen. In each case, a life story takes centre stage. More complex topics such as the Reich Flight Tax, post-war restitution policies and the return of looted art by museums are explored in greater depth on the basis of a very specific story of persecution. The materials are designed to be multimedia-based, encourage the user to engage with the website and contain modularly structured task sets, further links and ideas for project and group work. They are available to download from the website and can be used by learners at different school levels and educational levels. It is recommended for use from grade 9 (grammar school) or 10 (secondary school and comprehensive school).