Looted Property – Refugee Property. The international conference on ‘Provenance research into stringed instruments and the role of Switzerland in the instrument trade since the 1930s.’
Provenance research into stringed instruments is confronted with even greater challenges than is the case for works of art: The individual objects are far more difficult to trace. As objects of daily use, they are much more frequently altered; and because a violin does not hang on a wall or sit in a safe like a painting, but is instead handled by a player, an especially intimate relationship exists with it.
In view of the current Swiss and international debates on looted and refugee property in the Bührle Collection, it has become increasingly apparent that the corresponding discourse has hardly been taken up yet in the area of musical instruments. Provenance research in relation to looted materials is just as poorly systematised as in other fields. Researchers are confronted with numerous obstacles, not least because the requirements of basic research, such as the opening and indexing of relevant archives, are still unmet in many places. Furthermore, this special field of research requires multidisciplinary expertise.
In order to revive previously taboo or simply forgotten discussions, the Geigenbauschule Brienz (School of Violin Making, Brienz School), along with the University of Bern and the Bern University of the Arts (HKB), took the initiative and invited participants to a conference in Brienz at the beginning of April 2022. A successful re-examination can only be achieved with an interdisciplinary approach. For this purpose, experts from the fields of provenance research, history, jurisprudence, the violin making and instrument trade, music and musicology, as well as restoration and art technology were gathered together.
First, the historical background was outlined from the perspective of the victims, the perpetrators and the objects: Sophie Fetthauer (Hamburg) presented the challenges of the ‘Lexikons verfolgter jüdischen Musikerinnen und Musiker der NS Zeit (LexM)’ (Lexicon of persecuted Jewish musicians during the Nazi era) with its often truncated biographies, especially also concerning the independent scene and geographically still poorly explored areas in Eastern Europe, which have once again sadly gained topicality, especially today. Michael Custodis (Münster) described the role of the ‘Sonderstab Musik’ division of the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Task Force as the actual agency of the theft of cultural assets, where museums, orchestras and academics actually placed orders, mostly as a secret matter. This was a cartel of silence that can also be observed in other areas. Carla Shapreau (Berkeley) pointed out the mechanics of this mass plunder, which incidentally affected not only Jewish people but also Sinti, using numerous examples.
The violin dealer Robert Brewer Young (London) illustrated how important it would be to open business books and make private archives accessible with regard to the violin trade, using business relationships with the Hill Company as an example. Jason Price from the Tarisio Auction House (New York) shed light on the transatlantic violin trade during the Second World War and referred to the example of the Cozio Archive. Jean-Philippe Echard (Paris) presented the efforts of the Musée de la Musique (Museum of Music) in Paris to combat the obfuscation of history and revealed how, thanks to cryptography, it was also possible to ascertain prices recorded in secret writing. The violin maker Mark Wilhelm (Suhr) used case studies from the ‘Violin War’ to illustrate the true dimension of Switzerland as a centre of trade that did not shy away from fraud, forgery and receiving stolen goods in criminal cases.
Heike Fricke (Leipzig) reconstructed the wartime losses of the Berlin Museum of Musical Instruments with a detective’s flair. Philipp Hosbach (Leipzig) used the case study of the Kaiser-Reka collection to illustrate the issues that go beyond classical musical instruments. Josef Focht (Leipzig) used musiXplora to show what the digital humanities can achieve in merging and identifying inventories, also for related disciplines, when they incorporate methods of criminology such as dragnet searches. The violin maker and restorer Balthazar Soulier (Bern/Paris) took up the ball with regard to forensic materiality research and demonstrated how the covering of traces and label fraud is often taken literally, but can be uncovered by examining varnishes, slips of paper, stamps and other circumstantial evidence. He advocated that dealers and violin makers should note their work on the instrument itself in order to be able to identify it later. Michael Baumgartner (Basel) once again proved to be an expert on identification, false attributions, forgeries and swindling.
The conference was concluded by the historian Pascale Bernheim (Paris) who presented the activities of the Association Musique et Spoliations, which she co-founded, and the lawyer Sandra Sykora (Zurich), who soberly highlighted the limits of legal reappraisal and restitution. She appealed to personal and industry ethics, at least with regard to Germany and Switzerland.
The lectures were supplemented by four rounds of talks and a solo recital by violinist Tiffany Tan (HKB), who performed pieces by composers who were ostracised, banned, deported, driven underground or into flight, including Erwin Schulhoff, Stefan Wolpe, Grażyna Bacewicz and Paul Hindemith. Interwoven amongst these compositions were dance movements by Johann Sebastian Bach as the epitome of German culture.
After the Brienz conference, a complementary symposium was held in Paris entitled ‘The spoliation of musical instruments in Europe (1933–1945)’.
The event, characterised by great mutual trust and which was very well attended by the various stakeholders (only the musicians themselves did not come), demonstrated exemplary ways of proceeding in this complex field, such as building networks, daring to ask others, and identifying and processing additional collections and making them available. It is precisely because the collections of museums and dealers are mutually complimentary that cooperation between private individuals and institutions is needed, whereby conflicts of interest must also be addressed. It is also important to develop a certain sense of ease in order to reach people: communicating in a lively manner and telling stories, etc. This is partly already reflected in the press.
There are already plans to expand the working group on provenance research to include a working group on musical instruments. A Bernese research project in Switzerland is also planned.
Dr Thomas Gartmann, Bern – 22/07/2022