BERLIN - In January workers digging for a new subway station near City Hall unearthed a bronze bust of a woman, rusted, filthy and almost unrecognizable.
Researchers learned the bust was a portrait by Edwin Scharff, a nearly forgotten German modernist, from around 1920. In August, more sculpture emerged nearby: “Standing Girl” by Otto Baum, “Dancer” by Marg Moll and the remains of a head by Otto Freundlich. Excavators also rescued another fragment, a different head, belonging to Emy Roeder’s “Pregnant Woman.” October produced yet a further batch.
The 11 sculptures were survivors of what the Nazis notoriously called “degenerate art.” Several, records showed, were seized from German museums in the 1930s and paraded in the fateful “Degenerate Art” show . They were last known to have been stored in the depot of the Reichspropagandaministerium, which organized the “Degenerate” show.
Then the sculptures vanished.
A modest exhibition of the discoveries has been organized and recently opened at the Neues Museum, Berlin’s archaeological collection.
Like the sculptures, the museum rose from the ruins of war. In the architect David Chipperfield’s ingenious reconstruction , it has become a palimpsest of German history, bearing witness to a violence that time has been unable to erase.
This little show is unexpectedly moving. Its effect ends up being all out of proportion to the objects discovered, which are, aesthetically, fine but not remarkable. They are works of quasi-Cubism or Expressionism, mostly not much more than 30 centimeters high, several newly cleaned but still scarred.
They’re like the dead, ever coming back to us, radiant ghosts.
Archaeologists have determined that the recovered works must have come from 50 Konigstrasse, across the street from City Hall. The building belonged to a Jewish woman, Edith Steinitz; several Jewish lawyers are listed as her tenants in 1939, but their names disappear from the record by 1942, when the house became property of the Reich.
Among its subsequent occupants, German investigators now believe, the likeliest candidate to have hidden the art was Erhard Oewerdieck, a tax lawyer and escrow agent.
Oewerdieck is not widely known, but he is remembered at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel. In 1939, he and his wife gave money to a Jewish family to escape . He also hid an employee in his apartment. In 1941 he helped the historian Eugen Taubler and his wife flee to America, preserving part of Taubler’s library. And he risked his life by writing a job recommendation for Wolfgang Abendroth, a Nazi opponent.
Researchers believe that when fire from Allied air raids in 1944 consumed 50 Konigstrasse, Oewerdieck’s office fell through the floor, and then the building collapsed on top. Tests are being done on ash from the site for remains of incinerated paintings and wood sculptures. How the lost art came into Oewerdieck’s possession still isn’t clear.
But at least it’s now back on view. Scharff’s bust, of an actress named Anni Mewes, brings to mind Egyptian works in the m useum. Karl Knappe’s “Hagar,” a bronze from 1923, twisted like knotted rope, has been left with its green patina of rust , making it almost impossible to decipher, save as evidence of its fate. On the other hand, Freundlich’s glazed terra cotta “Head,” from 1925, gnarled like an old olive tree, loses little of its power for being broken. The Nazis seized the Freundlich from a museum in Hamburg in 1937, then six years later, in France, seized the artist and sent him to Majdanek, the concentration camp in Poland, where he was murdered on the day he arrived.
Nearby, the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s Hitler exhibition, today’s version of a “Degenerate” show, means to warn viewers about succumbing to what present law declares morally reprehensible. How could any decent German ever have been taken in? the show asks.
That is the very question the Nazis’ “Degenerate” show posed about modern art. Many more Germans visited that exhibition than the concurrent one of approved German art.
In any case, today’s Germany has salvaged the pieces . Redemption sometimes comes late and in small measures
MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
ESSAY
