by Rick Gekoski
It was inconceivable that Melanie would have given her father’s most precious possession to the lawyer the Nazis had foisted on her to deal with the probate of the estate. Within a few weeks Tom Adler and Richard Heiserer (who had ‘inherited’ the manuscript at the age of fourteen) were face to face, as their forebears had been some sixty years earlier. Heiserer would neither look Adler in the eye nor shake his hand. The manuscript, he insisted frostily, had been given to his father as payment for services rendered in ‘a legal way’, and though there was no paperwork to support this allegation, it had no doubt been lost during the chaos of the post-war years. Fortunately the manuscript itself had not been lost to the world, and Heiserer junior had no intention of allowing it – or its monetary equivalent – being lost to him.
It was a rotten moral position and a shaky legal argument, but Austria’s laws on the subject of reparations have been weak and ambiguous. The unwillingness to provide proper compensation for its treatment of the Jews and the wholesale looting of their property has been shameful, and it took over fifty years for the state to accept full responsibility for its crimes. Though the war had been lost, most post-war Austrians continued their habitual anti-Semitism. Ex-Nazis were granted an amnesty as early as 1948 (one of them, Kurt Waldheim, subsequently became the country’s President), and in the same year a poll showed that about half the population believed that the Jews had caused their own fate, and ‘something had to be done to place limits on them’. There was certainly no national will to acknowledge how repellent the situation not only had been but continued to be.
Gestures were made. By 1947 there had already been three Restitution Acts, but they were hedged about with significant reservations. Though the Third Act recognised that all property taken by the Nazis had been obtained illegally, the holder of any contested property had to show that it had been appropriated under the Nazi regime. Any new ‘owner’ who could claim that he had been unaware that the property had been illegally seized was under no obligation to return it. In any case, all claims for restitution had to be made within nine years – a time insufficient both practically (discoveries of such property went on for many decades) and morally. Why should such a time limit be imposed?
The reason may lie – as a confidential US State Department memo of 1950 noted – in the fact that the Austrian government was itself complicit in the storage and covert dissemination of many thousands of items of dubious provenance. According to Tom Adler – whose account of his grandfather’s library is an invaluable source – ‘of the more than $1 billion worth of Jewish assets taken by the Austrians under the Nazi regime … only a small portion was returned to Jewish owners and heirs.’
In 1998 – two generations since the end of the war! – the Austrian government finally passed a law that required the return of all art work taken by the Nazis which ‘entered museums and art collections under questionable circumstances’. Under this new ruling, though still with the usual difficulties regarding title, many exceedingly important pictures were returned to their rightful owners. The Rothschild family, alone, recovered more than 250 works of art.
It was only two years later that Tom Adler began his battle to retrieve Guido’s Mahler manuscript, by which time the tide of feeling and legislation in Austria had – at last – caught up with the imperatives of international law and feeling. Indeed, once it was noted that the Mahler manuscript might be described as having been looted during the war, an export licence was immediately granted. The details have not been revealed, but after protracted legal wrangling Tom Adler retrieved his family manuscript, and Sotheby’s went ahead with the sale in London. Their catalogue description makes reference to the dispute, noting that ‘the manuscript is now the sole property of Mr Tom Adler, Guido Adler’s grandson, following a court-approved settlement with the Heiserer family’, which suggests that some money must have changed hands. I hope it wasn’t much.
On 21 May 2004, I am Lost to the World – described as ‘one of the greatest autograph manuscripts of Mahler ever offered for sale at auction’ – was sold for £420,000 in London, to a private collector (it is now on deposit at the Morgan Library in New York). I trust the buyer has learned the full story. Because what they purchased is not just a musical treasure but an artefact soaked in blood, and perfidy, and love. It carries the dreadful story of the musicologist and his devoted daughter, in which a poignant sliver of the history of those terrible times is recovered. It is essential that such stories, like musical manuscripts, never be lost to the world.
Art theft, in its many forms, is a gigantic industry and occurs over a wide spectrum, from Picasso’s casual thefts from the Louvre in search of inspiring objects, through Vincenzo Peruggia’s curiously innocent and likeable theft of the Mona Lisa, including the political appropriation of art objects (as in the theft of the Urewera mural in New Zealand) right through to the palpable wickedness of Richard Heiserer’s pillaging of Guido Adler’s library.
Today, art theft is the world’s third largest criminal industry, exceeded in total value only by arms and drug dealing. The FBI estimates that some $6 billion worth of art – in Donald Rumsfeld’s phrase, ‘who would have thought there were so many vases?’ – is stolen every year. ‘It’s Like Stealing History’, proclaims the FBI website, and one can only regret the unnecessary simile. It is stealing history.
The rise in contemporary art theft (the value of which doubled between 2001 and 2011) is due to a number of factors. First, of course, the art market has exploded over that period, with spectacular auction prices (the era of the $100 million dollar painting has now arrived) widely publicised, and hence providing temptation to art thieves. And as art becomes more valuable, so too is awareness of art theft, so that more crimes are reported to the police. Robert Wittman, a former FBI agent, notes that ‘Art crime is on the rise because it is basically an economic crime. Art is one of the safe havens at this point, as far as assets are concerned, and criminals are not immune to seeing that in the papers and seeing the rise in auction prices.’
There is a prevalent belief, unsupported by much evidence, that much art is stolen to order by anonymous and reclusive wealthy art collectors, anxious to make illicit additions to their holdings. In fact, though, most stolen art is either sold foolishly into the art trade at a bargain price, or held to ransom, where insurance companies, keen to avoid a big payout, will often pay a low percentage (sometimes as low as 10 per cent) of a work’s value to recover it.
Art thieves are audacious, but their nerve is often unaccompanied by any clear idea of how to profit from their crimes. Most stolen objects find a fence easily enough, because they are not unique, but important works of art have usually been photographed and recorded, and are not easy to dispose of. Even if the stolen works are held back for many years – as in the case of the Mahler manuscript – when they appear they are likely to be recognised.
Wittman makes the point crisply:
Thieves may be good criminals, but they’re often terrible businessmen. Most are common criminals who will steal anything. In all other crime there is no problem in monetising the loot: if you steal drugs or jewellery, you get money. You can chop up a car and sell it for parts. You can’t shift a stolen Picasso.
Or a stolen I am Lost to the World, even after sixty years. Great art may not to be easy to protect from opportunist pilfering, but it is hard to dispose of, and has a pleasing way of returning to its rightful place, and owner.
12
Lumps of Coal: The Destruction of the Library at Herculaneum
Sometimes a story, no matter how compelling, can become so well known that it becomes almost impossible to imagine freshly. Take the sinking of the Titanic. Majestic new ship, maiden voyage, fancy passengers, jewels galore, iceberg, band plays on, gurgle, gurgle. As that dreadful film demonstrated, there’s no longer enough to arrest your attention here, even with the undoubted appeal of the death by drowning of Leonardo DiCaprio.
Similarly, it is hard to get an interesting an
gle on the eruption of Vesuvius, and the resulting destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79. Robert Harris’s brilliant novel on the subject filters the story through an obscure Roman water engineer, faced with the perplexing problem of why the local water supply is failing. Even though we know what this presages, the point of view holds our attention better than bubbling streams of molten lava and hordes of overheated citizens.
I wish I’d thought of that. But when I reflect about the eruption of Vesuvius – which, admittedly, is not very often – all that comes to mind, sadly, is lumps of coal.
To explain, I need to move a few miles up the coast, once the site of the prosperous town of Herculaneum. Here lived a Roman Senator, Lucius Calpurnius Piso, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, in a residence so fancy that it was later to serve as the model for the first Getty Museum. Stretching some 250 metres along the shoreline, the villa was a repository of the arts, the occasional resting place of philosophers, including the Epicurean Philodemus, and the home of one of the finest private libraries of Classical antiquity, made up of thousands of manuscript scrolls written on papyrus, a wetland sedge which had first been used for writing on in ancient Egypt. This vegetable material, properly prepared, took ink very well, but was unlikely to have a protracted life, being subject to decay if exposed to overly wet or dry conditions.
It is hard to imagine a grander place to live than this, the vast expanse of the sea fronting the villa, and the majesty of Mount Vesuvius only some seven miles behind it, to the west. Life may have been supremely comfortable in such a setting, but it was also likely, even in these exalted ranks, to be dangerous and often short. There were constant threats of war, and potentially mortal illnesses were difficult to diagnose and almost impossible to treat. There was medicine and surgery, to be sure, as the grisly implements from scalpels to forceps that survive from this period (at the House of the Surgeon in Pompeii) testify, but in the absence of any adequate form of anaesthesia it is hard to imagine that serious surgery was much preferable to death. The average lifespan was less than forty years, and what one was fortunate enough to have by way of life, and health, and pleasure was certainly to be celebrated. A philosophical school – precursors in their way of Omar Khayyam – was founded to do just this.
The original of this building lies under many metres of volcanic detritus; it has been recreated as The Getty Museum in Malibu, where its brash newness makes it look like an upmarket Hilton.
But even Epicurus, and his follower Philodemus, could not have imagined any catastrophe so likely to divert mind and body from life’s pleasures as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on 24 August AD 79. The scene was described with remarkable power by Pliny the Younger, who was there, putting it all down with his characteristic precision and elegance, in a letter he sent to Tacitus about twenty-five years after the event:
A cloud was forming … Its appearance and shape would be best expressed as being that of an umbrella pine. Since, stretched upward like an extremely tall tree trunk, it then spread out like branches … Sometimes it was white, sometimes dirty and blotchy, because of the soil or ash that it carried.
Rightly terrified by the appearance of this sinister cloud, which blotted out the sun, and the resounding shocks of earthquakes and bolts of lightning, the townspeople of the two threatened cities reacted differently. To the south, Pompeii (which was downwind of the explosion) was bombarded by rocks and heated material that made going out into the street and towards the boats extremely hazardous; in Herculaneum there was a better chance of survival from the ash falls by fleeing outdoors, but that was a thoroughly disagreeable option. Most people stayed inside, and died.
As conditions worsened dramatically, Pliny’s uncle’s life was in danger:
Soon great flames and vast fires shone from many points on Mount Vesuvius, the gleam and the light made more vivid by the night time shadows … Supported by two slaves, he stood up but immediately fell down again, because, I suppose, the air, thickened with ash, had obstructed his breathing and blocked his windpipe, which was delicate and narrow by nature and frequently inflamed. When daylight returned (the third day after he had breathed his last) his body was found intact and unharmed … He was more like a man sleeping than one who was dead.
Within a few days of the first eruption, the sea had receded hundreds of feet, and the town of Herculaneum was buried under smouldering rock – the pyroclastic flow – to a depth of 70 feet. It is hard to imagine a more comprehensive destruction of what lay underneath.
Yet, curiously, the eruption of Vesuvius may well have been the best thing that could have happened to the manuscripts of the Villa of the Papyri, as it came to be known. The manuscripts may have been carbonised, and encased in rock, but they were preserved, whereas no other papyrus manuscripts from this period have survived. All somebody had to do was find them and (what is admittedly harder) figure out a way to read them in their new form.
It wasn’t until 1709 that some workmen, boring a water hole, came upon the mosaic floor of the buried villa beneath. They had unwittingly dropped into the finest site of ancient Roman artefacts yet uncovered. For many years the underground villa was systematically tunnelled and unsystematically looted: the King of Naples filled his palaces and museums, individual robbers carried away myriad examples of marble and bronze statuary.
Some time in 1752 the looters – they could hardly be classed as archaeologists – came across what they first conceived to be oddly shaped lumps of coal, or perhaps carbonised tree branches, crushed by pressure and distorted by moisture. At first, they were a useful source of fuel and light in the dank conditions, but it wasn’t long before some observant soul noticed that the chunks of blackened matter had writing on them. A systematic collection of the objects ensued, and 1,800 examples were brought up to the surface, and taken to Naples for analysis. They soon proved to be the remnants of the only surviving library of the ancient world.
Two contradictory things then happened, almost simultaneously. First, there was constant and increasingly acrimonious squabbling between Spain, Italy and England regarding custodianship of the newly emerged material. And secondly, as soon as the papyri began to be, however inadequately, deciphered, most analysts agreed in their disappointment with the contents. To have waited so long, and to have worked so hard at unravelling … this? Altogether too many minor Epicurean tracts: several commentators speculated that no more than 10 per cent of the find was likely to be of interest, if it could ever be transcribed.
Imagine the frustration. Here, obviously, was an archaeological find of some significance, a glimpse back to the Roman world of the first century. Various methods were tried to unroll and decipher the rolls: some were slit in half and picked at with a knife (and largely disintegrated); liquid mercury was poured over others; Sir Humphry Davy came from England with a theory about chemical solvents. Nothing worked. As there was nothing to practise on, and science proceeds through trial and error, there were a lot of trials and as many errors. Maybe this would work? Or that? The result was a significant loss of carbonised papyrus rolls.
As some sixty years passed, the papyri deteriorated and disappeared at an alarming rate. They were given away as gifts by the King of Naples (Napoleon got some, and a couple ended up at Oxford), and eighteen were swapped for an equal number of kangaroos. (It seemed a fair deal: the papyri were unreadable, and the kangaroos manky and disease-ridden.)
In time, though, a method was evolved for slowly opening them, and attaching the delicate remains of the papyrus to an animal membrane. Though the process was crude and painstaking – the first unravelling of a single scroll took four years – increasing numbers of the papyri were eventually laid out ready to be read. To imagine this, you have to envisage myriad tiny burned potato crisps, each of such delicacy that a mere touch of the finger would turn it to dust, and curved so that its surfaces reflected the light in different ways. Black ink on blackened material, in the worst conceivable condition. Occasional words, tantalisingly, could be
made out. A phrase here and there. Enough to confirm that the find was not unimportant, if frustratingly elusive.
The saved, if depleting, store of papyri, and the possibility of many others still underground, was of such intense interest to classicists and archaeologists because shadowing their enthusiasm was the collective memory of that immense loss, the great library at Alexandria. Piso’s library was that of a wealthy and enthusiastic amateur, and reflected his passions – largely the Epicureans – and contained what was reasonably available. But his holdings were tiny and relatively insignificant compared to those of the greatest library of Classical antiquity.
Alexander the Great, who created what was to become an immense and wealthy city, the trading hub of the ancient world, had it as one of the aims of empire to appropriate the accumulated wisdom of all the cultures he conquered and to establish a setting in which every available book in the world might be found. The library itself was established by a former student of Aristotle’s, under the reign of Alexander’s successor, Ptolemy Soter (c. 367–c. 283 BC). It was a fabulous resource: Aristotle’s surviving library, for instance, provided part of the initial holdings at Alexandria.
The goal was to put into one place all the available works that mankind had produced, translate them into Greek, arrange them systematically and make them available for study. Ptolemy Soter and his immediate successors were, without question, the greatest book collectors in the history of the world, for the history of the world was what they were collecting, and they were insatiable and unscrupulous in their acquisition of everything that had been written. What they could not acquire through conquest they purchased, stole, or borrowed. For centuries after, the library was the greatest repository of human knowledge of the ancient world; indeed, no library since has been able to claim to hold such a high percentage of the world’s available intellectual treasures.
