The Orpheus Clock

by Simon Goodman

  There was, I remember, one notable exception. Years later we took a trip from Los Angeles to the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park, where my father stood gazing for what seemed like an uncharacteristically long time at a seventeenth-century oil painting, Portrait of Isaac Abrahamsz. Massa, by Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals. Even more uncharacteristically, he told us that this painting had once been owned by his father, our grandfather, but it had to be sold during World War II. He sounded bitter about it, angry in a way that I was only just beginning to understand.

  But he would say no more, and I didn’t ask. It seemed like ancient history—sad, perhaps, but with little bearing on my life.

  Eventually, as the years passed, I began to understand the basic outlines of my father’s family story—again, through bits and snippets and vague asides. Yes, my father and his father before him had been born into one of the wealthiest, most powerful Jewish banking dynasties in Germany, the Gutmanns. Yes, my grandfather and grandmother, herself a member of a Jewish banking family, a baroness no less, had lived with their two children—my father and his younger sister—in a luxurious estate in Holland, where they had presided over not only an enormous fortune and a fabulous art collection of old masters and famous Impressionists, but also an almost priceless collection of Renaissance silver and gold works of art. And, yes, the war and the Nazis had come, and while my father had survived in England, anglicizing his name to Goodman and serving in the British army, everything else—the fabulous estate, the vast fortune, the magnificent art collection, my grandparents themselves—had been swept away.

  At the time, my scant knowledge of this history did not much affect me—any real sense of loss would only come later. As for the lost fortune, the vanished art collection, it all seemed like part of some other world. Many families have stories of lost wealth—the fortune lost overnight in the Wall Street crash, the family bank accounts squandered at the roulette wheels of Monte Carlo by some dissolute great-uncle—but by the third or fourth generation these stories usually become nothing more than interesting, and perhaps only half-believed, bits of family lore and legend. Young men think of their own futures, not someone else’s past. Besides, by this time I was living in Los Angeles, and in all the world there probably is no place less conducive to pondering the past than LA.

  Still, as I got older, I began to understand, or at least was better able to appreciate, the profound effect that this tragic family history had had on my father—and later, through him, on me. For my father, these terrible events had been close, real, things he had lived and experienced, not something that, like me, he had simply heard about. When I tried to imagine myself in his place, I thought, no wonder he refused to talk about the war; no wonder he never spoke of his parents. Some things, I understood, were simply too painful to talk about, buried beyond words.

  But curiously, as the years passed, as the dreadful history of my father’s family receded in time, their effects on him seemed to increase, not lessen. He had a growing aura of pent-up frustration and bitterness and anger about him, a sense that some mysterious defeat, some terrible failure, was weighing on him, bending his spirit and then finally, it seemed, breaking it altogether. He grew increasingly withdrawn, uncommunicative, inaccessible. When my parents would have guests over—or more accurately, when my social and outgoing mother would have guests over—I remember my father usually standing off and alone in a corner, as if he were someplace else. He could talk animatedly about cricket and football (or, as Americans say, soccer), but almost nothing else seemed to interest him.

  As for the war, everything but the Allied victories now seemed off-limits. It got to the point that whenever a news report or documentary about the victims and, specifically, the Holocaust would come on the television, my mother had trained Nick and me to quickly jump up and change the channel. Otherwise my father would angrily switch off the set and then sit glumly, silently, in his chair.

  There was one memorable exception. One day in June 1967, I came home to find my father alone, hunched forward in his chair, watching the BBC news reports on Israel’s air and ground strikes against Egyptian military airfields and the Arab armies massing against them from Jordan, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Desert—the start of the Six-Day War. He was cheering, shaking his fist, urging the Israelis on. That’s it! Bash the bloody bastards! Nick, who was older, had already left home, and my mother was away, so for the next six days my father and I spent every spare minute following the war news together—he explaining the strategy and tactics and weapons as I listened, fascinated by this previously unseen side of him. It was the longest, most intimate time I had ever spent with my father. Yet, even then, as we watched with satisfaction as the Israelis rolled over the Arab armies at El Arish and Gush Etzion and Jericho and Jerusalem, my father barely spoke of his own Jewish heritage, or of that other, earlier war of attempted annihilation of the Jews. Then the Six-Day War was over, and the news looked elsewhere, and my father’s silence returned.

  Nick and I were growing up and had our own lives now. We were accustomed to Pa simply being Pa. But for our mother, the silence, the distance, the sadness, finally became too much. Sadly, they divorced. Ma eventually remarried and moved to Australia, while Pa remained in London, a quiet and somewhat reclusive aging bachelor. Later he met Eva, who, though twenty years his junior, had attended the same exclusive school in Switzerland that my father had attended as a boy. Curiously, given our family’s history, Eva was German—but she had been a young girl during the war. More curiously still, he eventually went to live with her in Germany, in the small southwestern university town of Tübingen. This was another mystery for me and Nick. Nevertheless, in Eva he found a comfortable companionship and, in his later years, perhaps some measure of peace. We noticed that he still traveled extensively. But about his past, he remained as silent as ever. Some men grow garrulous as they get older, telling the various stories from their lives again and again to anyone who will listen. Pa, as far as we could tell, had never told his story even once.

  And now he was dead.

  It might have ended there, except that a few months after his death I rang up Pa’s sister, our aunt Lili, just to say hello. Aunt Lili was one of those rumored, far-flung relatives I had wondered about as a boy, but had not actually met until years later. Like my father, she also had an unusual life. Lili had married into an old Italian family, but her husband had been taken prisoner of war by the British in North Africa. Then when the Germans occupied Italy, she had been forced, due to her Jewish origins, to keep one step ahead of the Gestapo. After the war she divorced her first husband and later married a Greek diplomat. Now elderly and widowed, she was living in modest circumstances in Florence. During our conversation, my aunt mentioned, in passing, that since the fall of the Soviet Union the Russians had begun, for the first time, to exhibit publicly some of the “trophy art” taken from Germany during World War II. She wondered out loud if perhaps some of her father’s, my grandfather’s, missing paintings that had disappeared during the war—the two Degas, the Renoir, the Botticelli, the Guardis, and others—might be found there and even possibly returned to the family.

  My reaction was “Missing paintings? What missing paintings?” Nick and I had assumed, when we had thought about it at all, that all that had been settled long ago or that whatever our father’s family had lost had been lost irretrievably. The idea that the family might still have a claim to anything from those old days, and that a half century later it might be recovered, seemed far-fetched. Frankly, we wondered if poor Aunt Lili, who was in her late seventies, might be getting a bit dotty.

  Then those old boxes arrived at Nick’s house, stuffed with papers and documents.

  It would take us first days, then weeks, then years, to figure it all out—and even as I write this, not all the mysteries have yet been solved. But I would eventually uncover the secrets that had been hidden since before I was born. And I can finally tell the story that my father never told me.

>   • • •

  I would discover that for a half century after the war ended, Pa had fought a bitter and often unsuccessful battle to recover the priceless artworks that had been stolen from his family—stolen first by the Nazis, and then, in effect, stolen again by narrow-minded bureaucrats. Unscrupulous art dealers and willfully negligent auction houses, as well as museum directors and wealthy collectors, would all be party to this theft, long after the war was over. I would discover that throughout his life our father had to deal not only with the almost unbearable knowledge that his parents had been savagely murdered, but also the knowledge that their looted legacy, their paintings and other cherished artworks, were on display in someone else’s gallery, hanging on someone else’s wall, locked in someone else’s safe—and that he could not get them back.

  In discovering his story, I would come to understand the anger, the indignation, the frustration, and the sense of loss that he must have felt. For the first time, and only after he was dead, I would finally begin to understand the strange, tormented, enigmatic man who was my father.

  In the years to come, my family and I would take up the search where my father had left off. The trail of our family’s missing art would lead from Nazi-occupied Holland and France to Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and America; from warehouses in Paris to salt mines and castles in Bavaria; from dingy government storage facilities to the rarefied atmosphere of Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses in London and New York; from the private art collections of the fabulously wealthy to the public exhibitions of some of the world’s greatest art museums. Like my father, I would spend years searching through musty archives, haunting the back rooms of museums and libraries on two continents, tracking down clues, pursuing false leads, searching, always searching. Like my father, too, at almost every turn I would encounter indifference and apathy and at times outright hostility from people who seemed not to want to know about the grim history of the artworks they possessed. Even when they did know about it, too often they seemed not to care.

  But there was one big difference between my father’s quest and mine. This time, for the most part, we would prevail.

  It has been a long and frustrating and, at times, an almost ruinously expensive endeavor. But over the years we have recovered dozens of paintings and many other artworks that were stolen from our family—although many remain missing, still stolen, to this day. In the process we have helped change the way the often ruthless business side of the art world is conducted and helped to effect new government protocols and regulations concerning the harboring of looted art. I hope we have made it easier for other heirs of Holocaust victims to find and recover their stolen legacies, all the while keeping alive the memory of the victims of long ago.

  Oftentimes in this very public and highly publicized battle, I have been asked by newspaper and magazine writers, by television news reporters and documentary filmmakers, why I do it, what my motivation is. I give the usual, perhaps expected answer—that while I know the dead can never be brought back to life, by recovering my family’s stolen legacy I hope to achieve a long-overdue sense of justice, a degree of what is popularly known today as closure.

  While that is true, I have another, deeper, more visceral motivation. After learning what had happened to my family—the murders, the thefts, the lies, and the betrayals they had endured—I was angry. From that anger came a desire to exact at least some small measure of retribution—for my grandparents, for my father, perhaps even in some ways for myself.

  After the war, Bernard used his British and Dutch passports constantly.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE GENERATIONS THAT CAME BEFORE

  Lili Orsini, Fritz, Eugen (seated), Luca Orsini, Herbert, Louise, and Lord the poodle, circa 1925.

  I remember that as a curious young boy I had come across a faded black-and-white photograph of my father’s parents, Fritz and Louise—two distinguished-looking, older people dressed in elegant but old-fashioned clothes. They had stared back at me from some distant, seemingly unknowable past. I say “older” although, at the time the photograph was taken, they probably were only in their thirties or forties; they never had a chance to actually become elderly. When I looked more closely, I could see my father in them, and even myself. But they seemed to belong to a world that didn’t connect with mine.

  Today, on the wall of my office at home in Los Angeles, I look at a portrait of my great-grandfather Eugen Gutmann. Painted at the end of the nineteenth century by celebrated portrait painter Franz von Lenbach, I found it just a few years ago at an auction in Cologne, while I was hunting for another Lenbach that is still missing. Every morning I greet Eugen in four languages—German, French, Italian, and English—and ask what the day will bring. Some days he remains impassive, and then some days I get the distinct impression he is smiling down at me—a twinkle in those gray-blue eyes—and then I know a new clue is lurking not far away. For the last few years—and as if guided by my great-grandfather’s aura—I have bit by bit been able to resurrect the history of my nearly disappeared family.

  BERNHARD GUTMANN

  Eugen’s parents, Bernhard and Marie Gutmann, were both from Bohemia, part of the old Austrian Empire. Bernhard had come from a pious family. His grandfather, great-grandfather, and many before him had been either rabbis or rabbinical judges, mostly from Leipnik and Kolin (now both in the Czech Republic).

  When Bernhard was still a child, his father, Tobias, had moved to the Bohemian capital of Prague and into small-time banking, which was, at the time, probably not much more than old-fashioned money changing. For Tobias and his family, the early decades of the nineteenth century must have been like stepping out of the Middle Ages and into a new, modern world. Bernhard, in 1815, had been born into a time of upheaval. Napoléon and the French revolution had changed everything—the modern era was beginning.

  Sensing that even greater opportunity beckoned, just over the Erzgebirge Mountains in the new German Confederation, Bernhard moved to Dresden. The granting of full political rights to Jews in Germany was still a few decades away, but in the 1830s the King of Saxony lifted all economic and commercial restrictions on Jews in Dresden. Similar changes occurred throughout the new Confederation of Germany, where a long pent-up surge of intellectual and entrepreneurial energy was unleashed. Around 1840, Bernhard Gutmann founded the private bank named simply, in the fashion of the times, the Bankhaus Bernhard Gutmann.

  The new bank specialized in commodities trading, currency exchange, and loans for industrial development. It prospered such that Bernhard could comfortably afford a large and elegant three-story villa overlooking the park on the fashionable Bürgerwiese. Salomon Oppenheim, a “court Jew” from Cologne and founder of the bank that still bears his name, would commission a Florentine-style palazzo just a few doors down.

  Even though Bernhard was still quite young—in 1840 he was only twenty-five—he became a member of the board and benefactor of the new Dresden synagogue, a magnificent Moorish-revival building designed by Gottfried Semper, perhaps the foremost German architect of the day. The Semper Synagogue epitomized an impressive and prominent place of worship, clearly a measure of the prosperity and aspirations of the small Jewish community in Dresden, which at the time numbered fewer than one thousand. It was perhaps also a measure of the historical hopelessness of those aspirations that, a century later, Nazi brownshirts would burn the Dresden synagogue to the ground on Kristallnacht.

  With the new synagogue came a new form of worship. While the major prayers were still spoken in Hebrew, many of the services were conducted in German, accompanied by choral singing—a small but significant step in the assimilation of German Jews into the surrounding German culture. As might be expected, this shift toward modernity caused tensions within the Jewish community. With the physical and symbolic tearing down of the ghetto walls, and the resulting intermingling of Jews with the Gentile culture, some Jews feared that assimilation would pose a more existential threat to Jewish faith and ident
ity than centuries of intimidation and persecution ever had.

  Bernhard was, by all accounts, politically and personally a conservative man, pious and sober. He was a transitional figure between the old order and the new. Firmly rooted in his ancient community, Bernhard would uphold the Jewish traditions until his death in 1895.

  His last years were lived out with great dignity and in considerable comfort in a fairy-tale white castle surrounded by a moat full of swans. Schloss Schönfeld, overlooking the Elbe River, became known as “the magic castle.” It had been built in the sixteenth century and was considered the finest of Renaissance castles in the region. Bernhard had acquired it just a few years after the final restrictions had been lifted on Jews owning real estate. It was a striking testament to the remarkable rise of the Gutmann family and the emancipation of Jews in Germany.

  Bernhard’s moated castle overlooking Dresden.

  EUGEN GUTMANN

  Bernhard and Marie’s third child, my great-grandfather Eugen, was born in Dresden in 1840, the eldest son in a family of twelve siblings. All but one of these survived into adulthood, which was remarkable for that era. Eugen is portrayed in family lore as an outgoing and generous boy. He is also described as impulsive, perhaps even a bit of a rebel. Records are scant, but as a young boy he almost certainly was enrolled in Dresden’s “Jewish school,” considered even by the Gentile community to be perhaps Dresden’s best grammar school, and later attended the local gymnasium (high school). No doubt, he would have been a regular attendee at the synagogue of which his father was such a prominent figure, although from what I learned about him later, I have to assume that the Jewish traditions never truly took hold.