The Vanished Collection by Pauline Baer de Perignon

Author:Pauline Baer de Perignon [Perignon, Pauline Baer de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781939931993
Google: lVw0EAAAQBAJ
Published: 2022-01-11T09:40:12+00:00

XIX

THE KOBLENZ ARCHIVE

Emboldened by my discoveries at La Courneuve, and filled with a spirit of adventure, I decided on a whim to go with Emmanuelle Polack to Koblenz. We both wanted to visit the German Federal Archives branch holding Nazi documents pertaining to owners who had still not been identified, including photographs of hundreds of paintings confiscated from emptied apartments during the Möbel-Aktion.

Emmanuelle was doing research into the Gurlitt affair. Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of an art dealer who dealt in Nazi-looted art, was arrested on a train in 2010, in possession of an exceedingly large amount of cash. The German authorities discovered over a thousand works of art stashed in his apartment, most of it acquired during the war by his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt. Emmanuelle was part of a working group brought together by the German government to establish the works’ provenance.

If the apartments on Avenue Foch and Avenue d’Iéna, as well as the storage unit, had indeed been looted, perhaps I would find a trace of my great-grandparents’ stolen paintings in photographs held in Koblenz. Confident I would manage my way around the German archives just as I had in La Courneuve, I left for Germany, birthplace of my ancestors, filled with enthusiasm but woefully ill-prepared.

I booked an Airbnb apartment near the railway station and noted down the address of the archive. We took two trains, changing at Frankfurt, the city of Jules’s birth. I regret now that I didn’t break my journey there to visit the municipal archives and the cemetery, to see if I could find any trace of Jules’s five brothers and sisters, and perhaps find out if I had any distant relatives still living there, but I was too impatient to get to Koblenz.

We were in such a hurry to investigate these new sources, Emmanuel for Gurlitt and I for the Strausses, that we headed straight for the archive with our luggage. We took two trains along the Rhine and a bus, then walked a few kilometers farther out from the center of town. At last we found ourselves at the ultramodern building that houses the federal archives. Half an hour later, we were sitting in front of the library’s computer terminals. Disaster. The catalog was in German, the archives had not yet been digitized, and the librarian spoke barely any English.

In the search box, marked Suche, I tried typing in “Jules Strauss.” Nothing. I tried all the search engines. No luck. Where and how was I supposed to look? I needed to find out how the documents were classified, but it was impossible to communicate with the librarian. I sat and watched Emmanuelle as she opened a large box of reproductions, each one marked on the back with an inventory number, the title of the painting, and the name of the artist. These were photographs taken in people’s apartments during the Möbel-Aktion, whose owners had not yet been identified. As the photos, like everything else there, hadn’t been digitized, Emmanuelle had to go through them one by one.

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