Jackson Jambalaya

JJ rarely posts book reviews but this one that appeared in the Wall Street Journal Saturday is one of the more poignant ones. Martin Rubin devled into a case where a family's legacy was looted by the Nazis while they were murdered in the Holocaust.  Mr. Rubin writes:


When Simon Goodman’s father died in 1994, he appeared to have left very little to his two sons, then residing in Los Angeles. But when some musty cardboard boxes crammed with yellowing papers—“the last tired remnants of our late father’s estate”—arrived in California soon after, they turned out to be the key to a valuable legacy, as Mr. Goodman tells us in “The Orpheus Clock,” a fascinating family history and memoir.

At the time of his father’s death, Mr. Goodman was living “in what might be called genteel poverty—comfortable enough, but far removed from the circumstances into which we vaguely understood he had been born.” Those boxed-up remnants would lead to the recovery of precious objects, as well as to a surer grasp of his family’s heritage, both splendid and tragic.

Raised in London, Mr. Goodman went on to study in Germany before moving to the United States, where he ended up working in the music business. While growing up, he was told that his father’s parents had “died in the war.” Only later, he tells us, did his Scottish mother “guardedly, reluctantly, reveal that those grandparents, those distant, unvisualized people whom I had never known, had been, more or less, Jewish.” Eventually he learned that they “had also once been enormously wealthy.”

Indeed they had. The family of Mr. Goodman’s father, bearing the name Gutmann, had founded and long been the leading lights of one of Germany’s major financial institutions, the Dresdner Bank. Generation after generation of Gutmanns had flourished in imperial and Weimar Germany, very much a part of the nation’s establishment. They not only amassed great wealth and magnificent artwork and objets d’art but rubbed shoulders with the top echelon of society. All that changed after 1933, when the Nazis seized the bank and the assets of the family members in Berlin.

Mr. Goodman is almost as scathing about his forebears’ complacency as he is about their adversaries. “Ironically,” he writes, “anti-Semites in Germany commonly spouted the most vicious diatribes against Jews in general while assuring their actual Jewish friends and associates, ‘Of course, we don’t mean you!’ Perhaps an equally insidious and fatal corollary was a tendency among some German Jews, particularly the wealthy and well connected, to respond to such anti-Semitism by deluding themselves with the assertion ‘Of course, they don’t mean us!’ ”

But they did, as the Gutmanns in Germany soon learned. As for Mr. Goodman’s paternal grandparents, they had been living in the Netherlands for some time by the time World War II broke out and had become Dutch citizens. In the wake of World War I and the punishing Versailles Treaty, Mr. Goodman explains, the Dresdner Bank “desperately needed a neutral-based affiliate that could channel foreign credit,” and the bank’s managers chose Fritz Gutmann to head it, a man “of unquestioned loyalty and trustworthiness.” In the interwar years, Fritz (Mr. Goodman’s grandfather) established himself as a pillar of Dutch commerce and society, with a townhouse in Amsterdam and a country estate.

Of course, the Netherlands became a precarious place to be after the country fell to the Nazis in 1940. A few years before, the Dutch affiliate of the Dresdner Bank had been “Aryanized” by its German parent and cut its ties with Fritz Gutmann, who went on to form his own company. Even with the German occupation, Fritz may have assumed that he and his wife did not face imminent danger.

In mid-1942, Mr. Goodman tells us, no less a Nazi official than Heinrich Himmler had assured the Dutch ambassador that, “according to your wishes, I have ordered my office at The Hague to leave Gutmann in his house and to exempt him and his wife from any kind of security police measures.” But by May 1943, Fritz and Louise Gutmann felt threatened enough to buy tickets on a train that they thought would be taking them to safety in Italy. (Their son, Bernard—the author’s father—was living in England and out of harm’s way.) The train turned out to be destined for the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic.

At first, the Gutmanns’ status at the camp allowed them to be housed among the “Prominente”—Louise even wore her fur coat—but soon enough they found themselves in the infamous “Little Fortress,” a squalid place of torture and hideous death. They had been “delivered into this hell on earth,” as their grandson puts it. Their sufferings must have been infernal. Certainly their deaths were. Fritz was beaten to death with clubs or garroted with wire (two accounts from fellow prisoners differ on the details). In his pocket was a visa for Italy, signed by Mussolini himself. Louise was transported in a cattle car to Auschwitz, where she was gassed. Meanwhile, the Gutmanns’ property and possessions in the Netherlands were confiscated by the Third Reich.

As Mr. Goodman looked further into his family’s history, he discovered that, after the war, his father had embarked on an effort to reclaim the family’s birthright, but his endeavors met with rebuffs and dead ends, transforming a robust, cheerful young man and all-round athlete into a sad, discouraged and diminished figure. His effort to get back the family’s Dutch estate was met with stonewalling from bureaucrats in liberated Holland. The musty boxes also revealed to Mr. Goodman the doggedness of his father’s quest to reclaim the Gutmann clan’s artworks, running from Old Masters by Frans Hals and Botticelli to Impressionist masterpieces by Degas and Renoir. The family’s peerless silver collection—including an ornate 16th-century clock with depictions from the underworld of classical myth—had also gone missing.

The root of such dispersal and loss was of course the original Nazi looting, but it was followed, as Mr. Goodman shows, by all manner of opportunistic theft. The wrongdoers included unscrupulous collectors, the heads of willfully blind institutions and Allied officials who, though responsible for returning stolen property to its rightful owners after the war, directed it elsewhere.

In addition to unearthing this historical saga, “The Orpheus Clock” describes the efforts of Mr. Goodman and his brother, Nicholas, to take up where their father left off and track down the family’s possessions. They encounter obstruction, denials of responsibility and the understandable if frustrating efforts of art owners to cling to works that they had bought third-hand without investigating the provenance of the art. But the two brothers are nothing if not determined, and by the end of Mr. Goodman’s narrative they have found many of their family’s possessions and, in some cases, negotiated terms of compensation. Mr. Goodman is discreet about the amounts of money involved.

As for the clock itself—an emblem for the whole enterprise of loss and recovery—it had indeed been taken by the Nazis and, after the war, buried near Munich before being “liberated” into the postwar art market. In the early 1960s it was bought by a Swiss collector, who bequeathed it a decade later to a municipal museum in Stuttgart, where Mr. Goodman and his brother eventually find it. They provide the museum officials with their estimate of what the clock is worth today—that is, their sense of what a fair compensation would be—and the sum is close to what the officials themselves have decided upon.

When the transaction is completed, the museum director and his legal counsel tell the Goodmans: “We . . . regret what happened to your family. . . . We are grateful for the opportunity, however, to set, at least this matter straight.” That phrase “at least” echoes down the decades. It reminds us that, for all the satisfaction of reclaiming objects, nothing can compensate for the human suffering, the lives snuffed out. Mr. Goodman’s response to this episode and to the many others is unfailingly gracious. Despite the horrors he has uncovered, he puts a positive spin on his experience, proclaiming: “I no longer suffer from an isolation of rootlessness.” Article.




Kingfish note: It has been really interesting to see headline after headline announcing new restrictions on Jews in Germany while digging through old issues of the Jackson Daily News.  I've thought about collecting them and posting them up here.