For years, Carla Shapreau has been looking for a Stradivarius stolen under the Nazis from the Mendelssohn-Bohnke family.
This lecturer at the University of Berkeley, in the United States, is one of the thirty French and international speakers participating in the symposium devoted to the spoliation of musical instruments in Europe, between 1933 and 1945, which comes from s end on Saturday at the Philharmonie de Paris.
Much less known than that of works of art, this register of spoliated cultural property has generated a large number of studies in recent years.
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"Nearly 80 years after the end of
the Second World War
, research in this field has been slow to develop and a large number of looted musical instruments remain untraceable,"
Carla Shapreau, who documents these, told AFP. spoliations and tracks down stolen instruments and sheet music.
Like some paintings still lost, many historical pieces have been missing for almost 80 years.
Where is the classified Stradivarius violin, confiscated in Vienna from Oscar Bondy, Austrian entrepreneur and collector persecuted by the Nazis?
The two violins that belonged to Johann Strauss junior and confiscated from his daughter-in-law of Jewish origin?
And did the Stradivarius given by Goebbels to the Japanese prodigy Nejiko Suwa in 1943 belong to a Jewish family?
German soldiers around a looted piano in Russia, in 1943, in the Velikiye Louki region (Pskov oblast).
Several thousand musical instruments seized, looted or sold under duress under Nazi Germany are still missing.
SZ Photo/Scherl/Bridgeman Images
Historians, musicologists, archivists, but also dealers and luthiers are increasingly interested in this complex file, the study of which is becoming more complicated due to the disappearance of direct witnesses and the absence of serial numbers on many instruments.
Thus, the violin that belonged to the Mendelssohn-Bohnkes that Carla Shapreau is looking for was located for the last time, according to the family archives, in 1940. It was then at 51, Jaegerstrasse, a Berlin building which belonged to them and which had seized by the Reich Ministry of Finance.
What has happened since?
Mystery.
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Highly coveted instruments
At other times, on the contrary, finding who to return an object to can prove almost as thorny.
This is the case of Monika Löscher, member of the Austrian Commission for Provenance Research at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, who is working on the case of the pianoforte of the singer Frida Gerngross, murdered in the ghetto of Izbica, in Poland. .
His heirs are still being sought for possible restitution.
On the side of the Nazi authorities, several organizations were responsible for the spoliation of musical property for twelve years.
In 1996, the book by musicologist Willem de Vries,
Sonderstab Musik
(translated into French in 2019, under the title
Commando Musik. How the Nazis plundered musical Europe
), detailed the activity of a cell made up of German musicologists , who located and confiscated from the Jews, on behalf of the Ministry of Propaganda, several tens of thousands of instruments and sheet music.
Among them, the rich collection of the famous harpsichordist Wanda Landowska who lived in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt (Val-d'Oise).
"In post-war France, the Directory of property spoliated during the 1939-1945 war lists, without being exhaustive, nearly 1,500 instruments lost
," says Carla Shapreau.
Finding them is like looking for a pin in a haystack.
For some children, Grandma's violin was all they had.
Benjamin Hebbert, expert and violin dealer
First complication:
“if the pianos have a serial number that identifies the part;
the person must have papers that attest to this number,”
Christine Laloue, curator at the Paris Philharmonie Music Museum, told AFP.
Documents often lost, making it difficult to trace the chain of ownership.
“For
violin making
, it's even more difficult, because violins or cellos rarely have numbers
,” she explains.
The musical instrument has also been able to undergo major repairs over the years.
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The Museum keeps a cittern case and an Erard harp classified as MNR (Musées Nationaux Récupération), that is to say objects potentially looted or indicated as looted.
According to Christine Laloue, one of the keys to moving forward is
“to work in a network”
to cross-reference the archives: that of the luthiers, the administrative archives on Jewish questions, the national archives and those of Paris.
Finally, even more than for the paintings, the instruments retain a powerful sentimental value.
In England, Benjamin Hebbert, an expert and violin dealer who is also taking part in the symposium, told AFP that he had met owners of violins who had arrived thanks to the
"Kindertransport"
, these rescue operations which made it possible to transfer from Nazi Germany to thousands of Jewish refugee children in the United Kingdom.
"For some children, their grandmother's violin was all they had
," he said.
For a family who brought back a violin, this instrument is probably the only thing that connected them to their life before the Nazis”.
Reunions that are becoming increasingly rare, as the living memory of these instruments disappears.
