Max Silberberg
Max Silberberg was a major cultural figure in Breslau, a German Jewish entrepreneur, art collector and patron who was robbed and murdered by the Nazis. His art collection, among the finest of its era, has been the object of numerous restitution claims.
Early life
Max Silberberg was born in Neuruppin in Brandenburg in 1878 as the son of the tailor Isidor Silberberg. Silberberg's talents were recognized and he was sent to high school while his sister Margarete trained as a seamstress. After he had completed his military service, the family moved to Beuthen in Upper Silesia. At the age of 24, Silberberg joined the factory for metal processing M. Weißenberg, part of the Vereinigung der Magnesitwerke cartel, which manufactured refractory building materials for lining blast furnaces. He married Johanna Weißenberg, the owner's daughter, and became himself a co-owner of the company. The couple's son Alfred Silberberg was born on 8 November 1908.In 1920 Max Silberberg moved with his family to Breslau, where they lived in a large villa at Landsberger Straße 1–3. The dining room, including the furniture and the carpet, was designed by architect August Endell in 1923 in the Art Deco style and decorated with an outstanding collection of paintings, mostly German and French works from the 19th and 20th centuries. Silberberg also had an extensive art library, featuring mainly French-language literature on modern art.
Silberberg was involved in the cultural life of the city and organized lectures in his house, on subjects such as on the history of Judaism, to which he invited outsiders. He was one of the co-founders of the city's Jewish Museum Association, as its 1st chairman since March 1928. Together with the director of the Breslau Castle Museum, Erwin Hinze, Silberberg was one of the organizers of the exhibition Judaism in the history of Silesia in 1929. In addition, he supported the Jewish Museum as a patron and donated a silver Torah shield from the 18th century and a silver Torah pointer. He was also a member of the board of trustees of the Silesian Museum of Fine Arts and helped found the Society of Friends of Art, which supported the museum as a funding institution. He also served as a member of the Society's board.
In 1932, Silberberg sold 19 artworks at the George Petit auction house in Paris. After the auction he still owned many artworks, including "works by Courbet, Delacroix, Manet, Pissarro, and Sisley and remained an avide collector, even continuing to purchase new works".
Nazi persecution, robbery and murder
The robbery and murder of Silberberg by the Nazi was described as a "Model Case" of Jewish persecution by the historian Monika Tatzkow in her chapter on Silberberg published in Lost lives, lost art: Jewish collectors, Nazi art theft and the quest for justice.When the Nazis came to power on 30 January 1933, Silberberg's position changed overnight. In Breslau Nazi persecution of Jews was immediate and devastating. Silberberg, like another famous Jewish Breslau art collector, Ismar Littmann, immediately lost all of his public offices and was harassed and robbed. In 1935 SS-Sturmbannführer Ernst Müller took Silberberg's villa for the SS security service, forcing the sale at a low price. Silberberg moved with his family into a small rented apartment and was forced to part with the majority of his art collection, which was auctioned in several "Jew auctions" at the Graupe auction house in Berlin. In addition to paintings and drawings by Menzel, Degas, Cézanne and others, and sculptures by Rodin, his extensive library was also sold off.
During the November pogroms in 1938, his son Alfred Silberberg was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp and imprisoned for eight weeks. Released on the condition that he leave Germany immediately, Alfred and his wife Gerta fled to Great Britain.
Silberberg's Weissenberg company was “Aryanized” and transferred to industrialist Carl Wilhelm from Breslau, and Silberberg's wealth plundered by special taxes designed by Nazis to rob Jews of their assets. Forced to sell some of the few works of art in his possession to the Silesian Museum of Fine Arts, Silberberg did not receive the sales proceeds, which went to the "Aryanized" company Weißenberg. The few artworks that remained in his possession until 1940, were "Aryanized" by the Museum of Fine Arts in Breslau.
At the end of 1941, his son Alfred, living in exile in London, received the last sign of life from his parents. Max and Johanna Silberberg were deported by the Nazis from Grüssau monastery assembly camp, on 3 May 1942 - presumably to the Theresienstadt ghetto. There are no records of the exact day or place of death. Various historians assume that Silberberg and his wife were murdered in Auschwitz. After the Second World War, Alfred Silberberg had his parents declared dead on 8 May 1945.
The Silberberg Collection
At the beginning of the 20th century, Max Silberberg built up one of the most important private art collections in the German Empire. He was part of a remarkable group of art collectors, many of them Jewish, living in Breslau in the early 20th century. Many of their remarkable collections were seized by the Nazis. Among the Jewish collectors were Emil Kaim, Leo Lewin, Ismar Littmann, Theodor Loewe, Wilhelm Perlhöfter, Max Pringsheim, Adolf Rothenberg, Carl Sachs, Max Silberberg and Leo Smoschewer.Art historians estimate Silberberg's art collection at around 130 to 250 paintings, drawings and sculptures, one of the most important art collections in the German Empire, with a focus on German and French art from the 19th and early 20th centuries. including works such as Portrait of a Man with Glasses by Wilhelm Leibl, Wilhelm Trübner's paintings The Way to the Church in Neuburg near Heidelberg and Lady with White Stockings, and Self-portrait with a yellow hat, by Kleinenberg from 1876 and The Labung from 1880 by Hans von Marées. Silberman donated Still Life with a Bundle of Leeks, Apples and Cheese dome by Carl Schuch to the museum in Breslau, which is now in the National Museum in Warsaw. The collection also included German Impressionism such as In the Kitchen and Market in Haarlem by Max Liebermann or Flieder im Glaskrug by Lovis Corinth as well as drawings by Adolph Menzel, Hans Purrmann and Otto Müller and sculptures by his contemporary Georg Kolbe. Silberman also owned drawings by Gustav Klimt and Paul Klee and Stockhornkette mit Thunersee by Ferdinand Hodler.The Silberberg Collection works of Realism and Impressionism included Algerian Women at the Well and Odalisque resting on an ottoman by Eugène Delacroix, and the works of Poetry by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and Thatched Roof Hut in Normandy. Silberberg also collected works by Honoré Daumier, Adolphe Monticelli, Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet whose Grand Pont in currently in the Yale University Art Gallery, Reading Young Girl and The Rock in Hautepierre.
Impressionist works included Pertuiset as a lion hunter and Young Woman in Oriental Costume by Édouard Manet and The Reading, Little Girl with Hoops as well the privately owned pictures Laughing Girl, Gondola, Venice and Bouquet of Roses by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The collector owned the paintings Boats on the Seine and Snow in the Setting Sun by Claude Monet. Other Impressionist works in this collection were The Seine at Saint-Mammès by Alfred Sisley, Boulevard Montmartre, Spring 1897 and Path to Pontoise by Camille Pissarro and Landscape with Chimneys, La sortie du bain and Ballet Dancers by Edgar Degas.
Late Impressionist works in Silberberg's collection included the paintings Still Life with Apples and Napkin, Jas de Bouffan and Landscape in the Aix Area, as well as the drawing of a male's back view Nude by Paul Cézanne. There was also Die Brücke von Trinquetaille, by Vincent van Gogh, of whom Silberberg also owned the drawing L’Olivette, works by Paul Signac as well as the cubist works Strand in Dieppe and Still Life with Jug by Georges Braque, and works by Georges Seurat, Alexej von Jawlensky and Paul Klee.
He acquired the wooden sculpture Die Mourning by Ernst Barlach from the actress Tilla Durieux, featured at the entrance of the Silberberg house. Other works, mostly small bronzes, came from artists such as August Gaul, Auguste Rodin, Aristide Maillol, Constantin Meunier, Renée Sintenis and Henri Matisse.
Restitution claims for Nazi looted art
After the Second World War, the heirs of Max Silberberg had great difficulties in asserting claims on their former property.Breslau had become a Polish city and the files that could have documented the systematic expropriation of Silberberg's property were either destroyed or inaccessible to the heirs. While the Polish authorities refused to compensate former German property - for example, land - the German authorities did not see themselves as responsible. The former art possessions were scattered around the world through auctions and resales and their whereabouts were in most cases unknown. In addition, although allied law had generally recognized that “loss of property through sale” was also to be viewed as robbery, since the sale took place under the pressure of persecution, national regulations made it difficult or impossible to demand return. From the end of the 1960s, most of the claims were barred.
It was not until the , held in Washington, D.C., United States, on 3 December 1998, that there was progress. After the death of Silberberg's son in 1984, the collector's daughter-in-law, Gerta Silberberg, managed to claim restitution for some works of art after 1998. Most of the collection is still considered lost.