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Agathe and Ernst Saulmann

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Agathe and Ernst Saulmann
Agathe Saulmann with her plane at Erlenhof, circa 1930
OccupationArt collectors
Agathe Saulmann
BornIda Agathe Breslauer
(1898-02-08)February 8, 1898
Berlin, Germany
DiedJune 18, 1951(1951-06-18) (aged 53)
Baden-Baden, Germany
Ernst Saulmann
Born(1881-05-26)May 26, 1881
Germany
DiedApril 1946(1946-04-00) (aged 64)
Paris, France

Agathe Saulmann (February 8, 1898, in Berlin as Ida Agathe Breslauer – June 18, 1951, in Baden-Baden) and Ernst Saulmann (May 26, 1881 – April 1946 in Paris) were a German-Jewish collector couple. They were victims of persecution under the Nazis.

Life

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Early years

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Ida Agathe Breslauer was born in Berlin as the eldest daughter of the architect Alfred Breslauer. Her sister was the photographer Marianne Breslauer. At the age of seventeen, she married Hendrik Jan de Marez Oyens, a classical philologist from Amsterdam, in Berlin-Dahlem. Their daughter Alma Carolina Frederica, called Nina, was born in The Hague in 1916. Breslauser soon separated from de Marez Oyen, began working in Berlin, and raised her daughter alone. In 1926, she married textile merchant and factory owner Ernst Saulmann and moved with him to Baden-Württemberg. Ten-year-old Nina de Marez Oyens grew up partly with her father in the Netherlands. In her autobiography Bilder meines Lebens (Pictures of My Life), Marianne Breslauer wrote of Saulmann that he was "an extraordinarily cultivated, successful man" who also possessed "a great sense of wit and comedy." Her sister characterized her as a "highly ornamental and distinguished being“.[1]

Ernst Saulmann was the managing partner of the Eningen Mechanical Cotton Weaving Mill, which his father, Franz Saulmann, had founded as a limited liability company with Richard Einstein and Otto Massenbach in 1895 and which was the livelihood for a large part of the working families in the community of Eningen unter Achalm until the 1930s.[2] In 1927, Agathe and Ernst Saulmann acquired from Louis Laiblin the "Erlenhof" estate on the outskirts of Pfullingen, which had previously served as an artists' colony and had been designed and built by the architect Theodor Fischer in 1904.[1] They gradually furnished it with late Gothic sculptures, Renaissance paintings, 18th-century furniture, historic majolica vessels and other handicraft pieces.

Agathe Saulmann was one of the few female pilots in the Weimar Republic.[3][4] She obtained her sport pilot's license in 1931 and owned a Klemm light aircraft. She had a private takeoff and landing field built next to her home. Flying was considered an extravagant hobby for a woman and in the rural environment she also attracted attention with her appearance: she liked to wear pants and smoke a pipe. In 1932, she planned a flight to Constantinople; an airplane accident thwarted her plans..

At the beginning of the 1930s, Saulmann's company ran into difficulties due to the recession caused by the Great Depression.

Nazi era: Flight and expropriation

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After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Jews were persecuted in Germany as part of the Nazi policy. After the adoption of the "Nuremberg Race Laws" of September 1935, which disenfranchised and discriminated against all Jews in Germany, the Nazi district leader of Reutlingen, Otto Sponer, incited the employees of the cotton weaving mill against Saulmann. Agathe and Ernst Saulmann fled to Florence, Italy on December 28, 1935.

A few days before their escape, Agathe Saulmann wrote to the Munich art dealer Julius Harry Böhler: "We are currently in the process of selling our factory and dissolving our household. Would you possibly be interested in selling our collection?“

In 1936, Böhler proposed the Munich auction house Adolf Weinmüller for the auction. A member of the Nazi party,[5] Böhler concealed the fact that he himself had been a 50 percent silent partner in Weinmüller since February 1, 1936. The auction proceeds of the collection yielded 40,000 Reichsmark, but the Saulmanns did not receive any of the money.[6] Since the tax office in Reutlingen had determined a Reichsfluchtsteuer (a special tax on Jewish assets) in the amount of 139,365 Reichsmark, the Saulmanns had to cede the proceeds in full. Saulmann's business was forcibly auctioned off and "Aryanized" on March 11, 1937, as were the couple's estate and private land holdings.[7] The buyer of the cotton weaving mill was Josef Leger, previously technical plant manager at Saulmann. Agathe Saulmann's plane had already been confiscated in 1933. This was followed by expatriation.[8]

Under Italian fascism, various press organs, such as the anti-Semitic journal La difesa della razza, fomented anti-Jewish sentiment beginning in 1936. Beginning in September 1938, the government under Mussolini implemented a number of anti-semitic racial laws.[9] Agathe and Ernst Saulmann fled to Nice in southern France in 1937 (or 1938). During World War II, they were interned by the Vichy regime at Camp de Gurs in the Pyrenees. Before deportation to an extermination camp, they managed to escape.

After the liberation they came to Paris, where Ernst Saulmann died in April 1946 of debilitation as a result of the camp imprisonment.[10] Agathe Saulmann received French citizenship. According to the report of Felix de Marez Oyens, her daughter Nina survived in Switzerland, where her father took her when the Wehrmacht occupied the Netherlands in 1940.[11]

Restitution

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Agathe Saulmann filed a complaint with the Restitution Chamber of the Regional Court of Tübingen on May 15, 1948, demanding restitution of her property. She achieved the restitution of the "Erlenhof" estate and returned there in the summer of 1949. However, the entire inventory had disappeared. On March 9, 1950, the Tübingen Restitution Chamber declared the sales contracts concluded in 1937 between the liquidator of Saulmann's cotton weaving mill and the buyer null and void and demanded the restitution of the company together with its real estate. The lawsuit caused a stir far beyond Württemberg.[12] In appeal proceedings, Agathe Saulmann renounced her shares in the company in return for a settlement of 100,000 D-marks and moved to Baden-Baden.[1] On June 18, 1951, she took her own life.[13]

Agathe Saulmann's daughter, Nina de Marez Oyens, took up her mother's restitution claims and researched the art collection until the 1960s.[14] In response to her 1962 inquiry at the auction house of Rudolf Neumeister, who had acquired Weinmüller's auction house in the late 1950s, she was told that all records had been burned during the war. In March 2013, Katrin Stoll, Neumeister's daughter and successor, found Weinmüller's auction catalogs from the Nazi era in the cellar with all the auctioneer's entries. She handed them over to the Central Institute for Art History in Munich for processing and online publication. Now, through the illustrations of some objects in the Weinmüller catalog of 1936, it was possible to identify and find works of art that clearly came from the "Erlenhof": the Franconian alabaster sculpture of a Mother of God in the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung;[15] the group of figures made of lime wood "Three Angels with the Christ Child", created around 1430/1340 in the circle of the Ulm painter-sculptor Hans Multscher, in the Bode-Museum[16] and a Renaissance chest in the Landesmuseum Münster. After restitution to the community of heirs, the museums bought back the works permanently.[1][3]

However, the whereabouts of most of Agathe and Ernst Saulmann's collection, including art from their villa in Florence, is unknown.[17][18]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b c d Boehm, Felix von (9 November 2019). "NS-Raubkunst: Letzter Flug aus Pfullingen | ZEIT ONLINE". Die Zeit. Retrieved 2023-01-16.
  2. ^ Hahn, Joachim (1988). Erinnerungen und Zeugnisse jüdischer Geschichte in Baden-Württemberg. Kommission für Geschichtliche Landeskunde in Baden-Württemberg, Baden-Württemberg. Innenministerium. Stuttgart: Theiss. p. 453. ISBN 3-8062-0566-3. OCLC 19264565.
  3. ^ a b AFP. "Berlin museum returns Nazi-looted treasure". www.timesofisrael.com. Retrieved 2023-01-16.
  4. ^ "The Silence of the Angels:The Saulmanns were dispossessed and driven out of the Swabian Alb in 1936. Searching for traces of the past". "I still remember the airplane exactly," he said. When he was a boy, he sometimes saw it against the sky. The man's voice faltered, and there was only the sound of breathing in the telephone receiver. The former historian of the city of Pfullingen and the author of a standard work on the Swabian dialect does not want to say any more. And no, he doesn't want to see anyone either. But he did see Agathe Saulmann. Back then, in 1933 or so, when half of the town looked up from their work and looked curiously above the green hills of Echaz Valley. "There she goes, it's Mrs. Saulmann," they all said in amazement. Now over 90 years old, Taigel is the last one whose dreams were filled with flying and the lightweight airplane of the factory owner's wife, which was built by Hanns Klemm from Böblingen.
  5. ^ "Red Flag names from Art Looting Intelligence Unit (ALIU) Reports 1945-1946". Retrieved 2023-02-08. Boehler, Julius Jr. Munich, Briennerstrasse 12. Grandson of the late Julius Boehler of Munich; son of Julius Boehler Sr of Lucerne. Partner of Sauermann. Close contact of Haberstock. Strong Nazi.
  6. ^ "Looted Art in the Third Reich - The Saulmann Case – DW – 02/09/2020". dw.com. Retrieved 2023-01-16. The couple fled into exile in 1938 and the Nazis commissioned their regular art dealer, Julius Böhler, to sell their collection. While Böhler benefited from this and other sales of purloined Jewish art, the genuine owners received none of the proceeds and were interned in Gurs internment camp in France. Only a few objects from the Saulmanns' collection have been returned.
  7. ^ "The Silence of the Angels - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz". www.preussischer-kulturbesitz.de. Retrieved 2023-02-08. Agathe and Ernst Saulmann fled via Florence to Nice, where they later fell into Nazi hands. In 1936 their factory was impounded, sold at auction, and aryanized. The more than one hundred objects in their art collection were also auctioned off. In 1936, they were sold in three auctions in Adolf Weinmüller auction house in Munich. As was customary then, the previous owners were not mentioned during the auctions. The proceeds from the auction were used to collect the Reichsfluchtsteuer (Reich flight tax), an insidious method of refinancing Nazi terror
  8. ^ "The Silence of the Angels - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz". www.preussischer-kulturbesitz.de. Retrieved 2023-01-16.
  9. ^ "Nazi conspiracy and aggression. TRANSLATION OF DOCUMENT 1409-PS 1938 REICHSGESETZBLATT, PART I, PAGE 1709 Order concerning the Utilization of Jewish Property of 3 December 1938". avalon.law.yale.edu. Retrieved 2023-02-08.
  10. ^ "Galerie der Vergessenen - Gallery of the Forgotten". www.lootedart.com. Retrieved 2023-02-08. Ernst und Agathe Saulmann wurden in Frankreich im Camp Gurs interniert, wo seine Gesundheit stark litt. Er verstarb 1946. Agathe Saulmann litt infolge der rassischen Verfolgung an Depressionen und starb an den Folgen eines Selbstmordversuches 1951. Die Werke, die zu ihrer Sammlung gehörten, sind verstreut und waren lange nicht dem Namen Saulmann zuzuordnen, denn der Auktionskatalog nannte als Vorbesitzer nur „S. in R." 1934 hatte die Reichskammer der Bildenden Künste angeordnet, dass Einlieferer im Auktionskatalog verschlüsselt anzugeben seien. Der Name der Familie geriet in Vergessenheit.
  11. ^ "Vertrieben, enteignet, interniert: Der Saulmann-Erbe im Interview - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz". www.preussischer-kulturbesitz.de. Retrieved 2023-01-16.
  12. ^ Kablaoui, Magdalena. "Mit Flugzeug beim Erlenhof gelandet - Pfullingen / Eningen / Lichtenstein - Reutlinger General-Anzeiger". gea.de (in German). Retrieved 2023-02-08.
  13. ^ AFP. "Berlin museum returns Nazi-looted treasure". www.timesofisrael.com. Retrieved 2023-02-08. The exiled Saulmanns in 1938 left fascist Italy for France, which the Nazis invaded two years later. The couple were interned in France in Camp Gurs, where Ernst Saulmann's health severely deteriorated. He died a year after the war ended, in 1946. Agathe, having suffered depression after the horrors she endured, committed suicide in 1951.
  14. ^ Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu. "Restitution and Re-Acquisition: Three Angels with the Baby Jesus". www.smb.museum. Retrieved 2023-02-08.
  15. ^ Zeitung, Süddeutsche (7 June 2017). "Der gestohlene Christus". Süddeutsche.de (in German). Retrieved 2023-02-08.
  16. ^ "Himmlische Heerscharen - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz". www.preussischer-kulturbesitz.de. Retrieved 2023-02-08.
  17. ^ "TV-Doku "Geraubte Kunst": Vom Versuch, Ungerechtigkeit wiedergutzumachen". Der Tagesspiegel Online (in German). ISSN 1865-2263. Retrieved 2023-02-08.
  18. ^ "Suche | Lost Art-Datenbank". www.lostart.de. Retrieved 2023-02-08.
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