The Orpheus Clock: The Search for My Family's Art Treasures Stolen by the Nazis - Hardcover

Goodman, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1451697635 ISBN 13: 9781451697636

Publisher: Scribner, 2015

Synopsis

The passionate, gripping, true story of one man’s single-minded quest to reclaim what the Nazis stole from his family, their beloved art collection, and to restore their legacy.

Simon Goodman’s grandparents came from German-Jewish banking dynasties and perished in concentration camps. And that’s almost all he knew about them—his father rarely spoke of their family history or heritage. But when he passed away, and Simon received his father’s old papers, a story began to emerge.

The Gutmanns, as they were known then, rose from a small Bohemian hamlet to become one of Germany’s most powerful banking families. They also amassed a magnificent, world-class art collection that included works by Degas, Renoir, Botticelli, Guardi, and many, many others. But the Nazi regime snatched from them everything they had worked to build: their remarkable art, their immense wealth, their prominent social standing, and their very lives.

Simon grew up in London with little knowledge of his father’s efforts to recover their family’s prized possessions. It was only after his father’s death that Simon began to piece together the clues about the Gutmanns’ stolen legacy and the Nazi looting machine. He learned much of the collection had gone to Hitler and Hermann Goering; other works had been smuggled through Switzerland, sold and resold to collectors and dealers, with many works now in famous museums. More still had been recovered by Allied forces only to be stolen again by heartless bureaucrats—European governments quietly absorbed thousands of works of art into their own collections. Through painstaking detective work across two continents, Simon has been able to prove that many works belonged to his family, and successfully secure their return.

With the help of his family, Simon initiated the first Nazi looting case to be settled in the United States. They also brought about the first major restitution in The Netherlands since the post-war era.

Goodman’s dramatic story, told with great heart, reveals a rich family history almost obliterated by the Nazis. It is not only the account of a twenty-year long detective hunt for family treasure, but an unforgettable tale of redemption and restoration.

About this title

About the Author

Born in London shortly after WWII and educated at the French Lycée in London, then at Munich University, Simon Goodman entered the music business in the late 1960s, specializing in breaking new British artists abroad. Goodman is married to the actress and teacher May Quigley and has one son and three daughters. He lives in Los Angeles where his search for his family’s treasures continues.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Orpheus Clock CHAPTER 1

MY FATHER’S OLD BOXES

Bernard with his typewriter in between flights, 1948.

The boxes were rather ordinary, the sort of musty, collapsing-in-on-themselves corrugated containers that one might find gathering dust in millions of attics and basements. They had arrived from Germany, of all places, at my brother’s sunny hillside home in Los Angeles in the fall of 1994—the last tired remnants of our late father’s estate.

Our father, Bernard Goodman, had died in Venice a few months earlier, on the day after his eightieth birthday, while swimming in the Adriatic Sea. The night before he had enjoyed a slap-up dinner at Harry’s Bar. Cipriani, the owner, had given Pa a bottle of grappa on the house. A noted athlete in his university days at Cambridge, my father had remained physically active all his years—it was not his body that life had broken—and despite his age, he was a keen swimmer. According to the authorities, he had suffered either a stroke or a heart attack and had lost consciousness in the water. As Eva, his longtime companion, had screamed and waved her arms from the shore, the lifeguards had plunged in and dragged him out, but it was too late. The official ruling was death by drowning.

His death was unexpected and somewhat unusual; eighty-year-old men do not often die while swimming in the sea. But perhaps that was only fitting. Our father had lived an unusual and unexpected life.

We arranged for his burial in a small wood outside Tübingen in Germany—and through various courts and solicitors I cleared up his financial affairs, which, sadly, were rather meager. By the time of his death he 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.

Then came the boxes, packed with papers and documents our father had painstakingly saved over half a century. Curious, not at all certain what we might find, my brother, Nick, and I started to go through them, ripping through the shipping labels printed in German—the language our father had once vowed never to speak again—and laying out the brittle contents in fragile piles on Nick’s dining-room table.

There were sheaves of yellowing notes written in our father’s own hand and blurry carbons of letters that he had pounded out on an ancient typewriter. There were stacks of government documents in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Czech—except for the Czech, my father could read and speak each language—their pages festooned with coat-of-arms letterheads and official stamps and seals. There were long-forgotten receipts and bills of sale, and black-and-gold, expired British passports with visa pages covered top to bottom with entry and exit stamps. Shockingly to modern eyes, the prewar stamps from Germany featured the Nazi eagle clutching a swastika. There were some dog-eared, old art catalogs, some faded museum brochures, and in a single, unlabeled envelope three black-and-white photographic negatives—the old kind, each some three by five inches—of paintings that I didn’t specifically recognize but which appeared to be French Impressionist paintings. The stacks grew higher, and then higher still.

The appearance of my father’s papers gave no outward indication of secrets long concealed, no promise of dramatic revelations—certainly not life-changing ones. Yet, as we began to look more closely at them, to examine the details, certain things stood out.

The art collection that we understood had once been owned by our father’s parents, the grandparents we had never known, consisted of works by some of the greatest masters, old and new—Degas, Renoir, Botticelli, Memling, Cranach, Guardi. There were also inventories of priceless Renaissance sculptures in gold and silver, of valuable tapestries and Louis XV furniture, and then a photostat of an aged, wrinkled handwritten note from my grandfather, describing the location of certain artworks and signed P. for “Papi.”

Curiously, and in retrospect ominously, amid those same documents, often on the same pages, were references to some of history’s most infamous figures—Adolf Hitler, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann, Nazi “philosopher” Alfred Rosenberg—and to the monuments dedicated to themselves: the planned Führermuseum in the Austrian city of Linz and the Reichsmarschall’s estate at Carinhall. Coupled with them were the names of men I did not then recognize, but who nonetheless sounded sinister—Haberstock and Hofer, Böhler and Plietzsch and Miedl.

Within those stacks of my father’s papers—stacks already tipping over and starting to spread, glacierlike, across my brother’s table—were references to Theresienstadt, the Nazis’ “model” concentration camp, and to the death chambers of Auschwitz. There were allusions to the Nazi occupation of Holland, to the SS and the Gestapo, to the French Resistance and the American World War II spy service, the OSS, to Scotland Yard and the international police agency Interpol. Then came memorandums from various postwar “restitution” bureaus in West Germany, France, and Holland, followed by notations concerning corrupt Swiss art dealers, spies and collaborators, hoards of priceless art packed into Parisian warehouses and Austrian salt mines—and much more.

The papers were confusing, mysterious, enigmatic. They were, I realized, very much like the man who had assembled them.

He had not always been so. As a young boy growing up in postwar London, I remember my father as an open, loving man, perhaps a bit reserved in the British style, but not above expressions of affection. One of my earliest memories is of my father hoisting me up on his shoulders—probably painfully, I now realize, because of his war wounds—so that I could watch the funeral procession for King George VI, who had died a few days earlier on my fourth birthday. From that lofty perspective, it seemed to me that my father was enormously tall—which actually he was not—and terribly strong, which he was.

I remember also that despite the solemnity of the occasion, played out under inevitably gray London skies, to me it had a magical quality—the plumed helmets of the Life Guards, the King’s coffin draped in the royal standard, adorned with the Crown Jewels, and mounted on a gun carriage pulled by a clip-clopping team of Windsor Greys. The rank upon rigid rank of marching soldiers and funereally paced cavalry came from every far-flung country of what had once been the British Empire. For a small boy, seeing the coffin of the wartime King, the last Emperor of India, there was no sense of the war’s tragedy, no feeling of loss—loss of lives, of treasure, of innocence. It was all simply glorious.

The war was never far away in the physical sense. Against our parents’ stern admonitions, Nick and I could not resist exploring the countless bomb sites that still scarred London even a decade after the peace, dressing up in too-large war-surplus uniforms and balancing wobbly Tommy helmets on our too-small heads. Every Thursday I would race to the newsagent stand in the South Kensington tube station to buy the latest installment of the War Picture Library, a comic book series featuring the gallant exploits of World War II British commandos and fighter pilots.

Other families still talked about the war constantly, yet it seemed strangely off-limits, almost taboo, in my family. My mother seldom spoke of it, except in the most general terms. Most disappointingly for a young boy with martial fantasies, despite my father’s service in the British army, in the distinguished Gloucestershire Regiment, and his having been wounded by a German bomb in the Blitz, he refused to speak even a single word about his participation in the war. His silence on the subject was unwavering and an utter frustration to Nick and me. He might occasionally, in passing, refer to some historical person or event—Field Marshal Montgomery, perhaps, or some great British victory such as the Battle of Britain—but on a personal level he seemed not to have found the war glorious at all.

I was perhaps ten or eleven before I finally pieced together, from the whispered and coded adult conversations that children instinctively pick up on, that my father’s parents had somehow “died in the war.” Only later did my mother guardedly, reluctantly, reveal that those grandparents, those distant, unvisualized people whom I had never known, had been, more or less, Jewish. Still later I gathered vague indications that my father’s parents had also once been enormously wealthy, and that I had various aunts and cousins scattered about in Italy, America, even Mexico—although, strangely, that family, those grandparents, had apparently been German-born “Gutmanns,” while we were very British “Goodmans.”

Different names, different nationalities, different religions—it was all quite confusing.

Naturally, these grudgingly shared bits of knowledge raised questions. Although I knew that we were not poor, I also knew that we were not rich. And who were these far-flung relatives I had never met? We had been to Italy on holiday, but no one had ever introduced me or my brother to any relatives there. And if indeed these mysterious relations did have some sort of German or Italian connections, wasn’t it the Germans, and to a lesser extent the Italians, who had been the very enemies battled so heroically by our British soldiers every issue in the pages of the War Picture Library?

I couldn’t have been more confused if I had learned that I was somehow descended from the Japanese.

And what did being Jewish mean? I was barely aware of what being Jewish had to do with someone having “died in the war.” Still, from the coarse comments of boyhood chums—boys repeating what they had heard from their parents—I had picked up insinuations that to be a Jew was to be different somehow, almost “un-British,” perhaps even disreputable in some way. And if my grandparents had been Jewish, did it not follow that my father was Jewish, and that I was at least partly Jewish?

But how could that be? It was true that my mother, a descendant of Protestant Highland Scots, with an impressive string of official birth names (Irene Doreen Rosy Amy Simpson, ultimately shortened to Dee), had never been overtly religious. Indeed, one of her ancestors, James Young Simpson, a physician who had discovered the anesthetic qualities of chloroform and had subsequently been knighted by Queen Victoria, had been a notorious freethinker—a nonbelief system that my mother also seemed to embrace. Nevertheless, she had insisted that Nick and I become proper Anglicans, enrolling us in a Sunday school from which we each eventually earned a certificate for reading the entire Bible. She had us officially christened—albeit, in my case, not until I was at the somewhat advanced age of twelve. Was it possible, I wondered, to be a member in relatively good standing of the Church of England and to be Jewish, or part Jewish, at the same time? Even with hindsight, I would never figure out if this stab at Anglican induction had been for conventional social reasons or, in a more ominous way, as some kind of insurance. My father was never able to show any enthusiasm or even interest in the whole process, but clearly my mother felt it necessary.

These were not questions I could discuss with my parents—my father in particular. If he was silent on the subject of the war, he was even more silent, if that was possible, on the subject of his family, Jewish or otherwise. I sensed that these were things best left alone.

Yet, for me, it all led to an increasing feeling of otherness, of not quite belonging in the country and the society and even the family into which I had been born—a feeling heightened by my appearance. My older brother, Nick, had inherited our attractive mother’s fair-haired, fair-skinned Anglo-Scots looks, while I, like my father, seemed to have come from a place much farther away. My hair was almost black, my eyes dark brown, my skin olive. I remember once returning from a summer in France, a vacation spent largely on a sunny beach, and having British customs and immigration officers look at my deeply tanned face and then carefully and dubiously examine my British passport. Someone even suggested that I might be an Algerian—they spoke the word like a curse. I couldn’t possibly be a real English boy.

Given all this, and my youthful doubts about my place in the world, perhaps it was fortunate that for our schooling my parents chose the Lycée Français in South Kensington, where classes were taught almost entirely in French, the desks occupied by a cosmopolitan mix of the children of émigrés and refugees and various and sundry eccentrics. It was a most un-British institution, and as a consequence I felt comfortable there. Perhaps fortunate also was that our family lived in Shepherd Market, a small square in the Mayfair district of central London, just three stops away on the Piccadilly Line from the Lycée. In the 1920s, it had been an ultrafashionable address, home to any number of successful writers, actors, and artists, and although it had become a bit sketchier in the postwar years, it retained its eclectic, nontraditional character.

This environment perfectly suited my mother, a funny, vivacious, life-loving woman, who had studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts before the war and later became a successful theatrical stage manager and producer. With my godmother, Anna Wiman, she discovered the iconoclastic comedy group Beyond the Fringe at the Edinburgh Festival—featuring, among others, the young actor Dudley Moore. When it opened, in the West End in 1960, at my impresario godmother’s theater, the Fortune Theater, it became an overnight sensation.

How my father fit into all of this was, as usual, a mystery. He was in all ways a proper English gentleman—in almost all of my memories he is wearing a jacket and tie, or at least a cravat—but he did not seem to have a regular job, at least not in the sense that other boys’ fathers had jobs, places that fathers went to in the morning and returned from at night. I remember he had letterhead stationery that identified him as B. E. Goodman, Manufacturer’s Agent, with an office address in Golden Square, Soho, but I don’t remember his ever actually going there, or mentioning the manufacturing of anything. Instead, he spent most of his time at home locked in his study, corresponding—as the contents of those dusty boxes would later reveal—with various lawyers and government officials. He must have given up the unused office in Soho because when I looked at his correspondence many years later, I noticed with bemusement that he had x’ed out the Soho address in the letterhead and typed in our home address. It was so very much like my father not to waste perfectly good stationery.

He traveled a great deal, mostly to Holland, but also to other countries throughout the Continent, although where he went and what he did on any particular trip I did not know, and he did not say. He was abroad so frequently that later, when he did take a recognizable job, it was as a travel agent—a position that helped facilitate his wanderings but, somehow, given his education and background, seemed a bit beneath him.

As we got older, he would sometimes take us with him on these journeys, to France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Austria, and once to Germ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1451697635
• ISBN 13: 9781451697636
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368