[spectre] Discussions about FLICK collection in Berlin

[Inke Arns]

[I just sent this to a friend, and I thought that it could be of 
interest for Spectre as well ... Greetings, Inke]


http://www.iht.com/articles/528356.html

A collector's family past divides Berlin
Alan Riding NYT
	
Thursday, July 8, 2004

BERLIN Never long forgotten, the question of whether today's Germans 
should answer for the sins of the Third Reich is now causing a deep 
rift in the art world here. The catalyst is Berlin's decision to 
exhibit the art collection of Friedrich Christian Flick, the wealthy 
grandson of a notorious Nazi war criminal. Outraged opponents say 
Flick and his collection are tainted by a poisonous past.
.
Flick, 59, a onetime playboy known to friends as Mick, has forcefully 
condemned the activities of his industrialist grandfather, Friedrich 
Flick, whose support for Hitler earned him three years in prison 
after World War II. Nonetheless, the younger Flick stands accused of 
building his 2,500-piece contemporary art collection on a fortune 
from a coal and steel empire that employed 50,000 slave laborers.
.
Opinions are sharply divided. Flick's main critics are Jews, but so 
too are many of his supporters. The German culture minister, 
Christina Weiss, welcomed the collection to the museum landscape 
here, but the city's culture senator, Thomas Flierl, expressed 
misgivings, saying that by rebuilding his business empire in the 
1950s and 1960s, Friedrich Flick personified tolerance of former Nazi 
moguls.
.
Surprisingly, the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection only recently 
became the stuff of debate here, 16 months after Flick agreed to lend 
it to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which runs Berlin's 
museums. With Flick also paying $9 million to convert a large 19th-
century warehouse into an annex of the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum of 
contemporary art, the initial response to the seven-year loan was 
generally positive, though there was some criticism.
.
Even the board of the country's Central Council of Jews chose not to 
take a position. "It took the following decision: This is not an 
explicitly Jewish topic but a debate that should be led by the entire 
German society," the council's chairman, Paul Spiegel, said in an 
interview with the online newspaper Netzeitung. "The board of the 
council is not going to say anything, in favor or against."
.
But in early May, Salomon Korn, the council's vice president, 
denounced the arrangement. "We are dealing with a kind of 
whitewashing of blood money into a socially accepted form of art 
property, and it is more than questionable why the federal government 
is supporting this," he wrote in the newspaper Handelsblatt. Korn 
followed up with an open letter to the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung 
in Munich asking, "Will there soon be a 'Göring Collection' in 
Berlin?"
.
Korn's references to "blood money" and Hermann Göring, the Nazi who 
collected art looted from Jewish families, caused a storm of articles 
and commentaries. They reawakened debate over the relative weights of 
German personal, collective and historical responsibility for the 
Nazis and also threw a spotlight on the Flick family.
.
When Friedrich Flick died in 1972, at 89, he left his three 
grandchildren a 10 percent stake each in what was then the country's 
largest family-held conglomerate. Three years later Friedrich 
Christian Flick sold his shares to an uncle for $60 million. Then, in 
1986, the Flick group was sold to Deutsche Bank for $2.5 billion.
.
Meanwhile, from his Zurich home, Flick began building his art 
collection, focusing on such contemporary artists as Bruce Nauman, 
Sol LeWitt, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Luc Tuymans, Martin 
Kippenberger and Paul McCarthy, but also collecting works by Francis 
Picabia, Alberto Giacometti and Marcel Duchamp. In 2001 he hired the 
architect Rem Koolhaas to design a museum in Zurich for his 
collection.
.
But even in Switzerland the Flick name proved contentious. Jewish 
groups and others criticized Flick for not contributing to a $6 
billion compensation fund for slave laborers. He argued that the fund 
was not meant for individual contributions and instead created his 
own foundation to fight xenophobia, racism and intolerance. But the 
protests continued, and he decided to place his collection elsewhere.
.
Berlin was ready. Since the reunification of Germany in 1990, the 
city has been reorganizing its art treasures. But its museums were 
poor in 20th-century art, not least because of Hitler's campaign 
against "degenerate" Modern art. So in the early 1990s, when Erich 
Marx, a construction magnate, offered to lend his fine collection of 
postwar art, Berlin turned an old rail station into the Hamburger 
Bahnhof museum for it.
.
More significantly, Heinz Berggruen, a Berlin-born Jew who fled 
Germany in 1937, returned with his art collection, which included 70 
works by Picasso and others by Cézanne, van Gogh, Seurat, Klee, 
Braque and Giacometti. Initially on loan, the collection has been 
acquired by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation for what 
officials called the symbolic sum of $120 million.
.
More recently the photographer Helmut Newton, another Berlin-born 
Jew, who fled in 1938, decided to donate his collection to a new 
Helmut Newton Foundation here. Although he died in Los Angeles in 
January, the city's first museum of photography opened last month 
with two exhibitions of photographs by Newton and his wife, June, who 
works under the name Alice Springs.
.
For Berlin, then, the prospect of receiving the Flick collection was 
appealing. "But first I wanted to know Flick's relationship to his 
grandfather and to know why he did not pay into the compensation fund 
for slave laborers," said Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, president of the 
Prussian foundation. "He gave clear answers. I saw he had no sympathy 
for things that happened in his family and that he created a 
foundation to fight racism. I also saw that collecting art is his 
life." By the time Korn set off the debate again, work had advanced 
on preparing the warehouse, which is scheduled to open Sept. 22 
beside the Hamburger Bahnhof museum.
.
Michael Fürst, a member of the Central Council of Jews, said that if 
exhibited, Flick's collection would represent "an insufferable 
provocation to all those who suffered hunger, humiliation and torture 
in his grandfather's business." And Deidre Berger, director of the 
Berlin office of the American Jewish Committee, said she would not 
visit the collection. "Where did the money come from to buy this 
art?" she asked. "We're talking about moral responsibility."
.
Flick, who is convalescing after surgery, could not be reached. His 
spokesman, Tyll Schönemann, said: "Flick always faced all debates. 
However, there are some accusations he's not willing to put up with. 
Among these is the accusation that he's the owner of 'blood money' 
and that he bought his collection with 'blood money.' This accusation 
is unfair and offensive. Flick is not a perpetrator. He is the 
grandson of a perpetrator."
.
Flick has won support from some Jewish leaders. W. Michael 
Blumenthal, a former U.S. Treasury secretary who is director of the 
Jewish Museum Berlin, said: "This Flick is not guilty, he was not a 
Nazi. If he wants to show his collection, let him show it. He could 
show more commitment to using his money to fight anti-Semitism, but 
those who attack him should look to the future, not the past."
.
Berggruen, 90, said Flick had consulted him about bringing the 
collection to Berlin. "I told him, do it," he recalled. "I was amazed 
by Korn's outburst. Flick should not be held responsible for crimes 
committed by his grandfather. Why should he feel guilty?"
.
Visitors to the collection will be given a handout containing an 
interview with Flick by Eugen Blume, director of the Hamburger 
Bahnhof, about the origins of his wealth and collection.
.
The one doubt to be resolved is the fate of the collection after 
2011. " Flick always referred to the seven years as an 'engagement 
period,'" Schönemann said in an e-mail. "Once the partners got to 
know each other and if the cooperation is satisfactory to all sides 
(and Flick has no doubt about this), a permanent loan might be 
thinkable. Flick does not want to sell his collection."
.
For the moment, then, Berlin will move ahead with a succession of 
exhibitions intended to present the entire collection over the next 
seven years.
.
The New York Times



Inke Arns
http://www.v2.nl/~arns