Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective
Margarete Eisenmann
Jewish art collector and Holocaust victim (1868–1942) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Remove ads
Margarete Eisenmann (1868 – 1942) was a Jewish art collector and Holocaust victim.
Life
Eisenmann was born in Berlin. Her father was de Wilhelm (Wolf) von Ledermann-Wartberg and her mother was Elise von Ledermann-Wartberg. She married Felix Samuel Eisenmann.[1] The couple had one son, Günther Bernhard Eisenmann.[2] Her father-in-law was Raphael Eisenmann.[3][4] It was from him that she inherited the Lucas Cranach the Elder's painting, The Resurrection (1530).[5]
Nazi persecution
When the Nazis come to power in German in 1933, Eisenmann and her family were persecuted because of their Jewish heritage. She was, in accordance with Hitler's anti-Jewish laws, robbed of her property and forced to pay a Jewish Wealth Tax, or Judenvermögensabgabe,[6] instated under the Nazi regime in 1938. The tax required German Jews with an annual income over RM 5,000 to pay 20 percent of their assets to the state.[5] Eisenmann was arrested and sent to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in September 1942 and killed at the Treblinka concentration camp. Her estate was seized and auctioned off.[5]
Eisenmann's son Günther and grandson Percy Henschel survived Nazi persecution.
Remove ads
Claims for restitution of looted artworks
After the war, in 1949, the looted Cranach painting resurfaced in a Sotheby's sale in London, where it had been consigned by dealer Hans W. Lange, whose auction house was known for forced sales of Jewish-owned property. It passed through the hands of New York dealers Hugo Perls and the Knoedler gallery before Eugene Thaw bought it around 1968.[5][7]
Eisenmann's son and grandson attempted to recover the Cranach. No other works from the family's estate are known to have been successfully recovered.[8][9] Henschel died in 2007.
"The last time it was seen, it was hanging on a wall in Hitler's chancellery," he said in an interview with the Guardian a year before he died. . "This painting represents all that I lost."[5][10]
A settlement was reached concerning the Cranach in 2021.[11][12]
See also
References
Wikiwand - on
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Remove ads