What may have happened to the museum cashier who embezzled a million

2023-08-04 16:43:20

The Basel criminal court has convicted a former cashier at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen of multiple embezzlement. The woman faces three years and seven months in prison. The court saw it as proven that she had embezzled admission fees of almost one million Swiss francs. She used the money to buy expensive clothes and cars, she went on trips that she could never have afforded with her small salary. And probably not everyone who hears about this case will just throw up their hands in horror.

You have to imagine it: someone is sitting at the cash desk of the Fondation Beyeler – a beautiful building designed by Renzo Piano, an art museum surrounded by orchards. Admission for a normal ticket is 25 Swiss francs, the buyers are like many typical museum visitors: educated, well-dressed, often well-off. Day after day they pass the cashier.

In art, envy is yellow, as in Otto Dix’s painting The Seven Deadly Sins, where he morosely perches on stinginess. Or as in Giotto’s fresco “Invidia” from 1306, where envy takes the form of an old woman, at whose feet the fire of jealousy burns and from whose mouth comes a tongue in the form of a snake that turns and pours its venom into splashed in the woman’s eyes. Envy can be motivating, but Giotto emphasizes the self-destructive nature of this feeling.

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Envy has something against social differences

Envy has something against social differences. He has that in common with justice. Most of the time, however, it takes the form of resentment. Envious people want to take something away from others. The cashier probably wanted to add something to herself, the very amenities or attributes of success she saw in her customers. Envy is the sincerest form of recognition, as Wilhelm Busch said.

And how hard it was for her to raise the money! Each individual ticket had to be retained, the visitors were sent through the entrance with the receipt, after which they sold the ticket again. A million made up of individual amounts of 25 francs each. Envy is powerful.

And he doesn’t have a good reputation. In the deadly sins ranking, envy takes second place. The pubic part of the human soul, Nietzsche called it. No one likes to admit to being jealous, everyone has been. Maybe that’s why the cashier’s case is so interesting. Because on the one hand you recognize yourself in it and on the other hand you are glad that the pain about your own lack does not take on such forms.