Can, must, may a state sell its most important works of art in order to pay off debts to foreign creditors? The debate has a long tradition: when Spain was on the brink of bankruptcy in the 1870s, Prussian politicians suggested using the main works of the Prado to pay off the debt – with a discount, of course. Museum officials in Berlin were disappointed when Otto von Bismarck categorically refused the deal. Nations could forgive a war, but not art theft.
A generation later, this maxim was forgotten. The Ottoman Empire was in a permanent financial crisis. In 1913, the director of the Berlin Antiquities Collection, Theodor Wiegand, who had close ties to Deutsche Bank, initiated the “museum business”: for a loan of one million lira, which was around 18.5 million marks, five major German banks were to sell the holdings of today’s Archaeological National Museum in Demand Istanbul as a deposit. According to the plan, the Prussian state was to guarantee the transaction and, in the event that the pledge was not redeemed, take over the holdings from the banks for today’s Berlin State Museums. So that the people of Istanbul would not get the wrong idea, it was planned at times to immediately move all the “pledges” to the Altes Museum in Berlin, but at least the outstanding objects such as the Alexander sarcophagus from Sidon.
Without any sense of wrongdoing
As can be read in a book published by museums on the history of antiquities collections at the height of the power of the Wilhelmine Empire, which can be downloaded free of charge from the Internet via Open Access, everyone in Germany who was involved in this “business” assumed that the Ottoman Empire would not pay his debts. The Berlin museums would have come into possession of the entire collection of Christian antiquities, a number of ancient Near Eastern sculptures and the most valuable antique sculptures in the National Museum in one fell swoop. The Istanbul Museum, on the other hand, would have become a provincial institution.
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An illustration of the statue of Ornith from the Geneleos group
The deal ultimately failed because the Germans kept increasing their demands and not only overlooked the growing influence of the nationalistic Young Turks. They also ignored that without such humiliating terms, France was willing to guarantee significantly larger lines of credit to the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, there was not the slightest hint of wrongdoing among the Berlin museum officials, or at least the collegiality towards their colleagues in Istanbul, who were highly valued. On the contrary, Wiegand and his colleague Martin Schede – after reading Gabriele Mietke’s essay one might rather speak of an accomplice – tried everything to keep themselves in the shadow of the banks so that the excavation permits in Miletus, for example, would not be endangered.
The latest research by the Berlin Antiquities Collections on the history of the excavations in Samos shows that such a ruthless ignorance of law and decency was part of the practice at the time. They began in 1910 and lasted until 1914, uncovering the remains of the Hera sanctuary that was once famous throughout the ancient Greek world. Until 1913, Samos was a semi-autonomous principality under Ottoman rule, but its liberal elites strove for unification with Greece. If the Berlin museums wanted to expand their collections with the excavation by sharing finds, they had to hurry, Wiegand and his colleagues were only too aware of that. As part of Greece, Samos would also adopt its extremely strict Antiquities Law. However, the Berliners were not satisfied with the objects that were legally attributed to them, above all the highly sought-after architectural parts and small sculptures. They wanted more, above all to help the still weakening Berlin collection of archaic sculptures to world fame. So outstanding works were taken out of the country with the help of the German Navy. Wiegand planned a large hall next to the Pergamon Museum only for archaic art, which was never built.
The fact that the treasures from Samos were not shown to the public until the Second World War shows that they were fully aware of the illegality of this robbery – any other term would be too polite. Only after the Red Army had taken them to Moscow and the Soviet Union had handed them over to the GDR in 1958 did they come to the exhibition without hesitation, becoming highlights of the new presentations in the Pergamon Museum and in its new entrance area, which was inaugurated in 1984, and since the 1990s in the Altes Museum . According to the General Directorate of the State Museums, loan agreements should now be negotiated.
No processing in the GDR
But why didn’t the GDR break with the history of injustice in the empire? The assumption of the museum historians is that knowledge of the illegal acquisition had evaporated due to generational change in the early GDR. But there were always rumours, especially since the handover lists of the division of finds do not match the existing holdings. Barely 20 percent of the approximately 280 objects from Samos are listed on them. So could it be that GDR cultural policy simply didn’t care whether these holdings were legal in the country? The scandal that has been going on since 1945 about the museum collections, libraries and archives with millions of dollars that the Red Army brought to the Soviet Union from all over Central and Eastern Europe and are still being held back by Russia in violation of all international law proves that socialist regimes are in no way more moral than capitalist regimes in terms of cultural policy objects. And Greece had remained in the western camp after a bitter civil war, while the early GDR had offered asylum to many Greek communists.
But did Greece have any interest in the finds from Samos around 1910 – which would have immediately raised the question of whether they shouldn’t actually be treated according to Ottoman law? So far, only German archives have been evaluated for research into this museum history, which extends far into economic, political, social and colonial history. This is one of the reasons why a picture of the “museum business” and the excavations in Samos emerges that hardly reveals the interests of the Ottoman, Sami or Greek experts, who were often highly regarded internationally. Did the authorities in Istanbul know about the export of the sculptures from Samos? Did they possibly ignore them in order to avoid diplomatic complications during the three Balkan wars? One thing is certain: Wiegand, Schede and their colleagues acted little differently than the management of ethnological museums at the time, who unhesitatingly exploited their state’s position of power to build up gigantic collections.