Georg Schöbel, German b. 1860

Max and Fanny Steinthal 
Seized by the Third Reich after their deaths 
In possession of Max and Fanny Steinthal’s son-in-law (until 1950) 
Impounded by the East German authorities in 1950 
Gemäldegalerie Dresden (by 1950) 
Restituted to the heirs of Max and Fanny Steinthal in 2004

Berlin, Jüdisches Museum, Max Steinthal: Ein Bankier und seine Bilder, September 2004, illustrated in the catalogue

The following lots are four of the highlights of a group of over sixty works recently restituted to the heirs of the leading German Jewish financier, collector and patron of the arts Max Steinthal.

The collection, which includes Old Masters, 19th and 20^th-century paintings, drawings and prints, as well as the first Deutsche Bank share certificate ever to be issued, will be offered in a series of sales over the coming months. As remarkable as its breadth and quality is its dramatic history, which saw it expropriated not once but twice during the 20^th Century.

Max Steinthal, who joined Deutsche Bank in 1873 as its youngest ever director and served the bank for over 60 years, is today perhaps best remembered for organising the financing of  Berlin’s elevated and underground railway system, which was inaugurated in 1902. In 1935, because of Nazi persecution of the Jews, Steinthal was forced to resign from the board of Deutsche Bank. While their children fled abroad, Max and his wife Fanny, homeless and penniless, saw out their last days living in a Berlin hotel.

The Steinthal children never saw their inheritance, because under Nazi law, the property of Jews who left Germany automatically became the property of the state. However, unbeknown to the Nazis, Fanny Steinthal’s Gentile son-in-law, whom she had appointed as her executor before her death, had moved the collection for storage to his home in Dresden in 1941, where it survived the war.   

In 1950, the son-in-law fled from Dresden, by then in the East German Democratic Republic, to West Germany. Under East German law, individuals leaving the GDR ‘illegally’ had to surrender their property to the state, and the collection was impounded by the authorities.

During the stocktake of the contents of the son-in-law’s house, the name ‘Steinthal’ was found on the backs of several of the pictures, raising doubts about the collection’s rightful owner. Unsure what to do with it, the authorities placed it in storage in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie, where it remained until the great floods of 2002. Checks of the museum inventory, made at the request of the Steinthal heirs, revealed the presence of the pictures and, during the evacuation of artworks to escape the rising water, a researcher noticed the crates labelled ‘Steinthal’, setting into motion the recently completed restitution process.

Highlights from the collection were exhibited as a special exhibition, Max Steinthal: Ein Bankier und Seine Bilder at the Jewish Museum in Berlin from 3 to 26 September 2004.

Caption: Max Steinthal beneath Sorolla’s Las tres velas in his study in his home in Uhlandstrasse, Berlin