“With every gift that the city accepts, it also takes on an obligation.” Anton Biebl, the cultural advisor for the city of Munich, says so. When a Jewish fellow citizen leaves his ancestral gallery, which was saved from the National Socialists, to a city that a few decades ago was still called the “capital of the movement” and from which the most brutal crimes against Jews originated, then this means: the greatest possible responsibility. And on the part of the giver: the greatest possible trust.
These pictures survived the Shoah; Konrad Bernheimer calls them “the family shrines”. On Monday evening, the well-known art dealer presented these portraits to his great-grandparents as well as some other important pieces from the family property at a ceremony in the city’s Jewish community center. Franz von Lenbach, who was a close friend of Konrad Bernheimer’s great-grandfather, painted the two pictures, which were also interesting in terms of art history. Sketches and preliminary photographic studies for these two paintings are already being kept in the Lenbachhaus.
Konrad Bernheimer also dedicated this donation to Charlotte Knobloch, President of the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria. Like no other, she fought for the “great dream of the Jewish people in Munich” that they would get a permanent and visible place in the city again – that community center on St.-Jakobs-Platz. Charlotte Knobloch thanks him – especially on behalf of the city, because Konrad Bernheimer, the cosmopolitan “Munich man at heart”, is living proof that the graphic artist Ephraim Moses Lilien with his legendary quote from the beginning of the 20th century is not quite was right. “Munich is indeed a city of art of the first – but a cosmopolitan city of the last rank,” said Lilien.
In any case, the fate of the Bernheimer family is firmly interwoven with the fate of Munich. The speakers of the evening remembered it again in unison: Lehmann Bernheimer, who had occasionally come to Munich with his father, a cloth merchant, as a young boy, opened his own shop on Salvatorplatz in 1864. Business flourished. Lehmann was soon able to move to Kaufingerstrasse and later build the “Bernheimer Palais”, which is still known today as such. Under its roof, he and his family offered everything that the aspiring bourgeoisie desired for their villas and the nobility to furnish their castles in keeping with their status: carpets, art, antiques and handsome replicas of the same. Lehmann Bernheimer quickly rose to the position of purveyor to the royal court and privy councilor. His son Otto, Konrad’s grandfather, took over the business.
“Hitler first made us Jews.”
“We were completely assimilated Jews,” says Konrad Bernheimer, who himself was raised strictly Catholic, in retrospect. “My grandfather always said: ‘Hitler first made us Jews'”. And although Otto and his sons were brutally tortured by the Nazis in the Dachau concentration camp after they came to power, they were robbed and dispossessed and had to flee to save their lives, Otto returned to Munich from exile in Venezuela in August 1945. Otto also brought the two paintings rescued from the office building, along with a few other objects, to the Isar again. Konrad Bernheimer described all of this in his 2013 work “Narwhal Tooth and Old Masters. From the Life of an Art Dealer Dynasty”.
He reports on the importance of the portraits of Lehmann and Fanny Bernheimer, the founding couple of the company, which he later took over, as well as on the four portraits of his great-great-grandparents, who have now also become the property of the city. Furthermore, Konrad Bernheimer gave a few other souvenirs, which he himself humorously calls “Bernheimerabilia”. A part of it could already be seen in the Jewish Museum, in its opening year 2007. Bernhard Purin, director of the Jewish Museum, holds out the prospect of seeing them again. In about three years he is planning a large portrait exhibition, to whose core exhibits the donation would contribute.
Konrad Bernheimer in front of the portrait of his great-grandfather, which he has now given to the city.
(Photo: Bernheimer Colnaghi)
Meanwhile, in a few days there will be a reunion with Konrad Bernheimer in person at St.-Jakobs-Platz. On Tuesday, October 26th, 6 pm, he will give a lecture there on “Rembrandt and his Jewish neighbors”. The lecture is part of the series “Dialogues Between Yesterday and Today” of the Munich Adult Education Center. For the autumn of 2021 this has proclaimed the focus “Remembrance for the future – Jewish life in Germany”.
Registration required: [email protected] or Tel. 202400491