The Orpheus Clock: The Search for My Family's Art Treasures Stolen by the Nazis

by Simon Goodman

Overview

“An extraordinary piece of history...a fresh and lively read” (The Christian Science Monitor)—the passionate, gripping, true story of one man’s single-minded quest to reclaim his family’s art collection, stolen by the Nazis in World War II.

Simon Goodman’s grandparents came from German-Jewish banking dynasties and perished in concentration camps. And that’s almost all he knew about them—his father rarely spoke of their family history or heritage. But when his father passed away, and Simon received his old papers, a story began to emerge.

The Gutmanns, as they were known then, rose from a small Bohemian hamlet to become one of Germany’s most powerful banking families. They also amassed a magnificent, world-class art collection that included works by Degas, Renoir, Botticelli, Guardi, and many, many more. But the Nazi regime snatched from them everything they had worked to build: their remarkable art, their immense wealth, their prominent social standing, and their very lives. Only after his father’s death did Simon begin to piece together the clues about the Gutmanns’ stolen legacy and the Nazi looting machine. With painstaking detective work across two continents, Simon has been able to prove that many works belonged to his family and successfully secure their return.

“Fascinating...splendid and tragic” (The Wall Street Journal), “Goodman’s story is alternately wrenching and inspiring...An emotional tale of unspeakable horrors, family devotion, and art as a symbol of hope” (Kirkus Reviews). It is not only the account of a twenty-year detective hunt for family treasure, but an unforgettable tale of redemption and restoration.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781451697643
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	08/16/2016
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	417,065
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Born in London shortly after WWII and educated at the French Lycée in London, then at Munich University, Simon Goodman entered the music business in the late 1960s, specializing in breaking new British artists abroad. Goodman is married to the actress and teacher May Quigley and has one son and three daughters. He lives in Los Angeles where his search for his family’s treasures continues.

Read an Excerpt

The Orpheus Clock

Bernard with his typewriter in between flights, 1948.

The boxes were rather ordinary, the sort of musty, collapsing-in-on-themselves corrugated containers that one might find gathering dust in millions of attics and basements. They had arrived from Germany, of all places, at my brother’s sunny hillside home in Los Angeles in the fall of 1994—the last tired remnants of our late father’s estate.

Our father, Bernard Goodman, had died in Venice a few months earlier, on the day after his eightieth birthday, while swimming in the Adriatic Sea. The night before he had enjoyed a slap-up dinner at Harry’s Bar. Cipriani, the owner, had given Pa a bottle of grappa on the house. A noted athlete in his university days at Cambridge, my father had remained physically active all his years—it was not his body that life had broken—and despite his age, he was a keen swimmer. According to the authorities, he had suffered either a stroke or a heart attack and had lost consciousness in the water. As Eva, his longtime companion, had screamed and waved her arms from the shore, the lifeguards had plunged in and dragged him out, but it was too late. The official ruling was death by drowning.

His death was unexpected and somewhat unusual; eighty-year-old men do not often die while swimming in the sea. But perhaps that was only fitting. Our father had lived an unusual and unexpected life.

We arranged for his burial in a small wood outside Tübingen in Germany—and through various courts and solicitors I cleared up his financial affairs, which, sadly, were rather meager. By the time of his death he was living in what might be called genteel poverty—comfortable enough, but far removed from the circumstances into which we vaguely understood he had been born.

Then came the boxes, packed with papers and documents our father had painstakingly saved over half a century. Curious, not at all certain what we might find, my brother, Nick, and I started to go through them, ripping through the shipping labels printed in German—the language our father had once vowed never to speak again—and laying out the brittle contents in fragile piles on Nick’s dining-room table.

There were sheaves of yellowing notes written in our father’s own hand and blurry carbons of letters that he had pounded out on an ancient typewriter. There were stacks of government documents in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Czech—except for the Czech, my father could read and speak each language—their pages festooned with coat-of-arms letterheads and official stamps and seals. There were long-forgotten receipts and bills of sale, and black-and-gold, expired British passports with visa pages covered top to bottom with entry and exit stamps. Shockingly to modern eyes, the prewar stamps from Germany featured the Nazi eagle clutching a swastika. There were some dog-eared, old art catalogs, some faded museum brochures, and in a single, unlabeled envelope three black-and-white photographic negatives—the old kind, each some three by five inches—of paintings that I didn’t specifically recognize but which appeared to be French Impressionist paintings. The stacks grew higher, and then higher still.

The appearance of my father’s papers gave no outward indication of secrets long concealed, no promise of dramatic revelations—certainly not life-changing ones. Yet, as we began to look more closely at them, to examine the details, certain things stood out.

The art collection that we understood had once been owned by our father’s parents, the grandparents we had never known, consisted of works by some of the greatest masters, old and new—Degas, Renoir, Botticelli, Memling, Cranach, Guardi. There were also inventories of priceless Renaissance sculptures in gold and silver, of valuable tapestries and Louis XV furniture, and then a photostat of an aged, wrinkled handwritten note from my grandfather, describing the location of certain artworks and signed P. for “Papi.”

Curiously, and in retrospect ominously, amid those same documents, often on the same pages, were references to some of history’s most infamous figures—Adolf Hitler, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann, Nazi “philosopher” Alfred Rosenberg—and to the monuments dedicated to themselves: the planned Führermuseum in the Austrian city of Linz and the Reichsmarschall’s estate at Carinhall. Coupled with them were the names of men I did not then recognize, but who nonetheless sounded sinister—Haberstock and Hofer, Böhler and Plietzsch and Miedl.

Within those stacks of my father’s papers—stacks already tipping over and starting to spread, glacierlike, across my brother’s table—were references to Theresienstadt, the Nazis’ “model” concentration camp, and to the death chambers of Auschwitz. There were allusions to the Nazi occupation of Holland, to the SS and the Gestapo, to the French Resistance and the American World War II spy service, the OSS, to Scotland Yard and the international police agency Interpol. Then came memorandums from various postwar “restitution” bureaus in West Germany, France, and Holland, followed by notations concerning corrupt Swiss art dealers, spies and collaborators, hoards of priceless art packed into Parisian warehouses and Austrian salt mines—and much more.

The papers were confusing, mysterious, enigmatic. They were, I realized, very much like the man who had assembled them.

He had not always been so. As a young boy growing up in postwar London, I remember my father as an open, loving man, perhaps a bit reserved in the British style, but not above expressions of affection. One of my earliest memories is of my father hoisting me up on his shoulders—probably painfully, I now realize, because of his war wounds—so that I could watch the funeral procession for King George VI, who had died a few days earlier on my fourth birthday. From that lofty perspective, it seemed to me that my father was enormously tall—which actually he was not—and terribly strong, which he was.

I remember also that despite the solemnity of the occasion, played out under inevitably gray London skies, to me it had a magical quality—the plumed helmets of the Life Guards, the King’s coffin draped in the royal standard, adorned with the Crown Jewels, and mounted on a gun carriage pulled by a clip-clopping team of Windsor Greys. The rank upon rigid rank of marching soldiers and funereally paced cavalry came from every far-flung country of what had once been the British Empire. For a small boy, seeing the coffin of the wartime King, the last Emperor of India, there was no sense of the war’s tragedy, no feeling of loss—loss of lives, of treasure, of innocence. It was all simply glorious.

The war was never far away in the physical sense. Against our parents’ stern admonitions, Nick and I could not resist exploring the countless bomb sites that still scarred London even a decade after the peace, dressing up in too-large war-surplus uniforms and balancing wobbly Tommy helmets on our too-small heads. Every Thursday I would race to the newsagent stand in the South Kensington tube station to buy the latest installment of the War Picture Library, a comic book series featuring the gallant exploits of World War II British commandos and fighter pilots.

Other families still talked about the war constantly, yet it seemed strangely off-limits, almost taboo, in my family. My mother seldom spoke of it, except in the most general terms. Most disappointingly for a young boy with martial fantasies, despite my father’s service in the British army, in the distinguished Gloucestershire Regiment, and his having been wounded by a German bomb in the Blitz, he refused to speak even a single word about his participation in the war. His silence on the subject was unwavering and an utter frustration to Nick and me. He might occasionally, in passing, refer to some historical person or event—Field Marshal Montgomery, perhaps, or some great British victory such as the Battle of Britain—but on a personal level he seemed not to have found the war glorious at all.

I was perhaps ten or eleven before I finally pieced together, from the whispered and coded adult conversations that children instinctively pick up on, that my father’s parents had somehow “died in the war.” Only later did my mother guardedly, reluctantly, reveal that those grandparents, those distant, unvisualized people whom I had never known, had been, more or less, Jewish. Still later I gathered vague indications that my father’s parents had also once been enormously wealthy, and that I had various aunts and cousins scattered about in Italy, America, even Mexico—although, strangely, that family, those grandparents, had apparently been German-born “Gutmanns,” while we were very British “Goodmans.”

Different names, different nationalities, different religions—it was all quite confusing.

Naturally, these grudgingly shared bits of knowledge raised questions. Although I knew that we were not poor, I also knew that we were not rich. And who were these far-flung relatives I had never met? We had been to Italy on holiday, but no one had ever introduced me or my brother to any relatives there. And if indeed these mysterious relations did have some sort of German or Italian connections, wasn’t it the Germans, and to a lesser extent the Italians, who had been the very enemies battled so heroically by our British soldiers every issue in the pages of the War Picture Library?

I couldn’t have been more confused if I had learned that I was somehow descended from the Japanese.

And what did being Jewish mean? I was barely aware of what being Jewish had to do with someone having “died in the war.” Still, from the coarse comments of boyhood chums—boys repeating what they had heard from their parents—I had picked up insinuations that to be a Jew was to be different somehow, almost “un-British,” perhaps even disreputable in some way. And if my grandparents had been Jewish, did it not follow that my father was Jewish, and that I was at least partly Jewish?

But how could that be? It was true that my mother, a descendant of Protestant Highland Scots, with an impressive string of official birth names (Irene Doreen Rosy Amy Simpson, ultimately shortened to Dee), had never been overtly religious. Indeed, one of her ancestors, James Young Simpson, a physician who had discovered the anesthetic qualities of chloroform and had subsequently been knighted by Queen Victoria, had been a notorious freethinker—a nonbelief system that my mother also seemed to embrace. Nevertheless, she had insisted that Nick and I become proper Anglicans, enrolling us in a Sunday school from which we each eventually earned a certificate for reading the entire Bible. She had us officially christened—albeit, in my case, not until I was at the somewhat advanced age of twelve. Was it possible, I wondered, to be a member in relatively good standing of the Church of England and to be Jewish, or part Jewish, at the same time? Even with hindsight, I would never figure out if this stab at Anglican induction had been for conventional social reasons or, in a more ominous way, as some kind of insurance. My father was never able to show any enthusiasm or even interest in the whole process, but clearly my mother felt it necessary.

These were not questions I could discuss with my parents—my father in particular. If he was silent on the subject of the war, he was even more silent, if that was possible, on the subject of his family, Jewish or otherwise. I sensed that these were things best left alone.

Yet, for me, it all led to an increasing feeling of otherness, of not quite belonging in the country and the society and even the family into which I had been born—a feeling heightened by my appearance. My older brother, Nick, had inherited our attractive mother’s fair-haired, fair-skinned Anglo-Scots looks, while I, like my father, seemed to have come from a place much farther away. My hair was almost black, my eyes dark brown, my skin olive. I remember once returning from a summer in France, a vacation spent largely on a sunny beach, and having British customs and immigration officers look at my deeply tanned face and then carefully and dubiously examine my British passport. Someone even suggested that I might be an Algerian—they spoke the word like a curse. I couldn’t possibly be a real English boy.

Given all this, and my youthful doubts about my place in the world, perhaps it was fortunate that for our schooling my parents chose the Lycée Français in South Kensington, where classes were taught almost entirely in French, the desks occupied by a cosmopolitan mix of the children of émigrés and refugees and various and sundry eccentrics. It was a most un-British institution, and as a consequence I felt comfortable there. Perhaps fortunate also was that our family lived in Shepherd Market, a small square in the Mayfair district of central London, just three stops away on the Piccadilly Line from the Lycée. In the 1920s, it had been an ultrafashionable address, home to any number of successful writers, actors, and artists, and although it had become a bit sketchier in the postwar years, it retained its eclectic, nontraditional character.

This environment perfectly suited my mother, a funny, vivacious, life-loving woman, who had studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts before the war and later became a successful theatrical stage manager and producer. With my godmother, Anna Wiman, she discovered the iconoclastic comedy group Beyond the Fringe at the Edinburgh Festival—featuring, among others, the young actor Dudley Moore. When it opened, in the West End in 1960, at my impresario godmother’s theater, the Fortune Theater, it became an overnight sensation.

How my father fit into all of this was, as usual, a mystery. He was in all ways a proper English gentleman—in almost all of my memories he is wearing a jacket and tie, or at least a cravat—but he did not seem to have a regular job, at least not in the sense that other boys’ fathers had jobs, places that fathers went to in the morning and returned from at night. I remember he had letterhead stationery that identified him as B. E. Goodman, Manufacturer’s Agent, with an office address in Golden Square, Soho, but I don’t remember his ever actually going there, or mentioning the manufacturing of anything. Instead, he spent most of his time at home locked in his study, corresponding—as the contents of those dusty boxes would later reveal—with various lawyers and government officials. He must have given up the unused office in Soho because when I looked at his correspondence many years later, I noticed with bemusement that he had x’ed out the Soho address in the letterhead and typed in our home address. It was so very much like my father not to waste perfectly good stationery.

He traveled a great deal, mostly to Holland, but also to other countries throughout the Continent, although where he went and what he did on any particular trip I did not know, and he did not say. He was abroad so frequently that later, when he did take a recognizable job, it was as a travel agent—a position that helped facilitate his wanderings but, somehow, given his education and background, seemed a bit beneath him.

As we got older, he would sometimes take us with him on these journeys, to France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Austria, and once to Germany—although in that case he insisted upon driving completely across that country without stopping, except once to allow us, in extremis, to go to the loo. Germany had seemed to put him in a dark mood.

The results of these trips were for us boys almost invariably disappointing. Instead of taking us to old castles and museums choked with guns and swords and suits of armor, our father seemed primarily interested in visiting, what was for us, a seemingly endless succession of musty and boring art museums. This might not have been surprising since he had majored in history at Cambridge (with an emphasis on art). The odd thing about these museum visits, however, was that Pa did not spend them in a leisurely contemplation of the art on display, but rather rushing from gallery to gallery, scanning the walls and then quickly moving on, as if he were looking for something and not finding it. Sometimes he would park us on a bench and then spend ages with a museum curator going over old lists and catalogs—again, as always, without explanation.

There was, I remember, one notable exception. Years later we took a trip from Los Angeles to the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park, where my father stood gazing for what seemed like an uncharacteristically long time at a seventeenth-century oil painting, Portrait of Isaac Abrahamsz. Massa, by Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals. Even more uncharacteristically, he told me that this painting had once been owned by his father, my grandfather, but it had been sold during World War II. He sounded bitter about it, angry in a way that I was only just beginning to understand.

But he would say no more, and I didn’t ask. It seemed like ancient history—sad, perhaps, but with little bearing on my life.

Eventually, as the years passed, I began to understand the basic outlines of my father’s family story—again, through bits and snippets and vague asides. Yes, my father and his father before him had been born into one of the wealthiest, most powerful Jewish banking dynasties in Germany, the Gutmanns. Yes, my grandfather and grandmother, herself a member of a Jewish banking family, a baroness no less, had lived with their two children—my father and his younger sister—in a luxurious estate in Holland, where they had presided over not only an enormous fortune and a fabulous art collection of old masters and famous Impressionists, but also an almost priceless collection of Renaissance silver and gold works of art. And, yes, the war and the Nazis had come, and while my father had survived in England, anglicizing his name to Goodman and serving in the British army, everything else—the fabulous estate, the vast fortune, the magnificent art collection, my grandparents themselves—had been swept away.

At the time, my scant knowledge of this history did not much affect me—any real sense of loss would only come later. As for the lost fortune, the vanished art collection, it all seemed like part of some other world. Many families have stories of lost wealth—the fortune lost overnight in the Wall Street crash, the family bank accounts squandered at the roulette wheels of Monte Carlo by some dissolute great-uncle—but by the third or fourth generation these stories usually become nothing more than interesting, and perhaps only half-believed, bits of family lore and legend. Young men think of their own futures, not someone else’s past. Besides, by this time I was living in Los Angeles, and in all the world there probably is no place less conducive to pondering the past than LA.

Still, as I got older, I began to understand, or at least was better able to appreciate, the profound effect that this tragic family history had exerted on my father—and later, through him, on me. For my father, these terrible events had been close, real, things he had lived and experienced. When I tried to imagine myself in his place, I thought, no wonder he refused to talk about the war; no wonder he never spoke of his parents. Some things, I understood, were simply too painful to talk about, buried beyond words.

But curiously, as the years passed, as the dreadful history of my father’s family receded in time, their effects on him seemed to increase, not lessen. He had a growing aura of pent-up frustration and bitterness and anger about him, a sense that some mysterious defeat, some terrible failure, was weighing on him, bending his spirit and then finally, it seemed, breaking it altogether. He grew increasingly withdrawn, uncommunicative, inaccessible. When my parents would have guests over—or more accurately, when my social and outgoing mother would have guests over—I remember my father usually standing off and alone in a corner, as if he were someplace else. He could still talk animatedly about cricket and football (or, as Americans say, soccer), but almost nothing else seemed to interest him.

As for the war, everything but the Allied victories now seemed off-limits. It got to the point that whenever a news report or documentary about the victims and, specifically, the Holocaust would come on the television, my mother had trained Nick and me to quickly jump up and change the channel. Otherwise my father would angrily switch off the set and then sit glumly, silently, in his chair.

There was one memorable exception. One day in June 1967, I came home to find my father alone, hunched forward in his chair, watching the BBC news reports on Israel’s air and ground strikes against Egyptian military airfields and the Arab armies massing against them from Jordan, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Desert—the start of the Six-Day War. He was cheering, shaking his fist, urging the Israelis on. That’s it! Bash the bloody bastards! Nick, who was older, had already left home, and my mother was away, so for the next six days my father and I spent every spare minute following the war news together—he explaining the strategy and tactics and weapons as I listened, fascinated by this previously unseen side of him. It was the longest, most intimate time I had ever spent with my father. Yet, even then, as we watched with satisfaction as the Israelis rolled over the Arab armies at El Arish and Gush Etzion and Jericho and Jerusalem, my father barely spoke of his own Jewish heritage, or of that other, earlier war of attempted annihilation of the Jews. Then the Six-Day War was over, and the news looked elsewhere, and my father’s silence returned.

Nick and I were growing up and had our own lives now. We were accustomed to Pa simply being Pa. But for our mother, the silence, the distance, the sadness, finally became too much. Sadly, they divorced. Ma eventually remarried and moved to Australia, while Pa remained in London, a quiet and somewhat reclusive aging bachelor. Later he met Eva, who, though twenty years his junior, had attended the same exclusive school in Switzerland that my father had attended as a boy. Surprisingly, given our family’s history, Eva was German—but she had been a young girl during the war. More unusual still, he eventually went to live with her in Germany, in the small southwestern university town of Tübingen. This was another mystery for me and Nick. Nevertheless, in Eva he found a comfortable companionship and, in his later years, perhaps some measure of peace. We noticed that he still traveled extensively. But about his past, he remained as silent as ever. Some men grow garrulous as they get older, telling the various stories from their lives again and again to anyone who will listen. Pa, as far as we could tell, had never told his story even once.

And now he was dead.

It might have ended there, except that a few months after his death I rang up Pa’s sister, our aunt Lili, just to say hello. Aunt Lili was one of those rumored, far-flung relatives I had wondered about as a boy, but had not actually met until years later. Like my father, she also had an unusual life. Lili had married into an old Italian family, but her husband had been taken prisoner of war by the British in North Africa. Then when the Germans occupied Italy, she had been forced, due to her Jewish origins, to keep one step ahead of the Gestapo. After the war she divorced her first husband and later married a Greek diplomat. Now elderly and widowed, she was living in modest circumstances in Florence. During our conversation, my aunt mentioned, in passing, that since the fall of the Soviet Union the Russians had begun, for the first time, to exhibit publicly some of the “trophy art” taken from Germany during World War II. She wondered out loud if perhaps some of her father’s, my grandfather’s, missing paintings that had disappeared during the war—the two Degas, the Renoir, the Botticelli, the Guardis, and others—might be found there and even possibly returned to the family.

My reaction was “Missing paintings? What missing paintings?” Nick and I had assumed, when we had thought about it at all, that all that had been settled long ago or that whatever our father’s family had lost had been lost irretrievably. The idea that the family might still have a claim to anything from those old days, and that a half century later it might be recovered, seemed far-fetched. Frankly, we wondered if poor Aunt Lili, who was in her late seventies, might be getting a bit dotty.

Then those old boxes arrived at Nick’s house, stuffed with papers and documents.

It would take us first days, then weeks, then years, to decipher it all—and even as I write this, not all the mysteries have yet been solved. But I would eventually uncover the secrets that had been hidden since before I was born. And I can finally tell the story that my father never told me.

•  •  •

I would discover that for a half century after the war ended, Pa had fought a bitter and often unsuccessful battle to recover the priceless artworks that had been stolen from his family—stolen first by the Nazis, and then, in effect, stolen again by narrow-minded bureaucrats. Unscrupulous art dealers and willfully negligent auction houses, as well as museum directors and wealthy collectors, would all be party to this theft, long after the war was over. I would discover that throughout his life our father had to deal not only with the almost unbearable knowledge that his parents had been savagely murdered, but also the knowledge that their looted legacy, their paintings and other cherished artworks, were on display in someone else’s gallery, hanging on someone else’s wall, locked in someone else’s safe—and that he could not get them back.

In discovering his story, I would come to understand the anger, the indignation, the frustration, and the sense of loss that he must have felt. For the first time, and only after he was dead, I would finally begin to understand the strange, tormented, enigmatic man who was my father.

In the years to come, my family and I would take up the search where my father had left off. The trail of our family’s missing art would lead from Nazi-occupied Holland and France to Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and America; from warehouses in Paris to salt mines and castles in Bavaria; from dingy government storage facilities to the rarefied atmosphere of Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses in London and New York; from the private art collections of the fabulously wealthy to the public exhibitions of some of the world’s greatest art museums. Like my father, I would spend years searching through musty archives, haunting the back rooms of museums and libraries on two continents, tracking down clues, pursuing false leads, searching, always searching. Like my father, too, at almost every turn I would encounter indifference and apathy, and at times outright hostility, from people who seemed not to want to know about the grim history of the artworks they possessed. Even when they did know about it, too often they seemed not to care.

But there was one big difference between my father’s quest and mine. This time, for the most part, we would prevail.

It has been a long and frustrating and, at times, an almost ruinously expensive endeavor. But over the years we have recovered dozens of paintings and many other artworks that were stolen from our family—although many remain missing, still stolen, to this day. In the process we have helped change the way the often ruthless business side of the art world is conducted and helped to effect new government protocols and regulations concerning the harboring of looted art. I hope we have made it easier for other heirs of Holocaust victims to find and recover their stolen legacies, all the while keeping alive the memory of the victims of long ago.

Oftentimes in this very public and highly publicized battle, I have been asked by newspaper and magazine writers, by television news reporters and documentary filmmakers, why I do it, what my motivation is. I give the usual, perhaps expected answer—that while I know the dead can never be brought back to life, by recovering my family’s stolen legacy I hope to achieve a long-overdue sense of justice, a degree of what is popularly known today as closure.

While that is true, I have another, deeper, more visceral motivation. After learning what had happened to my family—the murders, the thefts, the lies, and the betrayals they had endured—I was angry. From that anger came a desire to exact at least some small measure of retribution—for my grandparents, for my father, perhaps even in some ways for myself.


After the war, Bernard used his British and Dutch passports constantly.

Table of Contents

Part I Foundation

Chapter 1 My Father's Old Boxes 3

Chapter 2 The Generations That Came Before 18

Chapter 3 Fritz and Louise: Marriage, War, and a New Life 45

Chapter 4 Holland and Bosbeek: The Years Between the Wars 65

Chapter 5 The Ephemeral Peace 91

Part II Devastation

Chapter 6 The Wolves at the Door 113

Chapter 7 Theresienstadt 135

Chapter 8 Bernard 158

Part III Restoration

Chapter 9 Out of the Ashes 179

Chapter 10 Searching for Degas 199

Chapter 11 Renoir and Botticelli 221

Chapter 12 Return to Holland 234

Chapter 13 Sin and Sensuality 255

Chapter 14 Portrait of a Young Man 272

Chapter 15 Lifting the Curse: The Orpheus Clock 292

Chapter 16 Postscript: On Reflection 314

Afterword: In Hindsight 319

Acknowledgments 323

Appendix 1 Gutmann Family Tree 326

Appendix 2 Recovered Art 329

Related Bibliography 335

Photograph Credits 337

Index 339

Editorial Reviews

"In this heartbreaking book, Simon Goodman uses the theft of his family’s art collection as a lens through which to view the [Holocaust]...there’s a large component of redemption at work here as well. Don’t miss this gripping historical detective story."

History Book Club

"When [Goodman's] father died at the age of 80...letters, documents, and other correspondences revealed a trove of family secrets that led Goodman and his family on a quest for both justice and discovery of their family history....The search is still ongoing, but this account of the struggle so far is both arresting and poignant, combining elements of a family chronicle and an intricate detective story."

Booklist

An extraordinary piece of history...Even readers well familiar with World War II and Holocaust history will find this a fresh and lively read.

Christian Science Monitor

"This is a magnificent book, both poignant and chilling. Ultimately it stands as testimony to how family stories can grip across generations, and how fierce is the impulse to right wrongs. It is very moving indeed — a huge achievement.

Edmund de Waal

A remarkable achievement. The Nazis stole the Gutmann family’s art and tried to erase them from history; they almost succeeded. Here, now, with the sweep of a pen and the diligence of a crime reporter, author Simon Goodman has restored his family’s legacy. Shocking, stunning and totally unputdownable, The Orpheus Clock is an absolute must read.

Annie Jacobsen

"When [Goodman's] father died at the age of 80...letters, documents, and other correspondences revealed a trove of family secrets that led Goodman and his family on a quest for both justice and discovery of their family history....The search is still ongoing, but this account of the struggle so far is both arresting and poignant, combining elements of a family chronicle and an intricate detective story."

Booklist

06/15/2015
Music executive Goodman believed that his father, Bernard, was the quintessential British gentleman, always "wearing a jacket and tie, or at least a cravat." When Bernard passed away, Goodman and his brother Nick inherited files revealing that their father was born Bernhard Guttman, the primary heir of a prominent German banking family. Since the end of World War II, Bernard had been on a quest to recover the family's extensive art collection, plundered by the Nazis as Jewish property. Taking up the search, the brothers learn about the heartbreaking family history that obsessed their father, and in the process recover numerous treasures from the Guttman collection as well as reconcile with scattered Guttman relatives. As in Anne-Marie O'Connor's The Lady in Gold, many government officials, museum directors, and art collectors callously or duplicitously overlook suspect provenance to enhance their collections. Others are touchingly honorable when confronted with the legacy of the Holocaust. VERDICT Goodman's absorbing debut will appeal to readers with an interest in the business of art collecting, the cultural heritage of Western Europe, family histories, the work of the Monuments Men, and those who enjoyed The Lady in Gold, or its film version, Woman in Gold.—Laurie Unger Skinner, Coll. of Lake Cty., Waukegan, IL

Library Journal

2015-06-03
During World War II, the Nazis easily stole valuable artworks, furniture, and silver from Goodman, who has spent two difficult decades trying to recover them. The author's German family, who originally spelled the surname "Gutmann," were wealthy bankers beginning in the 19th century. In his affecting debut, Goodman, whose earlier career was in the music industry, traces their history, recording that his great-great-grandfather lived in a Dresden castle. The author spends several chapters talking about the financial rise of the family, who once employed Joseph Goebbels in a bank branch. Goodman's immediate family moved to the Netherlands and lived outside Amsterdam in an estate called Bosbeek, a place the author recalls as having "an almost magical quality." Then came the Nazis. Goodman rehearses much of the social and military history of the time, tells us about the deaths of relatives in the camps, and describes in excruciating detail how his family lost everything. Going through a box of his late father's belongings, he discovered the story of his father's generally fruitless attempt to recover his family's treasures. Soon, the author and his brother embarked on a long, tempestuous voyage of their own, encountering reluctance, disrespect, doubt, denial, and coldhearted crassness along the way. Throughout the book, Sotheby's does not come off well. Goodman's story is alternately wrenching and inspiring, though the diction is often clichéd: writing is on the wall, people hope for the best, places are hell on earth. These locutions often drag this extraordinary story down to the ordinary. Readers will see allusions to many familiar persons and events here: Anne Frank, the Monuments Men, and the works of Degas, Renoir, Botticelli, and numerous other artists. We also learn of some internecine Goodman family squabbles. An emotional tale of unspeakable horrors, family devotion, and art as a symbol of hope.

Kirkus Reviews