THE ADLER ART COLLECTION:
A STORY OF PASSION FOR ART, LOSS AND REDISCOVERY
In the heart of Munich, the successful bed feather manufacturer Karl Adler built up an extensive art collection together with his wife Emilie. Even as a young man, Karl Adler developed a deep passion for art and made contact with artists living in Munich. Karl and Emilie Adler furnished their home in Munich Harlaching with valuable paintings, furniture, handicrafts, sculptures and oriental carpets.
However, Karl Adler was above all a collector of graphic art and concentrated on modern art.
The Adlers were supported, inspired and advised by their beloved son-in-law Erich Glas, a modern artist who learned his craft at the legendary Bauhaus in Weimar and whose prints were also represented in the Adler collection.
In addition to Glas, many other young artists found valuable patrons in the Adlers and often became good friends of the family. Their collection grew to become one of the largest known collections of prints and etchings of its time, including works by artists such as Alfred Kubin, Max Slevogt, Käthe Kollwitz, Erich Heckel, Max Beckmann, Max Pechstein, Rudolf Großmann, Edwin Scharff, Josef Scharl, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Oskar Kokoschka, Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann, Max Klinger and others.
WORLDS APART: UPROOTED LIVES, NEW BEGINNINGS
AND AN UNSOLVED QUESTION
With the rise of the Nazis to power, he and the family came to understand that the Jews have no future in Europe. The five Adler children made their way to Israel and were “placed” as was customary at the time, to live in several different kibbutzim. The life encountered at the kibbutz was completely different from what they had known in the artistic and bohemian circles in Europe. They had to adapt quickly to an agricultural community struggling for its existence, to an entirely new language and mentality, to socialism and kibbutz standard of living.
In 1935, Karl and Emilie Adler came to visit their children, now settled in Israel, with a few new grandchildren born in the meantime. They wrote a letter describing their two-month experience, titled, “Palästinareise”. Photographs of them present the striking difference between the life their children found and Israel, and those left behind. Karl in his tie and the rest of the family wearing their best white shirts for the occasion, posing in views of mount Carmel and dry thorns.
Why did the Adlers go back to Germany? No-one really knows. In an extensive correspondence between Karl and the well-known artist Alfred Kubin, which was found as part of the research, Karl explicitly writes about their intention to immigrate to Israel themselves. One of the grandchildren recalls he had been told that their children tried to persuade Karl and Emilie to join them and immigrate to Israel, but they decided to go back.
Karl Adler did not live to see the confiscation of his property and art collection. He was arrested by the Gestapo on November 10, 1938, the day after the Reichspogromnacht, and taken to Dachau concentration camp. He died there on November 22, 1938 under unknown circumstances. The Book of the Dead lists him among the prisoners who died “a violent death”. Emilie managed to escape a few months later, bringing her husband’s ashes to be buried in the footsteps of Mount Carmel, not far from where the happy photos had been taken.
A JOURNEY BEGINS - ALMOST BY CHANCE
Decades later, Hagar Lev, one of the great-granddaughters of the Adlers, was working with the Initiative for Stolpersteine in Munich to check the feasibility of installing memorial stones next to the former family’s home. During the preparatory research process, the team pointed to a Süddeutsche Zeitung article from 2016 titled "Hitler's Curators" by Catrin Lorch in the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
The opening sentence of the article had her frozen:
"The looters moved out every night. They rang the doorbells of bedfeather manufacturer Karl Adler, art dealer Otto Bernheimer, his colleague Anna Caspari and merchant Otto Scharff"
The article mentions the story of over 70 collections being looted in the late 1930s, including that of the Adlers.
This Munich chapter of the Nazi art theft had been largely unknown, only coming to public attention after a file containing confiscation records and letters was unearthed in the archives of the Munich City Museum in 2007. Two years later a research project was launched by the City of Munich, carried out by two provenance researchers- Dr. Horst Keßler and Dr. Vanessa Voigt.
This discovery marked the first time the family gained understanding beyond the collection's existence; it revealed its richness and the heartbreaking story of its disappearance.
While some of the facts had been told by Emilie and her children, much hadn’t. In those years, the people who came to Israel didn’t talk too much about the old life. They were busy creating their new reality and looking at what is still to come. And things were very different in terms of intergenerational sharing.
ZOOMING INTO HISTORY
The great-granddaughter shared what she’s learned with others in the family, and gradually, more members of the family were contacted, some who had found residence in different countries, each through their own improbable journeys.
After months of work, a group of Karl and Emilie’s descendants gathered for a Zoom call on a summer day in July 2020, amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
Present were approximately 25 individuals residing in five different countries, representing various branches and sub-branches of the intricate family tree, with ages ranging from people in their late 80s to great-great-grandchildren of Karl and Emilie in their 20s.
Wanting to piece together their family's puzzle, the Adler descendants united in a quest for knowledge, with the intention to both enrich their own understanding and pass the story on to future generations.
The family contacted the Munich art historian Vanessa Voigt. And so started the formal research, supported by the DZK- Deutschen Zentrum Kulturgutverluste Magdeburg, in June 2021.
This website now serves as a testimony to the journey through the history of Karl and Emilie Adler and the fate of their art collection, to be able to share what came to light and above all: who Karl and Emilie Adler were, what they built and what was taken from them.