“To M. Mandel, Minister of the Colonies. Respectful tribute to the author”, wrote Jacques Binger in pen on July 31, 1938 on one of the first pages of his book. A few centimeters lower, the red stamp of a Berlin library, and another, blue: “restituiert” (returned).
The biography “Une vie d’explorer”, which he devoted to his father Louis-Gustave, a colonel and colonial administrator in West Africa, has fallen into oblivion. An original edition is now trading for around thirty euros on the internet.
But the man to whom it was given, Georges Mandel, is part of French memory. His real name Louis Rothschild, he was assassinated in July 1944 by French militiamen close to the Nazi regime.
Mandel, hostile to any collaboration with Adolf Hitler’s regime, had previously spent four years in French and German prisons. Of Jewish faith, all his property had been stolen from him.
“There were more than 11 or 12,000 volumes in his apartment, paintings”, says Wolfgang Kleinertz, widower of Claude, the only child of Georges Mandel, who herself had a daughter, who died in 2020.
The five books returned on Friday “do not represent much” in terms of their “intrinsic value”, he said. But “they are the witnesses of a period when we began to burn books, before burning people”, summarizes, with AFP, this octogenarian with incredible presence.
In January 2019, a painting belonging to Georges Mandel was returned to his family. “Portrait of a seated young woman”, by the French painter Thomas Couture, had been found among hundreds of works bequeathed by the collector Cornelius Gurlit, whose father Hildebrand, a German art dealer, is considered a war profiteer.
But two paintings by Canaletto, another by Gustave Courbet, a drawing by Rodin, a watercolor by Turner or even a painting by Utrillo, some of the other works stolen from the former minister , there is no trace left.
– “Sentimental value” –
“The collection will never be reconstituted”, observes Camille Noé Marcoux, a historian participating in the research, for whom the delivery of the Couture painting was a “miraculous appearance”.
While many apartments belonging to Jews were completely emptied during the Second World War, administrative documents, invoices and other photos having been destroyed, it is extremely complicated to trace the filiation of a work, which is moreover three generations. afterwards, he explains.
In the case of Couture’s painting, it was a small hole filled in the canvas, mentioned in an inheritance file, which had made it possible to prove that the painting indeed belonged to Georges Mandel.
For books, it is “virtually impossible” to “find marks, dedications” linking them to a family, observes David Zivie, an official at the Ministry of Culture working on Jewish spoliations. So, “when we can do it, it’s symbolically very important”.
“For the families of the victims, their sentimental value is enormous”, judge Jérôme Bénézech, the director of the Commission for the compensation of victims of spoliation (Cives), who underlines the “Franco-German dimension” of the restitutions of the day, wanted by libraries in Berlin and Dresden.
“It is Germany’s responsibility to continue to assume (…) the theft of cultural property committed by the National Socialists”, thus assures the German Minister of Culture Claudia Roth in a press release.
French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, for her part, welcomed the return of the works, “witnesses to the past”. “They are those of Georges Mandel, but also those of all the deportees, of all the prisoners, of all those whom anti-Semitism wanted to eliminate,” she said during a ceremony.
Such an “educational” event, when the 80th anniversary of the Vél’ d’Hiv roundup – this Parisian velodrome in which 8,000 Jews were locked up before being sent to concentration camp – will be commemorated on Sunday, that “sadly symbolic”, according to Jacques Fredj, the director of the Shoah Memorial, where the five books will be kept.
While “everything, down to the teaspoons” was taken from the looted Jews, “most of the property will never be returned to anyone,” he continues.
Often, “there is no one left to return them to”.
