Film Explores the Plight and Tragic Fate of Martha Liebermann and Her Collection

"There's a piece of Martha in almost all of my paintings," Max Liebermann endearingly affirms to his wife, Martha, as they stroll through the grounds of their summer residence in Berlin in 1927. The German television film Martha Liebermann: A Stolen Life (in German, Martha Liebermann: Ein gestohlenes Leben) opens on the occasion of Max's eightieth birthday, as the foremost German Modernist and president of the Prussian Academy of Arts is declared an honorary citizen of Berlin. Martha has prepared the Liebermann Villa and its meticulous gardens on Wannsee lake for guests to her impeccable standards.

Still from the film Martha Liebermann. Photo courtesy of Menemsha Films.

But the film then abruptly jumps forward to 1943, a decade into the oppressive dictatorship of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. A widowed Martha and her housekeeper subsist in a city apartment on the Graf-Spee-Strasse in Berlin. The accommodations, although still respectable, are bleak, as the elderly Martha–who is now in her eighties– shares her thin vegetable soup with her beloved dachshund. Under the surveillance of the Gestapo, Martha is left with the impossible choice to either secure her flight from Germany through proper channels or escape with the resistance group of Johanna "Hanna" Solf before her time runs out and she is deported to a concentration camp. Although some artistic liberties are taken, with fictional additions to the narrative and characters, the film portrays accurate aspects of the Nazis' persecution of Martha Liebermann and her final days.

Max Liebermann, a prominent Jewish artist and champion of the avant-garde Berlin Secession art movement, was singled out for discrimination early in the governing of the Nazi Party. Only a couple of months after the Nazis came to power in 1933, he resigned his position and membership to the Prussian Academy of Arts. In a public statement, he lamented that: "During my long life, I have tried with all my might to serve German art. I believe that art has nothing to do with politics or parentage. Since this point of view is now rejected, I can no longer belong to the Prussian Academy of Arts..." His works were removed from public collections, as their modern aesthetics were aligned with "degenerate art." As a precautionary measure, he deposited a handful of his most important works from his collection in the Kunsthaus Zürich in Switzerland and withdrew from public life. It was in his home on Pariser Platz in Berlin, that Max died in his sleep on February 8, 1935. His death was neither covered in the media, nor acknowledged by the Prussian Academy of Arts. A funeral service was held three days after his death. At the family's request, attendance was restricted, most likely due to the Gestapo's awareness and surveillance of the event. Max's grave is at the Jewish cemetery at Schönhauser Allee. Martha and her only child, daughter Katharina "Käthe," remained in Germany after Max's death, as the persecution of Jews worsened. Käthe managed to flee to the United States in 1938 with her family, with the intention of finding a way for her mother to join her. It is these final weeks of Martha's life where the film picks up.

Portrait of Martha Liebermann, painted by the Swedish artist Anders Zorn in the 1890s.

Portrait of Max Liebermann, painted by the Swedish artist Anders Zorn in the 1890s. Both portraits were commissioned by Max and featured in the film. Images: Public Domain.

In the film, when Martha is finally persuaded to leave the only city she has known, several financial obstacles stand in her way. With connections abroad, she attempts to emigrate from Germany to either Sweden or Switzerland, but those efforts are thwarted by a flight tax imposed by the Reich, which is perceived as "basically a ransom." Emigration taxation had been imposed during the Weimar Republic to stem the flow of capital exiting Germany during the financial crisis of the interwar period, but the Nazis amended the tax codes several times to extort wealth from Jews attempting to flee the state-sanctioned persecution. To further restrict the flow of Jewish wealth out of Germany, officials instigated foreign exchange controls, freezing Jewish assets so that they could not be transferred abroad as well. The Nazis encourage the emigration of Jews until October 1941, when it was prohibited by decree. This occurred around the same time that Hitler began implementing the systematic mass murdering of those deemed enemies of the state. True to history, Martha's bank accounts have been frozen in the film.

To cover the fifty thousand Swiss franc flight tax imposed on Martha's emigration, Solf and her resistance suggest that Martha sell some of her beloved paintings, a clear example of the forced sales or sales under duress that many Jewish collectors turned to to finance their flight or livelihood under the Nazi persecution. This was due to their artworks being an accessible asset that could be liquidated. Not only does Martha hesitate due to the immense sentimental value she has for her collection, with many of her husband's works included, but it is also because the paintings are registered with the state. "Even if one of them goes missing, I'll end up in a concentration camp," she exclaims at the idea of selling the works.

Historically, following the Anschluss and annexation of Austria into the Reich in March 1938, successive degrees targeted Jewish property. In April 1938, the Nazis implemented the Decree for the Reporting of Jewish-Owned Property, which required Jews to report assets valued in excess of five thousand Reichsmark and provide authorities with inventories of their valuable possessions, effectively obligating them into drafting the eventual confiscation lists of their own collections.

Kristallnacht was the spark that ignited the intensification of this financial persecution. On the night of November 9, 1938, the Nazis instigated violence, death, and destruction against its Jewish population in Germany and the annexed territories of the Reich, and in the days following, levied a one billion Reichsmark reparations payment or "atonement tax" on the very group of people it had attacked. Successive levies imposed on the Jewish population and outright confiscations ultimately left many with very little to their name.

Martha's desperate, final days are agonizingly portrayed in the final minutes of the film. On March 4, 1943, she had received notification that she would be deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp the next day. Bedridden from a stroke months earlier– something that the film does not portray– Martha chose to overdose on sleeping pills, departing this life on her own terms in defiance of the Nazis. When authorities arrived at her apartment the next morning, they found her unconscious. She was transported to Berlin's Jewish hospital, where she died on March 10. Her apartment was seized and sealed by authorities the day she has transported to the hospital. Just days following her funeral in late March, what remained of the Liebermann estate was confiscated and forfeited for the benefit of the Reich. A confiscated list of movable property was drafted that July by the chief financial officer of Berlin-Brandenburg on behalf of the Gestapo. It is believed many assets were sold the following months.

Martha Liebermann debuted in 2022 and is slated for future release in the United States. It won "Best Film" and lead actress Thekla Carola Weid received the "Best Actress" award at the 61st Golden Nymph Awards of the Monte-Carlo Television Festival.

Liebermann's Most Wanted

Two paintings from the Liebermann collection are featured in the Foundation's WWII Most Wanted Art deck of playing cards: Claude Monet's Manet Painting in Monet's Garden and Max Liebermann's The Artist's Wife (Martha Liebermann) Asleep.

Manet Painting in Monet's Garden, which Max Liebermann had bought in 1898, has not been seen since it was hanging in Martha's Berlin apartment. It is suspected that the Nazis confiscated and then sold the work after Martha's death in 1943.

The portrait The Artist's Wife (Martha Liebermann) Asleep was one of the Max Liebermann works that remained in their personal collection. The painting was sold by Martha under duress sometime between 1936 and 1943. Martha's portrait was in her possession until at least 1936 as it was one of the paintings she signed with an inheritance stamp and lent to a Berlin exhibition that year. However, the painting was not included on the confiscation list made on the Gestapo's behalf in 1943. By 1960, the painting was in Munich in the possession of Wolfgang Gurlitt, cousin of infamous Nazi-associated art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, and had probably been in his possession since 1952. Gurlitt was known to have visited Martha several times before her death, wanting to obtain works from her collection as she became ever more desperate throughout the years of persecution.

To learn more about Liebermann's Most Wanted, please visit the links below.

Liebermann Most Wanted: Liebermann	Liebermann Most Wanted: Monet