Truth will out
Opening his father’s suitcase led Antony Easton to a powerful family story of loss and restitution
Charlie Northcott/BBC Sounds/The House at Number 48
- Catherine Pepinster
The House at Number 48 is on Monday-Friday at 1.45pm on Radio 4.
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Antony Easton has always been a storyteller. From creating commercials for advertising agencies to making documentaries, narratives have been his passion. And yet, unbeknownst to him, in a brown leather suitcase kept in his family’s home, his father Peter had stored clues to a story more dramatic, tragic and poignant than anything he’d ever created.
It was a tale that Peter Easton never told his son. It’s one of vast wealth borne of hard work, of idyllic childhoods and beautiful homes – and what led to their destruction. “The story was there, right under my nose,” says Easton.
But piecing it all together took him years. Now a Radio 4 series, The House at Number 48, tells the story of Peter Easton and his parents, Hildegard and Rudolf Eisner, who fled Nazi Germany and settled in Britain in 1939, and how Antony, with the help of art detective and restitution expert Yana Slavova, is reclaiming the family’s assets – and their story.
After his father’s death in 2009, Antony inherited the suitcase. Its contents – documents in German, luggage labels, a family tree, an envelope marked Prague – revealed that his Eisner forebears were German-Jewish steel magnates. Once the Nazis came to power, they were in grave danger, so Rudolf and Hildegard Eisner fled from Berlin to Prague, then to Poland, on to Copenhagen and eventually ended up in Britain. They had lost their business and their homes, as well as artworks. But something else even more important was lost.
Easton's great-grandparents Olga and Heinrich Eisner. Martin Adam, Berlin
“For me, the restitution isn’t just about property and assets. It’s about people,” says Easton. “I knew nothing about my great-grandfather Heinrich, and he turned out to have been head of the Jewish chamber of commerce in Berlin and a great philanthropist.”
According to the Wiener Holocaust Library, property worth at least £135 billion in today’s money was looted from Jews in Europe between 1939 and 1945. Houses, art and antiques were taken when Jewish families fled or were arrested. Museums acquired looted artworks, turning a blind eye to gaps in their provenance.
There had been a few hints over the years that Easton’s father, seemingly a conventional middle-class Englishman and a nominal Anglican, with a successful career in PR, had another identity: as the son of Jewish refugees. His father had a trace of an accent, and would whisper in German with his own mother, who died when Easton was eight. One day a trunk was delivered to the family home, filled with crockery wrapped in newspapers from 1930s Germany. “I didn’t know what it all meant,” says Easton. “There was an atmosphere at home. My grandmother was broken and my father, he was just unhappy. I’ve read that it takes generations to deal with trauma and I’m proof of that.”
The House at Number 48 tells how breakthroughs came as Easton sought the truth. First, the family’s former au pair, a fluent German speaker, spotted that a painting that his grandfather once owned of the family steel works – Eisenwalzwerk, or The Iron Rolling Mill, by Hans Baluschek – was in a Berlin museum. And then came the crunch moment in the hunt for the truth, thanks to Yana Slavova.
It takes generations to deal with trauma – I'm proof of that
By 1938, Rudolf Eisner, Easton’s grandfather, was running the business he’d inherited from his father Heinrich, but with Hitler in power, not only the family’s fortune but their own lives were in danger. Eventually, they paid a vast “flight” tax to leave Berlin. The steelworks were taken from the family on account of their being Jewish, and absorbed by an industrial conglomerate, which was taken over decades later by a British firm.
Martin Hartig, a business associate who helped the Eisners leave Germany, offered to have power of attorney over their affairs to protect their personal property. Slavova spotted that the records of the museum holding the steelworks painting showed a link between the dealer who sold it to the gallery and Martin Hartig. Both had the same Berlin address – the house at number 48, which Easton’s grandmother inherited from her father and Hartig took over. Once he got hold of the Eisners’ wealth, he never gave it back. “Everything they couldn’t take with them, Hartig took,” says Easton.
For Slavova (who was inspired to hunt down looted art after the notorious 2013 case of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of Hitler’s art dealer, came to light – his hoard including hundreds of paintings including Old Masters and Impressionists), the Eisner restitution is just one of many cases she has worked on in the past 10 years. But she says it is the most memorable.
“This is the case I am most proud of. We had a 60 to 70-year provenance gap and then we found the property led to the painting. It was such a surprising case. I had not known about the Eisners and didn’t know how important they were, and then there was the twist with the details of who sold the painting.”
Hans Baluschek's Eisenwalzwerk was taken from his family.
Another twist is the encounter, recalled in the series, between Easton and Hartig’s descendants. “It was bizarre,” says Easton. “They are not responsible for what he did. But whatever I carry around as an Eisner descendant, they carry around. They have crosses to bear.
“For me, I now recognise my Jewish heritage. I feel there is more completion in my life. These people’s lives had been erased and I was in a position to do something about it.”
He and Slavova are now trying to claim back another art work, this time from the Belvedere, the Vienna gallery that featured in the Helen Mirren movie Woman in Gold, about restitution of paintings by Gustav Klimt, while another Eisner family painting has been found in a museum in Israel. Slavova is also on the trail of Impressionist paintings said to have belonged to the family. “What happened to them is a mystery,” she says, for while the Gestapo kept records of what they seized, items taken by individuals, such as Hartig, were not so carefully documented.
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Easton believes the digitising of records will help many more restitution cases. In the meantime, he is awaiting the return of the steelworks painting. “It’s a slow process. It’s up to the gallery to decide what to do. But they’ve had it long enough.”
Authors
Catherine Pepinster
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