The creators of these impressive collections were three wealthy Jewish entrepreneurs: Carl Sachs, Max Silberberg, and Leo Lewin. Later, the lawyer Ismar Littmann, also Jewish, whose interests focused on expressionist art, joined them. When Scheffler wrote the article about collectors from Breslau, he did not mention their Jewish origin; in 1923, it did not yet have political significance. Ten years later, when the Nazis came to power, this issue proved crucial, determining the tragic fate of both the collectors themselves and the art works they had gathered. Those who did not make a quick decision to emigrate perished, and their accumulated art collections were plundered. The extermination of Breslau’s Jews and the post-war change of borders meant that the collectors disappeared from the pages of the city’s history for many years. Although we walk every day on the streets they once traversed and visit the same places, we are unaware of who created them, gave them meaning, and adorned them. Breslau art collectors often visited the Silesian Museum of Fine Arts on Museumsplatz (nowadays Muzealny Square) and the library located there at the time. The building of this museum was demolished, but thanks to the preserved library collections, we can at least partially reconstruct galleries of outstanding works of art created by Jewish collectors in Breslau.
The topic of collections gathered by Jews in Breslau was addressed more broadly only in the last decade of the 20th century when the heirs of collectors, based on the Washington Declaration of 1998, began to claim their lost property. Researchers assisting families in finding works of art, often relying on previously unknown documentation provided by them, presented their discoveries in numerous articles. Publications by Anja Heuss, Hans-Joachim Hinze, and Monika Tatzkow allowed an assessment of the scale and level of the phenomenon of collecting outstanding works of art by Breslau Jews. The results of the research were surprising to many people interested in the city’s history: it turned out that in the twenties, Breslau could admire numerous canvases by well-known painters.
Research conducted over the past 25 years has brought to light many collections and their creators. Important for the reconstruction of collections were auction catalogs and inventories, which in several cases allowed a satisfying reconstruction of the collection, especially if it contained well-known works of art. For example, Max Silberberg’s collection, from which works were returned as one of the first under the Washington Convention, is well-researched. Other collections are known only fragmentarily, such as the gallery of paintings by Gustava and Alois Landerer. Nevertheless, we have chosen to present it to you due to the unique portrait of the collector. We have also selected the collection of Hugo Kolker, which is still insufficiently developed, to remind art connoisseurs of it.
Disparities in the illustrated objects reflect the different degrees of exploration of individual collections. The selection of presented objects was also dictated by the desire to present the diversity of Breslau collections and phenomena important for modern art, as well as topics related to the collector’s market, the confiscation of collections by National Socialists, and the restitution of works of art.
Before the Second World War, the Jewish community in Breslau was the third largest in Germany (after Berlin and Frankfurt). It included many collectors who were erased from the memory of descendants by Nazi persecutions, war, and post-war border changes. The above stories are just a fragment of the cultural landscape of the former Wrocław, in which a large group of Jewish intellectuals and entrepreneurs was present in the city’s public life. Many figures are still waiting to save their collections from oblivion and reconstruct them with their effort.
