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Max Silberberg (27 February 1878, in Neuruppin – after 1942, in Ghetto Theresienstadt or Auschwitz concentration camp) was a major cultural figure in Breslau, a German Jewish entrepreneur, art collector and patron who was robbed and murdered by the Nazis. His art collection, among the finest of its era, has been the object of numerous restitution claims.
In 1920 Max Silberberg moved with his family to Breslau, where they lived in a large villa at Landsberger Straße 1–3 (today ul. Kutnowska). The dining room, including the furniture and the carpet, was designed by architect August Endell in 1923 in the Art Deco style and decorated with an outstanding collection of paintings, mostly German and French works from the 19th and 20th centuries. Silberberg also had an extensive art library, featuring mainly French-language literature on modern art.
Silberberg was involved in the cultural life of the city and organized lectures in his house, on subjects such as on the history of Judaism, to which he invited outsiders. He was one of the co-founders of the city's Jewish Museum Association, as its 1st chairman since March 1928. Together with the director of the Breslau Castle Museum, Erwin Hinze, Silberberg was one of the organizers of the exhibition Judaism in the history of Silesia in 1929. In addition, he supported the Jewish Museum as a patron and donated a silver Torah shield from the 18th century and a silver Torah pointer. He was also a member of the board of trustees of the Silesian Museum of Fine Arts and helped found the Society of Friends of Art, which supported the museum as a funding institution. He also served as a member of the Society's board.
In 1932, Silberberg sold 19 artworks at the Georges Petit house in Paris. After the auction he still owned more than 200 artworks, including "works by Courbet, Delacroix, Manet, Pissarro, and Sisley and remained an avide collector, even continuing to purchase new works".
When the Nazis came to power on 30 January 1933, Silberberg's position changed overnight. In Breslau (later called Wroclaw) Nazi persecution of Jews was immediate and devastating. Silberberg, like another famous Jewish Breslau art collector, Ismar Littmann, immediately lost all of his public offices and was harassed and robbed. In 1935 SS-Sturmbannführer Ernst Müller took Silberberg's villa for the SS security service, forcing the sale at a low price. Silberberg moved with his family into a small rented apartment and was forced to part with the majority of his art collection, which was auctioned in several "Jew auctions" at the Graupe auction house in Berlin. In addition to paintings and drawings by Menzel, Degas, Cézanne and others, and sculptures by Rodin, his extensive library was also sold off.
During the Kristallnacht, his son Alfred Silberberg was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp and imprisoned for eight weeks. Released on the condition that he leave Germany immediately, Alfred and his wife Gerta fled to Great Britain.
Silberberg's Weissenberg company was “Aryanization” and transferred to industrialist Carl Wilhelm from Breslau, and Silberberg's wealth plundered by special taxes designed by Nazis to rob Jews of their assets. Forced to sell some of the few works of art in his possession to the Silesian Museum of Fine Arts, Silberberg did not receive the sales proceeds, which went to the "Aryanized" company Weißenberg. The few artworks that remained in his possession until 1940, were "Aryanized" by the Museum of Fine Arts in Breslau.
At the end of 1941, his son Alfred, living in exile in London, received the last sign of life from his parents. Max and Johanna Silberberg were deported by the Nazis from Grüssau monastery assembly camp, on 3 May 1942 - presumably to the Theresienstadt ghetto. There are no records of the exact day or place of death. Various historians assume that Silberberg and his wife were murdered in Auschwitz. After the Second World War, Alfred Silberberg had his parents declared dead on 8 May 1945.
Art historians estimate Silberberg's art collection at around 130 to 250 paintings, drawings and sculptures, one of the most important art collections in the German Empire, with a focus on German and French art from the 19th and early 20th centuries. including works such as Portrait of a Man with Glasses by Wilhelm Leibl, Wilhelm Trübner's paintings T he Way to the Church in Neuburg near Heidelberg and Lady with White Stockings, and Self-portrait with a yellow hat, by Kleinenberg from 1876 and The Labung from 1880 by Hans von Marées. Silberman donated Still Life with a Bundle of Leeks, Apples and Cheese dome by Carl Schuch to the museum in Breslau, which is now in the National Museum in Warsaw. The collection also included German Impressionism such as In the Kitchen and Market in Haarlem by Max Liebermann or Flieder im Glaskrug by Lovis Corinth as well as drawings by Adolph Menzel, Hans Purrmann and Otto Müller and sculptures by his contemporary Georg Kolbe. Silberman also owned drawings by Gustav Klimt and Paul Klee and Stockhornkette mit Thunersee by Ferdinand Hodler.
Selbstbildnis mit gelbem Hut
Nationalgalerie Berlin
Max Liebermann - In der Küche.jpg|Max Liebermann:
In der Küche
Privatsammlung
Lovis Corinth - Flieder im Glaskrug.jpg|Lovis Corinth:
Flieder im Glaskrug
Privatsammlung
Ferdinand Hodler - Stockhornkette mit Thunersee.jpg|Ferdinand Hodler:
Stockhornkette mit Thunersee
Privatsammlung
Impressionist works included Pertuiset as a lion hunter (Museu de Arte de São Paulo) and Young Woman in Oriental Costume (Foundation EG Bührle Collection) by Édouard Manet and The Reading (Louvre), Little Girl with Hoops (National Gallery of Art) as well the privately owned pictures Laughing Girl, Gondola, Venice and Bouquet of Roses by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The collector owned the paintings Boats on the Seine (private collection) and Snow in the Setting Sun (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen) by Claude Monet. Other Impressionist works in this collection were The Seine at Saint-Mammès (private collection) by Alfred Sisley, Boulevard Montmartre, Spring 1897 (Israel Museum) and Path to Pontoise (Musée d'Orsay) by Camille Pissarro and Landscape with Chimneys (Art Institute of Chicago), La sortie du bain (Musée d'Orsay) and Ballet Dancers (private collection) by Edgar Degas.
Late Impressionist works in Silberberg's collection included the paintings Still Life with Apples and Napkin (Musée de l'Orangerie), Jas de Bouffan (private property) and Landscape in the Aix Area (Carnegie Museum of Art), as well as the drawing of a male's back view Nude (Hermitage Museum) by Paul Cézanne. There was also Die Brücke von Trinquetaille, (private property) by Vincent van Gogh, of whom Silberberg also owned the drawing L’Olivette, works by Paul Signac as well as the cubist works Strand in Dieppe (Moderna Museet) and Still Life with Jug by Georges Braque, and works by Georges Seurat, Alexej von Jawlensky and Paul Klee.
He acquired the wooden sculpture Die Mourning by Ernst Barlach from the actress Tilla Durieux, featured at the entrance of the Silberberg house. Other works, mostly small bronzes, came from artists such as August Gaul, Auguste Rodin, Aristide Maillol, Constantin Meunier, Renée Sintenis and Henri Matisse.
Gondola, Venise
Privatsammlung
Alfred-Sisley - La Seine à Saint-Mammès.jpg|Alfred-Sisley:
La Seine à Saint-Mammès
Privatsammlung
Gustav-Courbet-Grand-Pont.jpg|Gustave Courbet:
Le Grande Pont
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven
Young Woman in Oriental Garb (1871) - Edouard Manet (Kunsthaus Zürich).jpg|Édouard Manet:
Junge Frau im orientalischen Kostüm
Stiftung Sammlung E. G. Bührle, Zürich
Breslau had become a Polish city and the files that could have documented the systematic expropriation of Silberberg's property were either destroyed or inaccessible to the heirs. While the Polish authorities refused to compensate former German property - for example, land - the German authorities did not see themselves as responsible. The former art possessions were scattered around the world through auctions and resales and their whereabouts were in most cases unknown. In addition, although allied law had generally recognized that “loss of property through sale” was also to be viewed as robbery, since the sale took place under the pressure of persecution, national regulations made it difficult or impossible to demand return. From the end of the 1960s, most of the claims were barred.
It was not until the Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Assets, held in Washington, D.C., United States, on 3 December 1998, that there was progress. After the death of Silberberg's son in 1984, the collector's daughter-in-law, Gerta Silberberg, managed to claim restitution for some works of art after 1998. Most of the collection is still considered lost.
Artworks from the Silberberg collection have also been located in the Museum Georg Schäfer in Schweinfurt, including Market in Haarlem by Max Liebermann and Head of a Bavarian Girl with Inntaler Hat by Wilhelm Leibl. In 2020, a researcher hired by the museum to research the provenance of 1000 artworks, quit, telling the New York Times that she had found paintings looted from Jews, but that "no one seemed to have any plans to return them to the heirs of the original Jewish owners".
In 2014, Germany's Museum Wiesbaden attempted to draw attention to the problem of looted art by hanging Hans von Marees’ Die Labung facing the wall because it had been obtained due to a forced sale from the Silberberg collection under the Nazis.
The painting Sewing School in the Amsterdam Orphanage by Max Liebermann, was restituted to the Silberberg family by the Bündner Kunstmuseum.
Yale University Art Gallery received a claim for a Courbet which was sold at a forced auction at Paul Graupe.
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