Eduard and Johanna Arnhold

Adolph Arnhold (1808-1876) was an exemplary example of a Jew's rise to the German bourgeoisie. Such a "Jewish career" was relatively new in the first half of the 19th century, although it was no longer unusual. In his case, however, this rise was not achieved through economic success, but through education. His son Eduard, who was born on June 10, 1849 as the fourth of eight children, was to follow a very different path.

Adolph Arnhold had studied medicine in Dessau, Berlin and Halle and then settled in Dessau as a doctor for the poor in the Jewish community. As a supporter of the Jewish reform movement, he campaigned for a change in Jewish ceremonial laws, such as the circumcision of boys - which had a tragic personal background. His wife Mathilde, née Cohn, who came from one of Berlin's oldest Jewish families on her mother's side, was only 17 years old at the time of their wedding. She gave birth to two sons in quick succession. Both of these, Max and Felix, suffered life-threatening complications as a result of their circumcision, which Max barely survived and Felix did not. In his 1847 essay "Circumcision and its reform", the traumatized Adolph Arnhold, concerned about further male descendants, raised the question of whether circumcision was "an essential aspect of Judaism" at all. In 1848/49, he was elected to the Dessau municipal council as an active member of the revolutionary movement in the then Duchy of Anhalt-Dessau. The suppression of this revolutionary movement two years later not only destroyed Adolph Arnhold's political hopes, but also made the situation of the Jewish communities more difficult. The state now increasingly interfered in their affairs. Eduard Arnhold spent the first years of his life in this climate of political repression and social stagnation, which also affected his own family very specifically.

Like his father, the young Eduard also attended the Herzogliche Franzschule. However, since 1849 this was no longer under the control of the Jewish community, but had been converted into a state commercial school for pupils (but by no means for girls) of all denominations, which they attended for four years after elementary school. The lessons were tailored entirely to the requirements of future businessmen, as all subjects were taught with a focus on practical relevance. Eduard Arnhold received a solid commercial education at this institute, which provided him with the tools for his later entrepreneurship. In September 1863, Eduard Arnhold completed his school education and began an apprenticeship with the Berlin merchant Caesar Wollheim. As a business partner of the "Dessauer Wollgarnspinnerei", he had often had business dealings in Dessau and had also met the Arnhold family there. A year later, Eduard's parents also moved to Berlin with the rest of the family, bought a house on Molkenmarkt and opened a lending library for public education.

A few years before Eduard Arnhold was apprenticed to Caesar Wollheim, the latter had entered the Upper Silesian coal business. In those years in the middle of the 19th century, efficient mining and smelting works were being built in various places in the Reich, marking the breakthrough of modern heavy industry. In Berlin, the two gas works were the most important customers for his coal. Caesar Wollheim quickly noticed that his new apprentice not only had considerable ambition but also considerable commercial talent and appointed the 22-year-old Eduard Arnhold as an authorized signatory. Three years later, he even made him a partner. The company was located at Behrenstraße 59. 

What Arnhold and his foster father Wollheim also had in common was their political views. They were both supporters of the National Liberals and were willing to support charitable causes. The biographer Michael Dorrmann mentions indications that Arnhold wanted to marry into the Wollheim family. However, according to the rumor, he was turned down by the chosen one of the Wollheim daughters "because he seemed somewhat inconspicuous and 'looked like nothing'" (Dorrmann, p. 34). It is not known when Eduard Arnhold finally met Johanna Arnthal, who was ten years his junior. What is known is that she came from a Jewish family from Hamburg who, at least until Johanna's father's early death, belonged to the business middle class. Michael Dorrmann describes the relationship between the two spouses as follows: "The division of roles within their marriage was based on the established bourgeois gender order, in which the man was assigned the sphere of the working world and the woman the family sphere. However, Arnhold allowed his wife to participate in many of his interests. They were largely involved in charitable work together and Johanna Arnhold was also involved in building up the art collection, although she certainly had her own taste. [...] As with other wives of the Wilhelmine business elite, representative duties played a major role in her life."

Until their marriage, Eduard had lived in his parents' house on Molkenmarkt. After the wedding, the Arnholds first moved into an apartment at Voßstraße 28 and then, in 1886, moved into the mezzanine floor of the Wallich house, an elegant residential building at Bellevuestraße 18a in Berlin's Tiergarten district. A picture gallery for the Arnholds' growing art collection was set up on the second floor of the spacious apartment. 

It may have been a strain on the marriage that they were unable to have children. Finally, in 1887, the Arnholds decided to take in Elisabeth Murler, who had been born four years earlier in Lüdenscheid and baptized a Protestant, as a foster child. The reason for taking her in was presumably the financial hardship of her biological parents. The adoption and transfer of the family name took place in 1899. In this year, the Arnholds undertook a trip to the USA. They would later travel to Italy and France, and by ship to Greece and the Middle East. 

After the death of Caesar Wollheim in 1882, Eduard Arnhold took over the company. However, the new owner was still unable to secure the company's capital from his own resources. Wollheim had therefore instructed that his working capital should initially remain in the business after his death. He gave the junior partner ten years to get on his own feet financially. After that, the company was to be renamed "Caesar Wollheim's successor", his capital was to be withdrawn from the company and paid out to his heirs. Eduard Arnhold had no trouble fulfilling Caesar Wollheim's conditions. He soon became an important energy supplier beyond Prussia's borders and one of the greatest authorities in the field of transportation. Nothing stood in the way of his social advancement into Berlin's high society. And he did so both in a Jewish professional organization such as the "Society of Friends", an informal center for managers of Jewish companies based in Berlin, and in numerous public functions.

Eduard Arnhold proved to be an entrepreneur with vision. Over the years, he supported the expansion of the waterways as well as the Berlin tramway. From 1902, he also supported aviation. Count Zeppelin received a generous donation from Arnhold after his airship was destroyed on May 16, 1911 while leaving the Düsseldorf balloon hall. The Kaiser, who held the industrious entrepreneur Eduard Arnhold in high esteem, would have liked to pave the way for him to become Minister of Transport. However, Arnhold resolutely refused to convert to Christianity, which was unavoidable. In 1891, he was given the title of Kommerzienrat instead and ten years later he was promoted to Geheimer Kommerzienrat. In 1913, Kaiser Wilhelm II appointed him as the first Jew to the Prussian House of Lords, the second chamber of the state parliament. The shareholders of Große Berliner Straßenbahn AG and Commerzbank made Eduard Arnhold their chairman of the supervisory board. 

At the turn of the year 1898/99, Johanna and Eduard Arnhold moved into a four-storey villa with several extensions and over 1000 square meters of living space at Regentenstraße 19, today's Hitzigallee. The central components of their impressive art collection were exhibited in two rooms with skylights. At times, they made the collection open to the public, especially for young people studying art or art history. 

Between 1881 and 1922, according to biographer Michael Dorrmann, the Arnholds spent around three million Reichsmarks to acquire around 270 mostly top-class paintings in addition to sculptures from the Renaissance and Baroque periods and 70 modern sculptures. As Peter von Becker - biographer and great-grandnephew of Eduard Arnhold - writes, the spectrum ranged "from a Madonna by Andrea della Robbia from the Quattrocento to Dutch painters of the 17th century to Goya, Manchuria and the famous painters of the 18th century. Century to Goya, Manet, Monet, Cézanne, Degas or Renoir, from Böcklin, Lenbach, Klinger, Feuerbach, Menzel, Leibl, Slevogt, Thoma, Corinth to Lesser Ury or Liebermann, from whom Arnhold owns more paintings than any other collection" (Becker, Peter von "Eduard Arnhold" Leipzig 2019). The Arnhold couple generally only bought from galleries, never from the artists themselves. At the time, he was an important customer of the Jewish art dealer Paul Cassirer, whose gallery was within walking distance of his apartment in the Tiergarten district. He also bought from Fritz Gurlitt's "Hof-Kunsthandlung", which had been run by his son Wolfgang since the company founder's death. During the Nazi era, he succeeded in concealing his own Jewish origins on his father's side, participating in the art theft of those in power and doing good business with Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in particular.

The Arnholds' increasingly extensive art collection was always exhibited under the title "Arnhold couple's collection". Independently of this, Johanna Arnhold collected works by female artists. As a member of the "Verein der Künstlerinnen und Kunstfreundinnen zu Berlin", of which she was a board member from 1911 to 1916, she acquired works by Julie Wolfthorn, Käthe Kollwitz and Sella Hasse.

As early as 1885, the Arnhold couple had a villa built in the Italian neo-Renaissance style on the western shore of Lake Wannsee as a summer weekend residence, which was also furnished with art treasures. Max Liebermann, who owned a country house with a studio a few hundred meters away on the same shore from the summer of 1910, painted the house in 1911 and thus preserved it for posterity. In contrast to Liebermann's estate, the Arnholds' is no longer preserved today. 

Eduard Arnhold was considered so knowledgeable that he was the only non-specialist to be appointed to the National Gallery's acquisition commission in 1911. His biographer and great-grandnephew Peter von Becker writes: "As an art collector, his interest in modernism is fulfilled by Impressionism, which still adheres to the recognizable image of the world and man even in the sparkling play of light and color. Although the French Impressionists around Manet, Monet, Cézanne and the German 'Secession' led by Max Liebermann broke with the conservative salon in the second half of the 19th century, they were not politically revolutionary" (von Becker, p. 31). On the other hand, Expressionism, although initially appearing as a heightened celebration of color, always remained alien to the Arnholds in its emotional gesture.

In addition to his entrepreneurial activities, Eduard Arnhold also earned merits in the promotion of science and technology. In 1910, for example, he co-founded the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, now known as the Max Planck Society, and supported its work with 250,000 Reichsmarks. Prior to this, he had already financially supported the German Museum of Technology in Munich. Eduard Arnhold also paid for important purchases for the Berlin museums. In the years after the war, 70 of the 120 members of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum Association, which he co-founded and which was to become a model for numerous museum support associations throughout Europe, came from Jewish families. When the National Socialists seized power in 1933, they were excluded from the Museumsverein and their names were removed from the membership list.

At the beginning of the First World War, Eduard Arnhold was probably caught in an emotional dilemma between business acumen and art appreciation. On the one hand, he profitably supplied a large proportion of the coal for the German steel industry, whose products were necessary for the military objectives of the German Empire. On the other hand, as a major collector of French Impressionists in Germany, he may have found it difficult to recognize the "hereditary enemy" in his neighbor France. This may explain why, unlike many other German-Jewish personalities, he did not attract attention through his nationalistic jingoistic patriotism. Biographer von Becker describes him, certainly aptly, as a "cosmopolitan patriot".

The Arnholds acquired the Hirschfelde manor near Werneuchen, just outside Berlin, shortly after the turn of the century. They commissioned the architect Paul Baumgarten to rebuild the manor house and redesign the park as a sculpture park. On January 30, 1906, Johanna and Eduard Arnhold celebrated their silver wedding anniversary and took this as an opportunity to found the Johannaheim, an orphanage for young girls. It was completed in just one year as a reformed educational mix of infant home, kindergarten, girls' school, leisure center and a boarding school-like residential complex. Teaching at the school, named after Johanna Arnhold, was characterized by a progressive pedagogy based on artistic activities. The best-known pupil was Brigitte Helm, who later became an actress and played the female lead in Fritz Lang's monumental film "Metropolis". She gained her first acting experience at an internal school performance of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" on the natural stage in the Hirschfelde estate park.

After the First World War, the continued financing of the Johannaheim was in jeopardy. Arnhold's company recorded a decline in income, as the cession of parts of Upper Silesia meant that some of the coal regions went to Poland. Inflation also devalued the Arnholds' private assets. In order to secure the continued operation of the Johannaheim, Eduard Arnhold decided to sell a painting for the first and only time. For 400,000 Swiss francs, he parted with Edouard Manet's painting "Le Bon Bock", which now hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. However, this financial injection by no means guaranteed the long-term existence of the Johannaheim, at least not at this location. After the death of the two founders, it had to leave Werneuchen in 1929 and move to smaller buildings in Potsdam.

In his function as a senator of the Academy of Arts, Eduard Arnhold met a German Rome Prize winner in a poor, unhealthy dwelling during a stay in Rome. Eduard Arnhold, who saw himself not only as a friend of art but also of artists, considered this unworthy. Although the Prussian Academy of Arts had been awarding the Rome Prize since 1828, what had been missing until then was a building that was both representative and inspiring. Eduard Arnhold envisioned creating such a building based on the model of the French Academy Villa Medici, founded in 1666. In the summer of 1910, he therefore acquired a 27,000 square meter park owned by Prince Massimo near Porta Pia and commissioned the architect Maximilian Zürcher to build an artists' house with guest apartments, studios, a nude painting room and common rooms. The Swiss architect, who had already converted historic country houses into artists' residences in Florence, was not only an architect but also a painter - a combination that proved to be extremely advantageous. Within three years, Zürcher created a villa as the main house that was architecturally reminiscent of the late 16th century. The façade was inspired by the Villa Giulia, the former papal summer residence. The studios are lined up on the park side. Eduard Arnhold wanted a uniform design for the studios because none of the artists should feel disadvantaged. At the same time, their highly functional terraced house design was an early realization of the "social architecture" discussed at the time. 

In 1913, the villa was able to accept its first Rome Prize winners. The applicants were selected by the Academy of Arts in Berlin and the prizewinners were appointed by the Prussian Ministry of Culture. The fellows of this first year at the Villa Massimo were Gustav Klimt, Georg Kolbe, Käthe Kollwitz, Henry van de Velde and Max Beckmann. With the outbreak of the First World War, the newly opened academy had to close its doors again. It was confiscated by the Italian state in 1915 and converted into a home for war invalids and a prosthesis factory. Eduard and Johanna Arnhold did not live to see the reopening of Villa Massimo in its original purpose in 1929. The National Socialist takeover four years later intensified the pressure on the institution from the Reich Chamber of Culture. For a few years, it was still possible to defend a certain degree of freedom, but the influence of the National Socialists increased. On the occasion of Hitler's visit to Rome in 1938, Eduard Arnhold's plaque was removed from the main building and the memory of the founder was erased.

The Arnholds had purchased the Villa Bellagio in Fiesole near Florence, which had previously been occupied by their friend, the Swiss painter and sculptor Arnold Böcklin. The Arnhold family now regularly spent their spring vacations here. Another vacation home was the Dürnbachhof in Neuhaus am Schliersee in Bavaria. 

On August 10, 1925, Eduard Arnhold noted in his last diary entry that it was "Cloudless! Hot!". In the morning, he and Johanna had taken a one-hour drive "via Miesbach to Fischbach and back". According to the diary, it was a "meatless day". Shortly before the vegetarian dinner, Eduard Arnhold went for a walk and did not return. About ten minutes' walk from Dürnbachhof, he sat down on the meadow next to his favorite bench. There was a particularly beautiful view of the Wendelstein from here. Then Eduard Arnhold fell asleep - forever. His body was transferred to Berlin and buried in the Wannsee II cemetery (grave location: Li AT FW-38). His wife Johanna survived him by almost four years. After her death on February 10, 1929, she was buried at his side. A sculpture by the German-Russian sculptor Theodor Georgii depicting a farewell scene stands in front of the grave wall with the inscription plaques. By decision of the Berlin Senate, Eduard Arnhold's final resting place has been an honorary grave of the state of Berlin since 1992.

In their will, Eduard and Johanna Arnhold had stipulated that the art collection in Regentenstraße should remain accessible to the public for at least ten years after their death. However, their house was located in the area that Hitler's architect Albert Speer had redesigned for the planned "World Capital Germania". In 1939, the villa was destroyed, as was the entire Regentenstraße and almost the entire old Tiergarten district. The Arnholds' collection was divided up among the heirs of their adopted daughter Elisabeth, who came from a non-Jewish family. Due to hardship and war, much of it was sold and dispersed, even after 1945. Other parts burned as a result of the bombing of the capital or were lost when Russian troops marched in.

In a drawer of Eduard Arnhold's desk, his widow had found a personal note with thoughts on the merchant's profession. Johanna Arnhold published these notes in 1928 in a privately printed "Gedenkbuch Eduard Arnhold". In it, Arnhold quotes the end of Schiller's poem "The Merchant": "To you, ye gods, belongs the merchant. To seek goods / He goes, but to his ship the good attaches itself."