Hermine Feist

Hermine Wollheim was born in Berlin in December 1855. At this time, her father Caesar Wollheim entered the Upper Silesian coal business, which he ran very successfully. His naturalization was recorded on 11 October 1840 in the Jewish citizenship registers, the list of Jewish community members who were naturalized in Berlin between 1808 and 1851. Before he became a "coal baron", as the Berliners called him, he had successfully traded in textiles, iron, scrap metal and, less successfully, wheat. Caesar Wollheim's diverse entrepreneurial activities also included the insurance business. From 1864 to 1866, he was general agent and later chief representative of the Frankfurt life insurance branch in Prussia. Hermine Wollheim thus grew up in an entrepreneurial family that had achieved some prosperity in the elegant Bellevuestraße in Berlin's Tiergarten district. Nothing is known about her school education. Throughout her life, Hermine Wollheim was regarded by contemporaries as an "eccentric original" (Klaus Mann: "Der Wendepunkt"), which is said to have set her apart from her sisters Martha and Else. One brother was called David Emil and died in infancy. The boy's first name suggested a Jewish-German parental home, while the daughters' names suggested a German nationalist outlook. This combination was not uncommon in Prussian Jewry at a time when the social equality of the Jewish population in the North German Confederation was soon achieved, namely in 1870. Caesar Wollheim's political views ultimately made him a supporter of the National Liberals. 

Hermine Wollheim married the merchant Otto Feist (1847-1912), the son of a tradesman in Frankfurt am Main. This marriage produced three sons: Paul, who died suddenly at the age of four, Ernst, who died in 1939 shortly after being released from Oranienburg concentration camp, and Hans, who survived the Shoah.

Hermine Feist and her husband had inherited a villa from her father, which belonged to the Alsen Colony on the Großer Wannsee. The colony had been founded by the banker Wilhelm Conrad in 1863. Magnificent villas were built here over the next few decades, set in parks. The Feist couple's property was located at Bergstrasse 5 and was redesigned from 1908 by the architect Alfred Breslauer according to Hermine Feist's ideas so that it could serve not only as a summer residence but also as a museum display for the porcelain collection. Hermine Feist therefore preferred furniture in the rococo style, which she believed was ideally suited to doing this effectively. The porcelains were literally staged by "arranging them systematically and decoratively in numerous display cabinets set into the wall with mirrored back panels" (Rother, p. 36).

In addition to tableware, Hermine Feist also collected figurative porcelain and vases. And she did so on a large scale from Meissen porcelain, which was Germany's only porcelain manufactory for a long time in the 18th century. Another German porcelain manufactory was the "Kurfürstlich Mainzische Porzellanmanufaktur" (today Höchster Porzellanmanufaktur), whose company logo is the Mainz wheel. Hermine Feist also had some pieces from their product range in her collection. The collection also included exhibits from the porcelain manufactory in Frankenthal in the Electoral Palatinate and the Nymphenburg porcelain manufactory founded in 1747. Hermine Feist repeatedly donated porcelain to the Berlin Museum of Decorative Arts. In 1908 she donated a small jug from Meissen, in 1910 a jug from the Nymphenburg manufactory, somewhat later a painted figure of a muse from the same production site, and in 1914 a Viennese cup. In 1922, Wilhelm von Bode, Director General of the Berlin museums, stated: "No museum has a collection of porcelain groups and figurines as important and rich as that which Mrs. Hermine Feist has brought together and tastefully exhibited in her villa in Wannsee" (quoted from Rother, p. 35).

Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, in the spring of 1914, Hermine Feist, who had been widowed for two years, moved into a luxurious city apartment with her sons at Bellevuestraße 15, not far from her parents' house. After her father's death in 1882, his business partner Eduard Arnhold was given a period of ten years in his will to earn the Wollheim heiresses' share of the business and eventually pay it out to them. Hermine Feist thus had sufficient financial resources at her disposal to further expand her diverse porcelain collection. In addition, there were funds from the inheritance of her late husband, who came from a German sparkling wine dynasty. Hermine Feist also collected old lace and jewelry and she also owned a respectable collection of paintings, which she had built up during her years of marriage to Otto Feist. Although these were bequeathed to her two sons Hans and Ernst in her will, they remained under her mother's control. The collection included works by Joshua Reynolds, Jean-Baptiste Francois Pater, a pupil of the Rococo painter Antoine Watteau, Reinhold Lepsius, a portrait painter and representative of German Impressionism, Joseph Highmore, an English portrait and history painter, Franz von Lenbach, who made a name for himself with portraits of prominent personalities, and Francisco de Goya. Her financial independence suffered severe damage, as the war bonds she had once subscribed to became worthless after the First World War, but the onset of inflation also led to a considerable loss in the value of her private assets. At the beginning of the 1920s, she was forced to take out overdraft facilities with Dresdner Bank on the security of her collections. As Hermine Feist was unable to repay these, she was considered to be in default from 1933 at the latest.

At the end of her life, Hermine Feist had "considerable debts and an art collection largely assigned as collateral to various creditors" and so "it was up to her lenders and her heirs to clear up the estate, primarily by selling art" (Rother, p. 33). This disastrous financial situation was not only due to the war bonds that had become worthless, the consequences of inflation and Hermine Feist's persistently expensive lifestyle. Rather, a large part of the debt had accumulated through interest charges. In any case, her account "showed a minus of around 1.1 million Reichsmark; in addition, her two sons Hans and Ernst Feist-Wollheim owed around 400,000 Reichsmark to the Dresdner Bank" (ibid.). In addition to the art collection, Hermine Feist, and after her death her sons as heirs to the estate, had valuable house inventory, real estate and shares, but not enough cash. Between January 1930 and July 1932, large parts of the collection were pledged to the bank as collateral due to financial claims. In quantitative terms, this involved 700 objects of various types. This prepared the dissolution of a collection that had once made its owner famous as a passionate expert far beyond Germany's borders. In a study, the art historian Sven Kuhrau paid tribute to Otto Feist's collecting, who "had acquired Italian furniture and small bronzes, majolica and stonework in a manner typical of Berlin, as well as Hermine Feist's preference for the 18th century and thus for paintings and furniture of French provenance as well as porcelain" (Kuhrau, p. 90). Hermine Feist died on November 17, 1933 and was buried in the New Cemetery in Berlin-Wannsee.

From May 20 to 24, 1941, large parts of Feist's collection were auctioned off in the prestigious rooms of the Fischer Gallery in Lucerne. After Hermine Feist's death, the porcelain collection remained at Wannsee, even after the villa and the works of art had already been transferred by way of security to Dresdner Bank and several private creditors. In August 1933, Dresdner Bank succeeded in including all of Hermine Feist's available porcelain in the security transfer agreement. In the meantime, the National Socialists were in power and Dresdner Bank joined the incipient policy of persecution, if only because of the majority shareholding of the Nazi government. In March 1934, Ernst Zimmermann, the former director of the Dresden Porcelain Collection, was commissioned to assess the total value of the porcelain. But only "after the heirs had submitted a binding offer to Dresdner Bank on August 10, 1935 for the sale of the works of art and the State of Prussia was then able to acquire the majority of the former Feist porcelain collection through Dresdner Bank was the presentation in the Villa Feist dissolved" (Rother, p. 36). The Dresdner Bank now shamelessly exploited the Feist family's twofold predicament - as debtors and as Jewish victims of persecution. Art objects were removed from the collection at will in order to offset them against the debt far below their estimated value. The individual parts of the collection, insofar as they were not sold directly by Dresdner Bank to museums such as the Berlin Museum of Decorative Arts, turned up at various auction houses in Germany and abroad in the following years.

First, parts of the collection were auctioned off on June 22 and 23, 1939 at the Berlin auction house of Hans W. Lange, who had "taken over" the business of the Jewish antiques dealer Paul Graupe and continued to run it under his own name from October 1937. In May 1941, however, large parts of Feist's collection were auctioned off by Theodor Fischer in Lucerne. After the end of Nazi rule, Hermine Feist's heirs filed a claim for restitution, as the value of the collections and the villa on Wannsee would have far exceeded the sum of the debts at the time. On December 8, 1959, a settlement was reached with the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which had been established shortly before, which stated that a small part of the former art collection would be restituted, but that the far greater part would be compensated financially. However, this settlement only covered those objects from the now scattered collection that had become Prussian cultural property. Numerous objects, including those from the Berlin Museum of Decorative Arts, are now among the war-related losses. They have been published in the Lost Art Database as tracing reports. In 2013, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture did not meet the restitution claim of the Feist heirs for a bronze bust of Hercules from the 16th century because a connection with Nazi persecution was not recognized, as the sale took place due to the debts incurred.