Anna Caspari

Anna Caspari was born on May 16, 1900 in Wrocław as the daughter of the wealthy merchant Hugo Naphtali and Olga Naphtali, née Bielski. She grew up in Wrocław at Kleinburgstraße 7 (today: Wrocław, ulica Januszowicka 7) under the name Aniela Naphtali. Her parents' house was part of the Wrocław art and culture scene. The Naphtali couple owned an important art collection with works of Realism and Impressionism by Gustave Courbet, Anselm Feuerbach, Wilhelm Leibl, Camille Pissarro, Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt. The profile of the art collection largely coincided with the later repertoire of the Caspari Gallery.

The father was a member of the Silesian Society for Patriotic Culture. This was one of the most important educational and research institutes in Silesia, which cultivated a worldwide exchange of knowledge and had an extensive scientific library.

Aniela came from a Jewish family, but was brought up secularly. Until her marriage in Munich, she described herself as non-denominational. She attended secondary school in Breslau. She then began studying art history, for which she moved to Munich at the beginning of 1920.

After finishing secondary school in Breslau, Aniela moved to Munich in 1920. There she studied art history, philosophy and literature at the Ludwig Maximilian University for seven semesters under the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, among others. Possibly inspired by her parents' art collection in Breslau, she made contact with the Caspari Gallery. It is not known exactly when she met the art dealer Georg Caspari (1878-1930). He had moved from Berlin to the Bavarian capital in 1912. He had previously been co-owner of the Fritz Gurlitt Gallery in Berlin. In Munich, he opened an art gallery "in the most distinguished setting" in 1913 in Palais Eichthal at Brienner Straße 52 opposite Café Luitpold. 

The building was designed by Leo von Klenze in 1818 on behalf of Simon Freiherr von Eichthal and built after 1820. Georg Caspari had the gallery rooms on the first floor furnished according to the ideas of architect Dr. Paul Wenz, while the painter Angelo Graf von Courten designed the decorations and furnishings. 

Caspari offered "modern and old paintings, antiques and graphic art". There were large exhibition rooms on the first floor and eight smaller rooms on the upper floor, including a library. As Ilse Macek researched, Caspari presented old masters such as Johannes Rottenhammer and Franz Anton Maulbertsch, 19th century works by Anselm Feuerbach, Arnold Böcklin, Wilhelm Leibl, Hans Thoma, Max Liebermann, Wilhelm Trübner, Max Slevogt, Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Vincent van Gogh, as well as contemporary art. The range extended from locals such as Maria Caspar-Filser and Oskar Coester to international greats such as Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Pablo Picasso. In addition to exhibitions, the art shop also regularly offered poetry readings, e.g. by Franz Werfel, Frank Wedekind and the Mann brothers. Thomas Mann read from "The Magic Mountain" here in 1914. In the same year, Hugo Ball wrote "Tomorrow the sun will be loaded onto a big-wheeled cart / And driven to the Caspari art dealership".

In March 1922, Anna Naphtali and Georg Caspari, for whom it was his second marriage, got married. He had converted from Judaism to Protestantism many years earlier. Anna also became Protestant at the wedding, and in 1923 she received Bavarian and thus German citizenship. Their two sons Paul and Ernst, born in 1922 and 1926, were baptized and brought up as Protestants. The family lived in their gallery building in the Eichthal-Palais. Her studies enabled Anna to increasingly support the work in the gallery, if not to run it independently. She accompanied her husband on most business trips and made contact with the clientele, which she continued to cultivate after her husband's death. 

Georg Caspari died on June 6, 1930 at the age of 52 in a car accident near Mainz. The couple were on their way to an art fair in Belgium; Anna herself was uninjured. Widowed at the age of 30, the art dealer now had to look after the children alone. She decided to take over her husband's gallery in Briennerstrasse. In the early years of the Nazi dictatorship, Galerie Caspari does not appear to have been affected by boycotts or acts of violence. At this time, the gallery was located on the second floor of the Eichthal-Palais, no longer directly accessible from the street. Anna Caspari's good reputation as an expert art dealer survived the economic difficulties of the Great Depression and the political caesura of 1933 for the time being.

In 1934, Anna Caspari decided to remove her sons from the Nazis' sphere of influence and send them to a boarding school near London. This was a far-sighted decision, as the pogrom-like attacks on Jewish-owned businesses in Munich intensified in the spring of 1935. Anna Caspari gave up her business premises in Brienner Strasse in April 1935 and moved into two rooms in the Hotel Continental. Only two basement rooms of her former gallery served as storage until 1939.

Attempts by the authorities to close her art dealership were averted for some time by Anna Caspari. She worked as an intermediary and appraiser for art dealers of the Nazi state such as Karl Haberstock and Julius Böhler. In 1936, she undertook a business trip to Paris and London, for which she was granted a passport. After she was banned from working as an art dealer in September 1936, she applied for a special permit, which she received because her foreign contacts were expected to generate foreign currency. (Peters 2016, p. 41 f) 

Son Paul was finally able to emigrate to England in March 1938 at the age of 16. The 13-year-old Ernst also emigrated there. From the end of 1938, Anna Caspari also tried to emigrate to England to join her sons. However, her applications were all rejected. She was arrested from December 12 to 13, 1938 on "suspicion of a foreign currency offense".

The gallery was deregistered at the beginning of 1939. A few days later, the Gestapo confiscated Anna Caspari's property at the Hotel Continental and the warehouse in Briennerstraße, including a portrait by Lovis Corinth. There were 22 paintings, 140 books and an unknown number of prints. The holdings were transferred to the Bavarian National Museum, the State Graphic Collections and the Bavarian State Library, where they were successively incorporated into their own collections. All three institutions made their own staff available as experts for the confiscation. The entire book collection was "donated" to the Bavarian State Library. 

In February of that year, Galerie Caspari was deleted from the commercial register. Today, the Haus der Bayrischen Wirtschaft stands on the site of the former "Contis", Anna Caspari's last place of business.

In March 1939, Anna Caspari had to hand in her silverware and jewelry to the municipal loan office. She was able to place some of them with acquaintances and thus save them from being seized, as it turned out after her death. In the same month, Anna Caspari moved from her apartment in the Hotel Continental in Ottostrasse to a cheaper apartment at Muffatstrasse 11 in Schwabing, where she lived on the second floor. In this "Jewish house", the former owners Berta and Max Schwager were forced to live in cramped conditions together with many of their fellow Jews until all the residents were deported in November 1941. This was the last stop for Anna Caspari, who spent two and a half years here before taking the train from Milbertshofen station to her death.

The chances of emigrating to England to join her sons or to Switzerland had worsened drastically with the outbreak of war on September 1, 1939 and applications to leave the country were rejected. Anna Caspari was completely impoverished and was forced to work for the Oldenbourg company, a book and magazine publisher. 

On November 20, 1941, the Munich Gestapo began deporting the Jews still living in Munich to the occupied territories in the East. It was the first mass deportation from Munich. For the first transport, the Gestapo forced the Jewish Community of Munich to compile a list of 1,000 people. That was over a quarter of those still remaining in the city. Anna Caspari was also one of the victims on the list.

It cannot be proven whether Anna Caspari tried to escape deportation by committing suicide. After 1945, two former employees of Galerie Caspari stated that Anna Caspari was rumored to have poisoned herself on the train journey. In the early hours of November 20, 1941, the deportees had to walk to Milbertshofen station, where they were put on a special train. The train, which was far too small, had no seats for most of the almost 1,000 people. The journey to Kaunas took three days. Together with people from two other deportation trains from Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, they were locked in the much too small cells of Fort IX, where they had to wait for another two days.

On November 25, 1941, the people deported from Munich, Berlin and Frankfurt am Main were shot in the trenches of Fort IX by Einsatzkommando 3 of Einsatzgruppe A under the command of SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger. Anna's widowed mother Olga Naphtali was deported from Berlin to the Theresienstadt ghetto on September 2, 1942, where she died on March 18, 1943. The history of Anna Caspari's art dealership and the "restitution proceedings" of Paul and Ernst Caspari were described in detail in Sebastian Peters' master's thesis at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2016. In November 1950, a total of 36 paintings were awarded to Anna Caspari's heirs and successively restituted.

More problematic was the compensation of the confiscated books and prints, which were deemed to have been destroyed. A compensation payment of 10,000 marks made in 1954 was intended to settle all the claims of Anna Caspari's heirs. The looting of Anna Caspari only became topical again as a result of the Washington Declaration in 1998. During the processing of the Bavarian State Library's holdings suspected of being looted, four books were discovered which could be attributed to the art dealer on the basis of a surviving bookplate. They were returned to the 90-year-old Paul Caspari in London almost 70 years after the end of the war, on November 28, 2014.

Anna Caspari's son Paul Caspari died on March 12, 2016 in Stanmore, Middlesex. Son Ernst (Ernest) was living in Newham, Gloucestershire in 2016. Both sons have families.