NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

Gerhard Leo with his father Wilhelm Leo in front of the bookshop LIFA (Librairie Française Allemande) located at Rue Meslay, in Paris around 1934.

Certificate of good performance of the student Léo Gérard from his school in November 1934.

A YOUTH IN EXILE

A SEARCH FOR DOCUMENTS IN THE GERHARD LEO ARCHIVE

Carsten Wurm

The itinerary that the later journalist Gerhard Leo took during his exile has been familiar since the publication of his autobiography – Frühzug nach Toulouse (“Early train to Toulouse”) (1988; trans. French 1989) – and the books on family history by his grandson Maxim Leo – Red Love: The Story of an East German Family (2009) and Wo wir zu Hause sind (“Where we are at home”) (2019). It led from the small Brandenburg town of Rheinsberg to Paris and Toulouse and there into the ranks of the French Resistance. Now that the Gerhard Leo Archive has been established, it is possible to document the various milestones. The few but informative papers and photos add important facets to the overall picture of exile in France.

First, there is a school report for the pupil Léo Gérard – as spelt in French – testifying to his fine achievements in November 1934. Gerhard Leo was 11 years old and had only been attending the French school for a little over a year. He had come to Paris with his parents in September 1933 without knowing a word of French. At first, he had even rejected the new language because he wanted to return to Rheinsberg, to the beautiful house with its garden by the lake and to his friends. Now he had made so much progress that he was praised for it. Later, as a journalist, Gerhard Leo was equally proficient in French as in German.

The family fled to France because the father Wilhelm Leo, a well-known lawyer from an assimilated Jewish family, had made a name for himself as an opponent of National Socialism. In 1927, for example, he had won a legal case against Joseph Goebbels. The then Gauleiter of Berlin claimed to have been tortured by French military personnel during the occupation of the Rhineland in 1920 and had suffered a walking disability. Leo submitted to the court a certified copy of Goebbels’ military papers attesting to his clubfoot-related exemption from service in the First World War. The family assumed that

Leo was deported for this reason to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1933 after the Reichstag fire. According to more recent research, Leo’s local political activism against the National Socialists was probably more compelling.

With no prospect of employment in the French judiciary, Wilhelm Leo opened a bookshop in Paris, Rue Meslay, in 1934. A photo in the Gerhard Leo Archive shows the proud bookseller and his son, Gerhard, standing outside the shop. Books are laid out and newspapers hung up in three windows and in the door frame. The large shop sign reveals that a stationer and a lending library were also attached to the bookshop by the name of LIFA (Librairie Française Allemande). The furnishings and upkeep were financed by one of Wilhelm Leo’s cousins, who was the general manager of the Perrier mineral water company, which is still well-known today. The family of five initially lived in the bookshop, in a separate room and in the hallway, until the cousin visited their home and made it possible for them to rent a flat in addition. Wilhelm Leo proved to be quite unsuited to mercantile life. His wife, Frieda, had her difficulties with him, for he would have preferred to keep the books. Nevertheless, the bookshop became an important address for German-speaking exiles because Leo volunteered as legal counsel for Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller (Association of German writers) and made his shop available for meetings and events. The children – Gerhard and his two older sisters Ilse and Edith – remembered visits from Heinrich Mann and Anna Seghers as well as Egon Erwin Kisch, who astonished them with magic tricks and taught them and other émigré children French history.

This anti-fascist activity did little to help the Leo family regarding the French authorities. After the outbreak of war, political refugees from Germany were also considered “enemy aliens”. The public prosecutor’s office of the Département de la Seine seized the bookshop by official order on 29 November 1939. The family was split up and temporarily interned, except for the son, who was not yet of age, and the mother who looked after him. Gerhard’s father and older sister, who had fled to the still unoccupied south of France, later found shelter in a church institution. His mother and younger sister, on the

Confiscation of Wilhelm Leo's bookstore, 1939. other hand, were forced by the occupying forces in Paris to return to Germany, where they were taken in by their grandmother in Hamburg. Gerhard Leo also fled south and found refuge in a home for Jewish children. A residence permit for the “non-working” refugee dated 6 February 1941 certifies Leo Gérard as living in Limoges, Château de Montintin, Château-Chervix commune. The Jewish home run by the relief organisation the Œuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE) was located there, where he attended school and began an apprenticeship as a cobbler. He initially escaped a raid on the children’s home, but was then arrested for deportation to Germany. However, an extract from Berlin-Charlottenburg’s Protestant baptismal register of 17 February 1942, sent by his mother

Residence permit for the “nonworking” refugee Leo Gérard, 1941.

as a precautionary measure, helped him to persuade the French official that he was not Jewish. His father, Wilhelm, was deemed Jewish under the Nuremberg Laws, but had been baptised as a child.

In the meantime, his sister Ilse had a partner, an Austrian doctor, who was in contact with the Communist Resistance at the age of 19, Gerhard Leo sought to join the Travail allemand organisation, which worked under the direction of the Resistance. With an Alsatian identity, he found work on their behalf in the Wehrmacht (the armed forces of the Third Reich) transport commandant’s office in Toulouse and from there reported to the Resistance on military transports. When he was threatened with exposure, he changed his identity and moved to Castres, where he helped to produce leaflets and throw them over the wall into a German barracks, and in daring operations attempted to win over members of the Wehrmacht to the Resistance. He was betrayed, arrested by the Abwehr (military intelligence unit), and put on trial. During his transport to Paris, where he was threatened with the death penalty in a further trial, Leo was freed by a happy coincidence at Allassac railway station on 3 June 1944: a unit of guerrillas attacked another train and became aware of his wagon with its guards. A Resistance pamphlet from October 1944 reports on the event, calling Leo “Le Rescapé”, the “one who got away”, for the first time – henceforth his combat name, which was to open doors for him in France until the end of his life.

Report on Gerhard Leo’s liberation, 1944.

Leo remained with the unit that had liberated him and thus became a member of the “Francs-Tireurs et Partisans” (guerrillas and partisans), eventually with the rank of lieutenant. He was mainly used as an interpreter, but he also had to make use of his weapon. On 15 September 1944, a document in the archive identifies Leo as a frontline representative of the Free Germany committee for the West. A photo from this time, which has only survived as a reproduction, shows a beaming young man in battledress with a beret on his head. Looking at this photo, it is easy to overlook the severity and heavy losses of the fighting in the final few months of German occupation. Leo took part in partisan operations supporting the Allied landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944. The skirmishes that delayed the deployment of German troops to the northern front were decisive for the outcome of the war. It was then that Leo lost a newfound friend, Lieutenant Michel, who was arrested by an SS unit and hanged in Tulle. The infamous massacre of the civilian population took place nearby in Oradour.

ID card issued by the Committee “Free Germany” for the West, 1944, detail.

Gerhard Leo as a lieutenant in the “Francs-Tireurs et Partisans” (guerrillas and partisans), around 1944.

The entire Leo family survived unscathed until the end of the war. Gerhard wrote to his mother and sister in Hamburg for the first time on 10 May 1945, announcing his return to Germany. Wilhelm was also looking forward to reuniting with his wife and younger daughter and hoped for a job as a judge in Hamburg. A second letter from Gerhard, dated January 1946, reveals what happened next. Wilhelm had gathered most of his paperwork and personal documents and spent the wait with his eldest daughter and first grandchild in quarters in Paris. He was active on the board of the Free Germany committee for the West, whose task after the war was to investigate Nazi crimes, bring the culprits to justice, and educate the public about the recent past. He even managed to have the seizure of his bookshop lifted and to sell the stock. He had just received the 45,000 (old) French franc and was on his way to collect tickets for a concert on 11 November 1945 when he suffered a heart attack, from which he died the same day.

It is possible to document Gerhard Leo’s further career in detail with the aid of other documents, starting with his Communist Party (KPD) membership card, issued in Düsseldorf on 12 May 1946. But here are just a few milestones. Leo became a journalist, first at the KPD newspaper Freiheit in Düsseldorf, then – after moving to East Germany – at the news service Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst (ADN) and Neues Deutschland, for which he was to become a correspondent in Paris in the 1970s and ’80s. He was special correspondent at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 and in Cambodia immediately after the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979. In 2004, in recognition of his services in the Resistance, he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour by President Jacques Chirac.

Letter from Gerhard Leo to his mother and sisters in Hamburg, dated 2 January 1945 (recte 1946), reporting his father’s death shortly before his return to Germany.

CARSTEN WURM is a research assistant at the Literature Archive of the Akademie der Künste.

The Gerhard Leo Archive, which comprises four shelf metres, contains – in addition to work manuscripts, correspondence, biographical documents, and photos – above all family papers that go back to a letter from Alexander von Humboldt dated 1831. It holds, for example, documents on the life of Gerhard Leo’s father, the lawyer Wilhelm Leo, who became a bookseller in Paris, and letters written from prison by Leo’s father-in-law, Dagobert Lubinski, a publicist and leading member of the Communist Party opposition, who was convicted of high treason and murdered in Auschwitz in 1943.

SNAPSHOT DRAWINGS MILEIN COSMAN

Anna Schultz

Photo of Milein Cosman and Hans Keller, 1961.

Helene Weigel as Mother Courage, 1956. Thomas Mann, 1947.

Igor Stravinsky, undated. Joseph Beuys, 1983.

Wilhelm Furtwangler, 1980s. Back of Stravinsky's head, 1960s.

Hans Keller, undated. Open page of the sketchbook, on the right a self-portrait, 1952.

Milein Cosman was obsessed with carrying a pen and pad of drawing paper wherever she went. She used every opportunity, the almost daily visits to concerts or theatres, press conferences, or meetings with friends or neighbours, to draw incessantly and unashamedly. Her works, mainly portraits – a wonderful and extensive selection of which she donated to the Art Collection of the Akademie der Künste shortly before her death – serve as enduring testimonies of her many excursions and encounters. As part of the estate of John and Gertrud Heartfield, who had been friends with Cosman for many years, several drawings and prints had already entered the Academy’s art collection in 1983. These are mainly drawings of the Heartfields and their beloved cats, produced in the 1940s during their exile in England and while on a visit in 1968. Jointly, both groups present an impressive panorama of the London arts scene of the post-war years, and especially the cultural life of exiles in the London district of Hampstead, where Cosman lived embedded within a large circle of friends from 1946 until her death in 2017.

Born Emilie Cosman in Gotha in 1921, Milein, as everyone called her, spent her childhood in Düsseldorf before attending the École d’Humanité, a progressive boarding school, in Switzerland. In 1939, she moved to England to study art, where her Jewish family had already fled from National Socialist persecution in 1938. After graduating, she worked as an illustrator for non-fiction and children’s books and for various illustrated magazines, and soon gained a reputation as one of England’s leading portraitists. In 1947, she met her future husband, the musicologist and critic Hans Keller (1919–1985), whose striking features, as she confessed to her friend Peter Black, kindled in her the desire to draw him from their very first meeting. He remained one of her favourite models until his death; she drew, painted, etched, and modelled his head hundreds of times.

In 1949, she was invited to Bonn by the magazine Heute to make portraits of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s first post-war cabinet. Cosman bequeathed around sixty of these drawings to the art collection of the German Bundestag.

In her observant and sensitive portraits, Cosman not only “identifies” important characteristics of the sitters, but also commits them so skilfully to paper that they capture the essence of the person concerned. The artist’s special and undying interest was in German cultural figures. When she attended a guest performance of the Berliner Ensemble in London in 1956, she was thrilled by Helene Weigel’s performance. With just a few strokes and with little detail, she succeeded in encapsulating the actress in her signature role as Mother Courage. At a press conference held at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum for an exhibition opening in 1983, she portrayed Joseph Beuys, wearing a hat of course, his nervousness hinted at in the unusually tremulous lines of her felt-tip pen. Cosman’s fascination for music, or more precisely musicians, is attributable not only to her relationship with her husband: she portrayed her friend and neighbour, the pianist Alfred Brendel, in symbiotic harmony with his instrument, and she succeeded in depicting the sweeping gestures of the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich just as skillfully as she did the elegance of Wilhelm Furtwängler’s conducting hand, which moves the baton with such control and gentleness, contrasting with the his upward gaze, detached from the orchestra. A personal liking is probably less in evidence here than admiration for the maestro’s skill. A close analysis of a person and respect for his work are particularly evident in the many depictions of Igor Stravinsky, some of which were used as illustrations for a book for which Hans Keller provided the text. When, like a magician, Stravinsky casts his spell on the undepicted musicians, the paper sheet serves as a metaphorical echo chamber. But humour is also discernible: even from behind, the composer is unfailingly identifiable by his bald head.

Writers also figure prominently in Cosman’s oeuvre: Erich Kästner, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Elias Canetti – they were all captured by her on paper. She drew Thomas Mann, whose work she greatly admired, on 25 May 1947, visibly tired, on his first trip to Europe after the war, shortly after the publication of his novel Doctor Faustus, while he was in conflict with Furtwängler over the latter’s reinstatement as a musician. Cosman’s snapshot drawings reflect the cultural life of the post-war period. As remarkable visual records, they are also valuable contemporary documents that localise her sitters in time and space.

ANNA SCHULTZ is Research Associate at the Art Collection of the Akademie der Künste.

An exhibition in celebration of the 101st anniversary of the artist’s birth – organised in cooperation with the Art Collection of the German Bundestag — opened on 31 March in the Reichstag building. On display until 20 May 2022 are portraits of politicians and artists that Cosman donated to the German Bundestag and the Academy. (www.kunst-im-bundestag.de). Admission is free; prior registration at www.bundestag.de/besuche/ fuehrung is required. A digital showcase of a selection of works can be found in a digital shop window (https://digital.adk.de/milein-cosman/ ) and in a brochure accompanying the exhibition: Milein Cosman, Portraits from Politics and Art – Between London Exile and Bonn Republic, ed. Andreas Kaernbach and Anna Schultz on behalf of the Art Advisory Board of the German Bundestag and the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

Andrea Clos

THE ARCHIVE OF FRIEDRICH HOLLAENDER (1896–1976)

The composer Friedrich Hollaender made his mark like no other on Germany’s “Golden Twenties” with his melodies, lyrics, and revues. In Max Reinhardt’s cabaret Schall und Rauch (“Sound and smoke”), he accompanied such famous diseuses as Trude Hesterberg, Rosa Valetti, and Grete Mosheim on the piano; in the early twenties, he composed the incidental music for Else Lasker-Schüler’s play Die Wupper; his Tingel-Tangel-Theater founded in 1931 in BerlinCharlottenburg was legendary; and for Marlene Dietrich, he wrote the international hit from The Blue Angel. Werner Richard Heymann, himself a composer, celebrated him as “Fridericus Hollaender, / the Rex of major- and minorlands. / The cabaret’s greatest accomplisher!”

Friedrich Hollaender in front of his bust, around 1931.

Since 1994, the composer and lyricist’s archive – not least a treasure trove of outstanding sources relating to cabaret of the 1920s and ’30s – has been housed at the Akademie der Künste. On the centenary of his birth in 1996, he was honoured with an exhibition, a publication, and a CD; since then, the estate has also been accessible for academic research in the reading room and online at www.archiv.net. The interest is huge, and music manuscripts, prints, handwritten notes, and photos of Friedrich Hollaender and his contemporaries are constantly being consulted, quoted, and published.

Alan Lareau, professor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and an expert on the history of cabaret, plays a special role in this context. For many years, he has been exploring the estate and acted as a link between the archive and research. In enlightening discussions and publications, he has shared interesting facts and new research, most recently in 2014 with a publication about Erich Hollaender’s equally famous father, Victor Hollaender. The Jüdische Allgemeine reviewed the book – Revue meines Lebens: Erinnerungen an einen Berliner Unterhaltungskomponisten um 1900 (“Review of my life: memories of a Berlin entertainment composer around 1900”) – with the following words: “Saving Hollaender’s name from oblivion is a noble task that editor Alan Lareau has undertaken with great success. [...] The result is a glimpse into several vanished worlds at once. A big round of applause.”

The Academy Archives also owe an important addition to the Friedrich Hollaender estate to contact with Alan Lareau. As an intermediary to his daughter Melodie, he ensured that an important portion of the documents, sheet music, films, and pictures remaining in the family’s possession reached Berlin in 2021. To do so, he travelled to Los Angeles, packed the crates for the archive and meticulously labelled the contents of each box. The daughter from the musician’s third marriage to the actress Leza Hay had kept some of the items at her house in Los Angeles after the initial handover in 1994. How valuable these remaining documents were, however, only transpired years later.

It is not uncommon for material to be lost when heirs move house, unless, as in this case, a prudent researcher puts out his feelers and rescues what has been left behind. And “rescue” really is the appropriate term here. Several of the 16-mm film reels from Friedrich Hollaender’s estate, for example, are in a state of partial decomposition. The pungent smell of vinegar from the film packaging suggests that speed is of the essence. On exposure to moisture or heat, the acetyl groups detach from the cellulose chain and combine with water to form acetic acid, causing the films to shrink and become brittle. The eight recovered films are, therefore, currently being restored and digitised. It will be fascinating to find out what is concealed behind such a label as “in Woodrow Wilson’s house” – he was, after all, the 28th President of the United States. All the films date from the period of Hollaender’s life in exile, which started in 1933. After a timely warning, the “non-Aryan” artist and his second wife Hedi Schoop managed to flee from the Gestapo at first to Paris. There the couple stayed for about a year in the large German émigré community, moving to Hollywood a year later.

The time in America was enormously important for Hollaender’s career. American “Tingel-Tangel” variety came into being. In Hollywood, after initial difficulties, he was able to resume his film career, which had already begun in 1929 with compositions for Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel. He again composed songs for Marlene Dietrich and received four Oscar nominations.

It is suspected that the film canisters, which had gone unnoticed for many years, mainly contain private footage of Friedrich Hollaender, his wife Hedi and her siblings Paul and Trudi Schoop, his parents Victor and Rosa Hollaender, and such friends as the film director Ernst Lubitsch and the film actor Ernö Verebes, who starred alongside Gustaf Gründgens and Lil Dagover in numerous films of the 1930s.

Unrestored roll of film, inscription: Hedis Heads 1932–35.

Hedi and her sister Trudi had already performed as dancers and cabaret artists in Hollaender’s TingelTangel in Berlin, and numerous photos of the two can now be found in the Archive. Hedi later turned to sculpture and became a pioneer of “California Pottery” in the United States with her artistic utilitarian ceramics. In 1931, she also sculpted the previously unknown 26-centimetrehigh plaster bust of Friedrich Hollaender, which has now become the property of the Archives of the Academy. Hollaender and Schoop soon separated, however, and in 1943 Hedi married Ernö Verebes.

The newly acquired documents also afford insight into the family’s history. Hollaender was born into a Jewish family of artists. His father Victor, a composer, bandleader, and theatre director, was one of the most successful composers of light music and operettas and a co-founder of modern cabaret and revue theatre. One uncle, Gustav, was a conductor and another, Felix Hollaender, a successful writer, critic, dramaturge, and director. Also preserved in the collection are documents attesting to the origins of the family name. Under the Prussian Edict of Emancipation of 1812, his Jewish grandparents, Sigmund Benjamin Rachel and Renette Rachel, were officially obliged to adopt a new name. From 15 July 1837, they bore the name of Hollaender.

Notes by Melodie Hollander (she dropped the “e” in her name after her father emigrated to the United States) and letters from her relatives confirm that her aunt Elise Felicitas Hollaender and her husband Siegmund Stöckel (Samuel Nuchem Steckel) were killed in Auschwitz in 1942. The memorial Stolpersteine for the Stöckel family are located in Fregestrasse in Berlin. Two of the children of the conductor Gustav Hollaender died in the Litzmannstadt ghetto and in Auschwitz respectively.

Friedrich Hollaender returned to Germany in 1954, initially to Munich. The legacy of works is enriched with autographs of his late compositions Scherzo, unsuccessfully performed in Hamburg in 1956, and Adam und Eva. Text fragments, notes, and orchestrations have been edited and made available for research. Unknown series of photographs of Hollaender and various members of his family illustrate his life, while his work is documented with film photos from Der blaue Engel, among others. Interesting, if somewhat laborious to read is, preserved in files, the correspondence with various music publishers about the rights to Hollaender’s songs and stage works. Amusing, on the other hand, is the correspondence of his Munich lawyer Wolfgang Börner with his kind attempts to make amends for his client’s somewhat lax attitude to paying for items of all kinds.

After Hollaender’s death, his daughter Melodie campaigned for eighteen years to have her famous father commemorated with a street named after him in Berlin. The negotiations over the archive almost broke down in the early 1980s due to the refusal of Berlin’s politicians to allow such a street naming. Finally, in 2012, not far from Kurfürstendamm, Rankeplatz in Wilmersdorf was renamed Friedrich-Hollaender-Platz and a memorial column was unveiled. In the Archives of the Academy, the events described here can be read and the context reconstructed in almost 500 individual documents.

ANDREA CLOS is Archivist at the Performing Arts Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

A SMALL, DISCREET CELEBRATION

THE REOPENING OF THE VILLA SERPENTARA IN OLEVANO

“Owing to the strained financial circumstances of the Akademie der Künste, I must ask you to desist from this inauguration ceremony”, writes Gerhard Boeddinghaus, Senate for Public Education, in a letter to the Akademie der Künste on 4 September 1961. What he was referring to was the planned reopening of the Villa Serpentara in Olevano near Rome, which, after a long break, was again to become available to the Academy as an artists’ residence.

Anneka Metzger

Villa Serpentara, Olevano, 1961. Photo © Adrian von Buttlar.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the swathe of land between Subiaco and Palestrina in the Sabine Mountains had been discovered by artists from various European countries as the embodiment of an ideal landscape. The Romantics – from Joseph Anton Koch and Franz Theobald Horny to Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld and Carl Blechen – had set up their easels there. It was thanks to the initiative of German artists associated with the Karlsruhe landscape painter Edmund Kanoldt that the stand of holm oaks in Olevano, “the Serpentara”, was preserved in 1873. In an impromptu rescue and fundraising campaign, they prevented the threatened deforestation by purchasing the hilly terrain occupied by a grove of ninety-eight oaks for 2,350 lire. In order to safeguard the site in the long term, they donated it to the German Emperor, who entrusted it to the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin. From the 1890s, the sculptor Heinrich Gerhardt, who lived in Rome, was responsible for supervision on site. It was he who, after the German Imperial Embassy in Rome had refused development of the site, purchased a plot of land directly next to the grove and built a “refuge” complete with artists’ studios on it. Gerhardt eventually bequeathed the property and the villa to the Academy, which inherited it upon his death in 1915. Since then, it has been sending artists to Olevano on work-study residences, with interruptions during the First and Second World Wars. And from then on, the Akademie der Künste was entrusted with a property that required incessant correspondence between Rome and Berlin and never-ending interventions. It had to be patched up and refurbished, requests for money and foreign transfers went back and forth, fire and liability insurance policies became due, the water tank had to be repaired and maintained, stoves purchased, contracts signed with the administrator, the proceeds from the olive and grape harvests agreed with the custodian family, firewood procured, pests controlled, the right of way through the grove organised, and stone walls renewed. House rules were drawn up, and over the years countless inventory lists were made, itemising everything down to the last fork.

In 1945, the Villa Serpentara was seized by the Allies. In the 1950s, lengthy restitution negotiations were held, well-documented in the files of the Historical Archives, owing to disputes over the legal succession of the Prussian Academy of Arts to the Villa Serpentara and the Villa Massimo in Rome. In 1956, under the bilateral cultural agreement signed by the Federal Republic of Germany and Italy, the villa was finally returned. In the ensuing years, the dilapidated building was inspected and makeshift repairs carried out. In the autumn of 1961, the Academy and the Senate for Public Education in Berlin decided to open the villa to artists again. The building’s dubious structural stability posed an obstacle to this, as did the still outstanding and essential maintenance work and the lack of furnishings. In the early summer of 1961, Maria von Buttlar, the wife of the Secretary General of the Akademie der Künste, Herbert von Buttlar, assumed responsibility for the villa. She travelled to Rome, where within a few weeks she succeeded in ensuring its “provisional habitability”. She not only procured furniture and tableware and negotiated with local companies and authorities, but also finally moved into the villa with her three sons for a trial stay. At the end of August 1961, in consultation with the Academy and Manfred Klaiber, the German Ambassador to Rome, a date was set for the official opening “when the holidays in Italy are over”. But then, shortly before the planned date, the Berlin Senate called everything into question again: financial bottlenecks and the political situation shortly after the building of the Wall did not seem to be appropriate circumstances for a celebration. But perhaps the invitations had already been sent out, and the Foreign Office’s wish to “inaugurate Villa Serpentara with a small, discreet celebration” weighed too heavily. The fact is that the villa, “this small house of communication with the outside world”, as the Secretary General, who had travelled to Rome, dubbed it in his speech, was opened at 11:30 a.m. on 13 September 1961, in the presence of the German Ambassador and representatives of the cultural institutions in Rome. The Buttlars’ then 13-year-old son Adrian provided the photographic record of the event. Thanks to Maria von Buttlar’s receipts for expenses, we also know what was purchased for the occasion: “Bread and ham, sausage and cheese, cigarettes, cigars, matches, toothpicks, brochettes, mineral water, orange juice, grapefruit juice, tomato juice, 25 bottles of wine.” The following day, President of the Akademie der Künste, Hans Scharoun, received a telegram from Rome.

ANNEKA METZGER, is Assistant to the Director of the Archives at the Akademie der Künste.

The Akademie der Künste has been awarding fellowships for artists to stay in Olevano since 1961: https://www.adk.de/en/academy/young-academy/villa-serpentara-fellowship/. A conference in Rome from 25 to 27 May 2022, “Olevano - Measuring a Myth” in cooperation with Villa Massimo, the Bibliotheca Hertziana, and the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, is dedicated to the history of the artist town of Olevano and the Villa Serpentara.

Telegram from Secretary General Herbert von Buttlar to President Hans Scharoun, 14 September 1961.