It is estimated that property worth at least £135 billion in today’s currency was looted from Jews in Europe between 1938 and 1945. In Austria, following the Anschluss – the German takeover of Austria in March 1938 – Jews fled persecution by the Nazis. Many had their belongings stolen or had to sell them under duress.
One Jewish family from Braunau am Inn in Upper Austria, the Wertheimers, were forced to sell their home for a fraction of its worth in 1939. Some of the Wertheimers’ belongings came into the possession of their pro-Nazi neighbours, the Kaltenhausers, either through direct looting or as the result of pressured emergency sales. Some family members became refugees in Britain, South America, and Shanghai. One of the three Wertheimer sisters was later among the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust.
Many decades later, Katharina Mayrhofer, a descendant of the Kaltenhausers, discovered a table in the attic of her family house near Braunau. Its origins were unclear. Mayrhofer embarked on a search for the original owners of the table, which led her to a collaborative project of restitution and restoration with Helen Emily Davy, a descendant of the Wertheimers.
This exhibition at the Wiener Library examines how descendants of victims of the Nazi era and of National Socialists confront a shared past. The Wertheimers’ table, an ordinary object with an extraordinary history, unearths difficult questions about memory, responsibility, and justice. Mayrhofer and Davy present this exhibition as a lens by which to understand the past, both public and private, and our responsibilities to it and each other in the present.
