Dispersed by Forced Sale—the Faience Collection of Michel Oppenheim

The lawyer Michel Oppenheim (1885–1963) was employed by the City of Mainz until the latter forcibly retired him in 1934. As a Jew, Oppenheim was subsequently subjected to further persecution by the National Socialist regime. In the summer of 1937, the City of Mainz gave the Oppenheim family notice to quit the apartment they rented in the Goldenluftgasse. Forced to move into a smaller apartment, the passionate collector of ceramics saw himself faced by an insurmountable problem: where was he now to house his extensive collection of Höchst porcelain, faience, and other antiquities? 

He decided he had no choice but to sell off some items, including 65 faience objects. Through the mediation of his friend Kurt Röder (1881– 1943), Director of the Grand Ducal Porcelain Collection in Darmstadt, he succeeded in finding a buyer in the Seilers, a married couple from Cologne. The Seilers paid Oppenheim a low price, for as it turned out they were interested only in one particular faience jug made in Frankfurt and not in the collection as a whole. Shortly after acquiring the collection, the Seilers sold 63 of the 65 faience objects to the Munich antique dealer Ludwig Steinhauser (ca. 1878–after 1952), a well-known ceramics dealer. In November 1939, the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt acquired from Steinhauser an 18^th century teapot made in the Kelsterbach manufactory for its collection.

Michel Oppenheim survived the Holocaust in hiding at a friend’s house and was able to conceal a portion of his porcelain collection from the National Socialist authorities. In the 1950s, Oppenheim attempted to recover the objects—including the faience works—that he had been forced to sell. A list in the case file on the lawsuit against the widow Clara Seiler includes as item 52 the Kelsterbach teapot. In the case heard before the Mainz District Court, Steinhauser attested that he had acquired the collection from the Seilers and resold the contents separately. Through the destruction of his business premises in an air raid in 1944, all records and unsold items had been lost; consequently he could not say what had happened to the faience objects.

Michel Oppenheim and Clara Seiler reached a settlement in court; Oppenheim was thus unaware that all the time the teapot had been located close to where he was living. Proactive provenance research has been able to identify the teapot as a cultural asset expropriated as a result of National Socialist persecution. Michel Oppenheim’s heir has forgone any claim to the teapot, which will thus remain in the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt. To date no trace has been found of the remaining faience objects from the Oppenheim collection.

Udo Felbinger

The teapot may be seen in the exhibition “Herkunft [un]geklärt” [Origin (un)resolved] in the Landesmuseum MainzOpens in a new window: