Max Stern and Karl Theodor Koetschau

The art historian Karl Koetschau, a major figure in German museology, was a friend of Max Stern’s father, Julius, and a mentor of the young Max. He must have thought highly of Max and his capabilities, for when Max was only 19, Koetschau wrote a letter of reference asking that Max be permitted to attend an auction, and bid for and purchase works of art for the Düsseldorf municipal art collections. When Max studied art history at Bonn University in 1923-28, Koetschau was one of his teachers. As an honorary professor he could not supervise a dissertation but it was Koetschau who suggested Max Stern’s dissertation topic. At first it was to be on the Hungarian painter Mihály Munkácsy. When it turned out on Stern’s subsequent trip to Budapest in 1924 that Hungary’s foremost art historian Gabriel de Térey was just completing a book on that painter, Koetschau suggested the German painter Johann Peter Langer (1756-1824).

When Max Stern was preparing to flee Nazi Germany in 1937, he was hoping to leave Koetschau in charge of his late father’s art gallery in Düsseldorf until things calmed down again and he could return from exile. As Stern put it, he tried to make an art historian into a gallery owner. However, it turned out that Koetschau had had a Jewish grandfather, a fact that had been known to the Nazis yet kept secret because they had no one else as well qualified to fill the museum post he held in Berlin. This, however, meant that he was not allowed to run a business. Stern also tried to put the Dutch art historian Cornelis van de Wetering, Koetschau’s assistant at the museum in Berlin, in charge. But the Nazis would not allow a foreigner to take over a gallery that important for Germany. Van de Wetering then opened West’s Galleries in London for Stern with his sister Hedi Stern Selbiger in 1936. Stern closed Galerie Julius Stern, sold the building and auctioned off the collection before moving to London.

At some point between Koetschau’s retirement from Berlin on 1 April 1936 and Stern’s departure for London on 23 December 1937, Stern “acquired” Koetschau’s library (as he says in his taped memoirs).

Nothing is known about Koetschau between his retirement from his post in Berlin in 1936, when he was 68, and his death in Düsseldorf in 1949, at 81. If the Düsseldorf municipal records are correct, he retained his post as the director of the Düsseldorf art collections until 1941, when he retired from civil service (at 73). In that case, he would have held two posts simultaneously (in Düsseldorf and Berlin) between 1933 and 1936. In the Dominion Gallery archive there are no letters to or from Koetschau documenting whether he and Stern stayed in touch after Stern left Germany. However, in a letter dating from 1948 to Otto Gerson, the partner of Stern’s brother-in-law Siegfried Thalheimer at Fine Art Associates in New York, Stern indicates, “Dr. Karl Koetschau is also alive in Düsseldorf”, suggesting that they were still in contact.

A.S.