Nicolas Berggruen, described in your HTSI piece as “the modern-day Medici” (FT Weekend, June 1) has often cited his father Heinz as his mentor, but in some ways the son isn’t a patch on the father.
Heinz Berggruen, whom you describe as “an eminent German-Jewish art dealer and collector”, reinvented almost his entire life story under the uncritical eye of an adulatory press and was showered with medals, awards and degrees, on the basis of a fiction.
He was hailed as a philanthropist in three countries and honoured with a state museum forever in his name, courtesy of the German taxpayer. But there is little evidence that he actually gave away anything more than a fraction of the fortune he had acquired.
In fact, after the war, Heinz Berggruen was suspected by the Monuments Men — the US army unit assigned with the restitution of looted art — of colluding with notorious Nazi looted-art dealers like Karl Haberstock to sell stolen goods on.
This part of the family history no doubt will not be mentioned when the Museum Berggruen travelling exhibition opens at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris this autumn.
Just after the war, it was the Orangerie that staged an exhibition of works stolen from French private collections recovered in Germany by the Monuments Men.
Vivien Stein
Author of ‘Heinz Berggruen: Leben & Legende’, London SW19, UK
