译文连载[附英文原文]：邪魔画商 （一）

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    2010年9月22日晚九点左右，由苏黎世前往慕尼黑的高铁途经边境站林道，巴伐利亚海关人员上车进行例行检查。很多在瑞士银行有额外存款的德国人就是在这个边境小站带“黑钱”过关的，边检人员对此了如指掌，在这里抽查可疑旅客已成惯例。
    根据《镜报》的报道，一位执勤的海关人员在机车的走道里看到一位衣着整齐、满头银发的孱弱老人，于是要求他出示证件。老人掏出一本奥地利护照。他叫罗夫·尼可拉斯·康纳利斯·葛利，1932年生于德国汉堡。报道说他告诉海关人员，此行是出差前往柏恩的一间画廊。由于葛利表现得异乎寻常地紧张，这位执勤人员决定带他去车上的洗手间进行搜身，结果搜出一个信封，里面装着崭新的九千欧元钞票（合一万二千美元）。
    尽管老人家携带的款项并未超过法定的一万欧元款限，他紧张的举止和崭新的钞票还是引起了这位海关人员的怀疑。他把护照和钱款还给了老人，让他回到原位就座。他设定对葛利进行进一步调查。从此，触发一场历时百年的神秘悲剧的爆炸式结局。

 一、不堪家史[A Dark Legacy]

  康纳利斯·葛利是个幽魂人物。他告诉那个海关官员他住在慕尼黑的一所公寓里，而他缴交房产税的地址却在邵兹堡。根据《镜报》的报道，无迹可查。根据那位海关官员的建议，海关和税务调查员无法查到任何退休金、健康保险、银行存款、税务或雇佣记录－葛利从未工作过－慕尼黑的电话簿上也没他的名字。葛利是个不折不扣的隐形人。
  他们继续追查，发现葛利居然在慕尼黑的高尚住宅区史瓦滨的一间百万公寓里住了半个世纪。然后就是他的姓：葛利。熟悉希特勒当权期的德国艺术史，特别是从事搜寻“劫掠品”（被纳粹强掠的艺术品）的人，葛利这个姓氏举足轻重。希德布兰·葛利当时任职于一间博物馆，拥有四分之一犹太血统，根据纳粹法律属于“二等杂种”。虽然如此，他成为纳粹批准的画商之一。第三帝国期间，他收集到大量的劫掠品，许多是从犹太画商或收藏家手中得来。调查人员由此展开联想：此葛利与彼葛利，两者是否有关联？康纳利斯在火车上提到前往画廊，那他是不是靠暗中卖画维生？
  调查人员开始琢磨：位于阿瑟街1号第5单元的公寓里到底有何蹊跷？也许警员们从慕尼黑的艺术圈儿里听到了什么风声。“圈子里个个人都知道葛利手头有大把劫掠品，”一位现代画廊老板的丈夫告诉我。但是调查人员决定小心行事。德国有严格的私人财产法，侵犯隐私法以及其它一些法律顾忌，首当其冲的，就是德国并没有法律规定私人或机构不得拥有掠夺品。直到2011年九月，法官才以怀疑逃税和贪污为由下发了搜查令。这时距车厢搜身一事已经整整一年了。不过当局仍对执行搜查举棋不定。
  而三个月之后，康纳利斯通过科隆的莱泊兹拍卖行出售了麦克斯·贝克曼的杰作《驯狮人》，售价为864,000欧元（合117万美元）。更有意思的是，根据《镜报》的报道，康纳利斯将所得六四分成，付给了犹太画商阿尔弗莱德·弗莱克海姆的后裔。 弗莱克海姆在二十年代的德国各地和维也纳拥有多间现代派画廊。1933年， 弗莱克海姆抛下画业逃亡巴黎，之后沦落伦敦， 1937年于贫困交加中死去。他的家人多年来一直在追讨他当年丢弃的画作，其中包括这幅《驯狮人》。
   据弗莱克海姆的家族律师说，康纳利斯与其后裔有约在先，康纳利斯承认弗莱克海姆于1934年被迫将这幅画出卖给自己的父亲海德布兰。这颗重磅炸弹激起了当局对康纳利斯公寓内有更多藏品的进一步怀疑。
   2012年2月28日，搜查令终于启动。当警察、海关和税务人员进入葛利1076呎（约107平米）的公寓时，他们被搜查的结果惊呆了:　121幅镶框画作，1285幅未裱画作，作品出自毕加索、马蒂斯、雷诺、夏加尔、麦克斯·利伯曼、奥托·迪克斯、弗郎兹·马尔克、埃米尔·诺尔德、奥斯卡·科科施卡、恩斯特·基什内尔、德拉克洛瓦、杜米埃、库尔贝，还有一幅丢勒，还有卡纳莱托，等等等等，价值不下十亿。
   根据《镜报》的报道，整整三天，康纳利斯遵令就座，静静地看着工作人员将一幅幅画打包运走，被存放在距慕尼黑以北１０哩嘉清市的一个联邦海关仓库里。总检察长办公室并未对此事发表任何公开讲话，在守口如瓶的同时，他们在商讨着权宜之计。藏画的消息一旦走漏，定将引起轩然大波。德国会被追讨声和政治压力所围攻。面对这个史无前例的案局，似乎所有人都不知所措。这会揭起那从未愈合也永远不会平复的旧创伤和文化断层。
  接下来的几天，康纳利斯就那么失魂落魄地坐在空荡荡的公寓里。当局安排了心理辅导员来看望他。与此同时，没人知道该怎么处置那些保存在嘉清仓库里的画作，直到有人向德国的新闻周报《焦点》透露了风声。这个报信人可能是2012年入室的警员或者装运工，因为该人提供了公寓室内情形的描述。2013年11月4日，《焦点》周刊以头条整版报道，七十年来最大的纳粹掠夺品窝藏案，在慕尼黑郊外一位独居几十年的老人的公寓里被发现。此时距画作没收已有20个月，而从车厢奇遇算起已是三年的时间了。
  《焦点》报道既出，媒体旋即包围康纳利斯的居所大楼，他隐士般的日子从此一去不返。

图１,２:故事的主人公康纳利斯·葛利
  

图3中:康纳利斯的父亲希德布兰·葛利



图4: 祸起萧墙:麦克斯·贝克曼的杰作《驯狮人》



 The Devil and The Art Dealer     by Alex Shoumatoff

At about nine P.M. on September 22, 2010, the high-speed train from Zurich to Munich passed the Lindau border, and Bavarian customs officers came aboard for a routine check of passengers. A lot of “black” money—off-the-books cash—is taken back and forth at this crossing by Germans with Swiss bank accounts, and officers are trained to be on the lookout for suspicious travelers.

As reported by the German newsweekly Der Spiegel, while making his way down the aisle, one of the officers came upon a frail, well-dressed, white-haired man traveling alone and asked for his papers. The old man produced an Austrian passport that said he was Rolf Nikolaus Cornelius Gurlitt, born in Hamburg in 1932. He reportedly told the officer that the purpose of his trip was for business, at an art gallery in Bern. Gurlitt was behaving so nervously that the officer decided to take him into the bathroom to search him, and he found on his person an envelope containing 9,000 euros ($12,000) in crisp new bills.

Though he had done nothing illegal—amounts under 10,000 euros don’t need to be declared—the old man’s behavior and the money aroused the officer’s suspicion. He gave back Gurlitt’s papers and money and let him return to his seat, but the customs officer flagged Cornelius Gurlitt for further investigation, and this would put into motion the explosive dénouement of a tragic mystery more than a hundred years in the making.

A Dark Legacy

Cornelius Gurlitt was a ghost. He had told the officer that he had an apartment in Munich, although his residence—where he pays taxes—was in Salzburg. But, according to newspaper reports, there was little record of his existence in Munich or anywhere in Germany. The customs and tax investigators, following up on the officer’s recommendation, discovered no state pension, no health insurance, no tax or employment records, no bank accounts—Gurlitt had apparently never had a job—and he wasn’t even listed in the Munich phone book. This was truly an invisible man.

And yet with a little more digging they discovered that he had been living in Schwabing, one of Munich’s nicer neighborhoods, in a million-dollar-plus apartment for half a century. Then there was that name. Gurlitt. To those with knowledge of Germany’s art world during Hitler’s reign, and especially those now in the business of searching for Raubkunst—art looted by the Nazis—the name Gurlitt is significant: Hildebrand Gurlitt was a museum curator who, despite being a second-degree Mischling, a quarter Jewish, according to Nazi law, became one of the Nazis’ approved art dealers. During the Third Reich, he had amassed a large collection of Raubkunst,much of it from Jewish dealers and collectors. The investigators began to wonder: Was there a connection between Hildebrand Gurlitt and Cornelius Gurlitt? Cornelius had mentioned the art gallery on the train. Could he have been living off the quiet sale of artworks?

The investigators became curious as to what was in apartment No. 5 at 1 Artur-Kutscher-Platz. Perhaps they picked up on the rumors in Munich’s art world. “Everyone in the know had heard that Gurlitt had a big collection of looted art,” the husband of a modern-art-gallery owner told me. But they proceeded cautiously. There were strict private-property-rights, invasion-of-privacy, and other legal issues, starting with the fact that Germany has no law preventing an individual or an institution from owning looted art. It took till September 2011, a full year after the incident on the train, for a judge to issue a search warrant for Gurlitt’s apartment, on the grounds of suspected tax evasion and embezzlement. But still, the authorities seemed hesitant to execute it.

Then, three months later, in December 2011, Cornelius sold a painting, a masterpiece by Max Beckmann titled The Lion Tamer, through the Lempertz auction house, in Cologne, for a total of 864,000 euros ($1.17 million). Even more interesting, according to Der Spiegel, the money from the sale was split roughly 60–40 with the heirs of Jewish art dealer Alfred Flechtheim, who had had modern-art galleries in several German cities and Vienna in the 1920s. In 1933, Flechtheim had fled to Paris and then London, leaving behind his collection of art. He died impoverished in 1937. His family has been trying to reclaim the collection, including The Lion Tamer, for years.

As part of his settlement with the Flechtheim estate, according to an attorney for the heirs, Cornelius Gurlitt acknowledged that the Beckmann had been sold under duress by Flechtheim in 1934 to his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt. This bombshell gave traction to the government’s suspicion that there might be more art in Gurlitt’s apartment.

But it took until February 28, 2012, for the warrant to finally be executed. When the police and customs and tax officials entered Gurlitt’s 1,076-square-foot apartment, they found an astonishing trove of 121 framed and 1,285 unframed artworks, including pieces by Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Chagall, Max Liebermann, Otto Dix, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Kirchner, Delacroix, Daumier, and Courbet. There was a Dürer. A Canaletto. The collection could be worth more than a billion dollars.

As reported in Der Spiegel, over a period of three days, Gurlitt was instructed to sit and watch quietly as officials packed the pictures and took them all away. The trove was taken to a federal customs warehouse in Garching, about 10 miles north of Munich. The chief prosecutor’s office made no public announcement of the seizure and kept the whole matter under tight wraps while it debated how to proceed. Once the artworks’ existence became known, all hell was going to break loose. Germany would be besieged by claims and diplomatic pressure. In this unprecedented case, no one seemed to know what to do. It would open old wounds, fault lines in the culture, that hadn’t healed and never will.

In the days that followed, Cornelius sat bereft in his empty apartment. A psychological counselor from a government agency was sent to check up on him. Meanwhile, the collection remained in Garching, with no one the wiser, until word of its existence was leaked to Focus, a German newsweekly, possibly by someone who had been in Cornelius’s apartment, perhaps one of the police or the movers who were there in 2012, because he or she provided a description of its interior. On November 4, 2013—20 months after the seizure and more than three years after Cornelius’s interview on the train—the magazine splashed on its front page the news that what appeared to be the greatest trove of looted Nazi art in 70 years had been found in the apartment of an urban hermit in Munich who had been living with it for decades.

Soon after the Focus story broke, the media converged on No. 1 Artur-Kutscher-Platz, and Cornelius Gurlitt’s life as a recluse was over.