Research on the Art Collections of Johann Ludwig and Mary Jacoby and Cäcilie and Ernst Holländer, Berlin
Provenance research project in cooperation with Carolyn Hollander, funded by the German Lost Art Foundation
The project started in and ended in August The art collections of the Berlin families Jacoby, Neumann, and Holländer were built up over three generations: Mary Jacoby’s (1869-1942) collection of paintings, for example, goes back to her parents, the Breslau-born banker Max Markus Neumann (1823-1901) and his wife Anna, née Mayer (1842-1912).
Anna Neumann was herself a painter and hosted a prominent salon in Berlin, where she welcomed artists such as the painter Stauffer-Bern, the sculptor Ernst Moritz Geyger, and the dramatist Paul Lindau. The Neumann collection included notable works, among them Arnold Böcklin’s painting <em>Sommertag</em> (Summer Day), which Anna Neumann had acquired from the Berlin art dealer Fritz Gurlitt in the early 1880s for approximately 4,500 Marks. This painting was later sold to industrialist Karl August Lingner for 84,000 Marks and donated by him to the Dresden Gallery in 1902.
Together with her husband, Johann Ludwig Jacoby (1862-1942), who was a commercial court judge and owner of the oldest cotton wool factory in Berlin, the Julius and Adolph Jacoby Cotton Wool Factory, Mary Jacoby amassed a collection of clocks, a Biedermeier collection with miniatures and some Japanese objects, as well as paintings. The clock collection, assembled with the advice of Wilhelm von Bode, comprised over 40 museum-quality pieces.
In 1866, Johann Ludwig Jacoby’s parents and uncle, Adolph and Cäcilie and Julius and Lydia (the sisters had married two brothers), had donated the “Eternal Light” on the occasion of the dedication of the New Synagogue in Berlin, which continued to burn during the November pogrom of 1938 and was not rediscovered until 1989 during construction work. Julius Jacoby had been chairman of the board of the Berlin Jewish community since 1901.
Mary Jacoby had seven siblings, including the zoologist and ornithologist Oscar R. Neumann (1867-1946), the physicist Elsa Neumann (1872-1902), the first woman in Germany to earn a Ph.D. in physics, and the artist Alice Neumann (1866-1943).
Johann Ludwig and Mary Jacoby’s daughter Cäcilie (1890-1941) studied law and was editor of the magazine “Die Studentin”. Their son Hans Jacoby (1896-1984) also studied law and later worked for the Dresdner Bank. In 1919, Cäcilie Jacoby married Ernst Julius Holländer, a lawyer born in Berlin in 1883. The couple had five children: Gerhard, Kurt, Eva, Heinz, and Günter. Cäcilie and Ernst Holländer also amassed an art collection. Cäcilie also acquired first and special editions of books.
From 1933 on, the Neumann, Jacoby and Holländer families were persecuted as Jews.
Ernst Holländer was dismissed from his position as a regional court judge in February 1934 under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. He subsequently devoted himself to family history research and served on the board of the Benedikt-Bunzel Foundation in Hamburg. His brother-in-law Hans Jacoby was likewise dismissed from his position at a subsidiary of Dresdner Bank.
Beginning in 1937, the family worked urgently to bring the children to safety abroad. The eldest son Gerhard emigrated to Chicago in 1937 with support from relatives including the American author Edna Ferber. After the November 1938 pogrom, during which Hans Jacoby was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the family accelerated efforts to emigrate. The three younger children—Kurt, Eva, and Günter—arrived in England in June 1939 at the Stoatley Rough School in Haslemere, founded by Dr. Hilde Lion. Kurt was later interned in Canada as an enemy alien.
On 14 November 1941, Ernst and Cäcilie Holländer were deported on the first Berlin transport to the Minsk ghetto, where they were murdered. Johann Ludwig Jacoby died on 15 September 1942 in Berlin, and his wife Mary took her own life on 22 September 1942. Mary Jacoby’s sister Alice Neumann took poison when she was to be deported on 29 January 1943 and died two days later in the Jewish Hospital in Berlin.
The research project, conducted from June 2024 to August 2025, investigated approximately 100 objects from both collections and documented twelve new provenance findings. The project reconstructed the various pathways through which the collections were dispersed.
Before their deportation, Ernst and Cäcilie Holländer entrusted artworks to the Berlin art dealer Erna Gerlach. According to Gerlach’s post-war account, she received 26 paintings for safekeeping and was instructed to contact the children through Edna Ferber after the war. Gerlach claimed she attempted to exchange artworks with Göring’s staff for exit permits for the couple. She stated that all entrusted objects except for a music box, a book of Shakespeare sonnets, and a Bohemian ruby glass were destroyed in a 1943 bombing raid on a railway station. However, research in Gerlach’s membership file in the Reich Chamber of Culture revealed that her shop in Grolmanstraße was severely damaged only in December 1943, and that her inventory had been evacuated to five different locations in southern Germany. In 1940, Gerlach had offered paintings to the Reich Chancellery and to Hans Posse, the special representative for the planned Linz museum. Paintings by Carl Kappstein, a relative of the Neumann family by marriage, appeared in auctions she organized in Baden-Baden in 1941 and 1942, potentially indicating a connection to the Holländer collection.
After the Holländers’ deportation, their seven-room apartment at Giesebrechtstraße 3 was “inventoried” by the Gestapo in January 1942. The landlord Franz Spierling, a baker and pastry chef who had operated his business in the building since 1909, held the keys and purchased various items including a built-in bookcase, tea trolley, desk, sofa, and window treatments. The inventory listed “16 paintings and pictures” without assigned values, whose whereabouts could not be determined. Twenty pieces of silverware were handed over to the tax office. In summer 2024, a previously undocumented painting by Lesser Ury surfaced in the art market bearing Spierling’s stamp on the reverse. Spierling died childless in 1967, and no testament could be located.
In June 1941, furniture from Johann Ludwig and Mary Jacoby was auctioned at the Gerhard Harms auction house in connection with a forced relocation from their apartment at Waitzstraße 7. After the deaths of both in September 1942, Mary Jacoby’s lawyer’s wife, Martha Kalischer, who had been designated as preliminary heir in Mary’s testament, gained control over the estate and took possession of some ivory objects. The Chief Finance President Berlin-Brandenburg confused Mary Jacoby’s rooms with those of another resident named Arnold Jacoby, leading to items being sold to a dealer named Lemcke, who passed them on to the Kalischers. Fritz Kalischer also sold furniture to a merchant named Wilhelm Wilcken, who was involved in illicit trade in watches with a firm in The Hague.
Hans Jacoby described his father’s collection in post-war restitution proceedings as including a portrait attributed to Holbein or Lütker vom Ring, which Max Friedländer had considered genuine and photographed for a major art history publication; a sketch by Pesne depicting Frederick the Great; a painting by Isabey showing a funeral scene; Dutch landscapes; and the renowned clock collection. Despite intensive research in the papers of Wilhelm von Bode, Robert Schmidt, and clock expert Ernst von Bassermann-Jordan, as well as consultation of the RKD photo archive in The Hague, these works could not be identified or located.
The research documented several successful rescue efforts. In May 1939, silver bowls, cutlery, furs, and four ornate beakers were smuggled to Chicago and stored with relatives, where they remain with the family today. Jewelry was transported to Amsterdam in 1938 by Donata Helmrich, a family friend later honored as “Righteous Among the Nations” for rescuing Jewish forced laborers in Ukraine. These items eventually reached the heirs in New York in 1948. Hans Jacoby brought a painting by Victor Dupres from his parents’ collection to Chicago in 1941.
At least 400 books from Cäcilie Holländer’s library were confiscated after the deportation. Some 40,000 books from “private libraries of evacuated Jews” were acquired by the Berlin Municipal Pawnshop in 1942 and transferred to the Berlin City Library. In 2023, two French-language books from Cäcilie Holländer’s collection were identified in the holdings of the Berlin Central and Regional Library through her autograph “Cäcilie Jacoby” and returned to her granddaughter.
Despite extensive archival research across numerous institutions in Germany and the United States—including the Berlin State Archive, Federal Archive, Brandenburg Main State Archive, Bavarian National Museum, archives of Berlin museums, the Edna Ferber Papers at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, and the RKD in The Hague—most collection items could not be located in literature, photo documentation, art journals, or other collections. The project successfully identified loss and rescue pathways, reconstructed the biographies of key actors including Erna Gerlach, Franz Spierling, Martha Kalischer, and the auctioneers Gerhard and Rudolf Harms, and documented the loss circumstances in greater detail than previously known.
Further research is recommended into the profiteers and intermediaries, including Franz Spierling, Martha Übel, Wilhelm Wilcken, Erna Gerlach and her heirs, the firm Eugen Fass, and Heinz Fiedler, an assistant of Erna Gerlach whom she attempted to exempt from military service in 1944.
