The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [178]
What of the endlessly recycled Amber Room story? Does Eichwede believe that it will ever be buried?
The professor sighs, slinging his green-and-black tartan jacket over his shoulder like a hunting cape and looks us directly in the eyes. 'What can I say? Some people have princesses and fairies. Others have the Amber Room.'
In January 2003 the presses in St Petersburg were working double time. Before the new Amber Room could be unveiled to an international audience of VIPs, hundreds of copies of a special catalogue had to be printed.
Each guest arriving in St Petersburg on 31 May 2003 for the three-hundredth anniversary celebrations of the city would be able to read the Summary Catalogue of the Cultural Valuables Stolen and Lost During the Second World War. Volume 1. The Tsarkoye Selo State Museum Zone. The Catherine Palace. Book L.8 Out of a possible 100,000 lost items, the Russian government chose to illustrate the catalogue cover with a large hand-tinted photograph of the Amber Room.
In a foreword, the Deputy Minister of Culture P. V. Khoroshilov declared:
The West and especially Germany prefers to keep silent about Russia's cultural losses. Nevertheless everybody is interested in finding out how many German paintings, drawings, engravings, sculptures and objects of decorative art, archaeological finds and collections of books, still remain in Russia and what museums house them.
The Amber Room was once again listed as officially missing, the lead item in a 300-page inventory of works stolen by the Nazis from the Catherine Palace.
The Deputy Minister of Culture concluded with praise for only one West German: 'Of great help was the archive of the German scholar George Stein, who dedicated many years of his life to the search for the Amber Room... Unfortunately the work was interrupted by this scholar's tragic death.' We are sure that Stein would have been delighted to know he had made the final edit of the Soviet's Amber Room story.
Dr Sautov, director of the Catherine Palace, wrote an introduction. The Amber Room was a 'symbol of Russian cultural and art losses' and he and his staff 'are convinced that it has not perished and will be found as a result of properly organized searches'.
Director Sautov continued: 'The aim of this [catalogue] is . . . a concrete wish of real men to [publicize] which unique pieces of art were lost during the occupation, the Amber Room among them.' No mention here of the fire set by the Red Army that destroyed everything in the Knights' Hall of Konigsberg Castle.
There followed a ten-page summary of the Amber Room story written by Larissa Bardovskaya, the head curator of the Catherine Palace, who freely lifted material from Paul Enke's book and from the untrustworthy George Stein. She concluded poignantly: 'The artistic valuables of the Catherine Palace museum are still waiting for the return to their home. The problem concerning the cultural trophies of the Great Patriotic War demands the most thorough attention from the representatives of the international community.' And these representatives were set to arrive in St Petersburg on 31 May 2003, to celebrate the city's tercentenary.
But in February 2003 another row had threatened to overshadow the unveiling ceremony. Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi announced that Russia was at last to return to the Bremen Kunsthalle the 364 works taken by Red Army veteran Viktor Baldin. However, Nikolai Gubenko, now head of the Dumas Culture and Tourism Committee, appealed directly to President Putin to prevent the collection from leaving. First Deputy Prosecutor General Yury Biryukov summoned Shvydkoi to his office and warned that if he went ahead with the return he would face criminal