ART TROVE IN MUNICH WORTH 1.5 BILLION EUROS

Any polls about what the average German is thinking about all this?

Any polls about what the average German is thinking about all this?

Questioned about the media's interest in him, he said: "I'm not Boris Becker. What do these people want from me? I'm just a very quiet person. All I wanted to do was live with my pictures. Why are they photographing me for these newspapers, which normally only feature photos of shady characters?"

Cornelius Gurlitt appears to revere his father Hildebrand, who was first discriminated against by the Nazis for this "non-Aryan" background but was later commissioned to sell and make money from artworks confiscated by the regime. The younger Gurlitt described his father as "courageous" and said "he loved art and fought for it". That some of the artworks in his collection may have been unfairly claimed from Jewish collectors – as the case of Fritz Salo Glaser implies – appeared not to have occured to him.

Gurlitt insisted that his father never bought anything from a private individual but only from German museums or art dealers, adding that his father only cooperated with the Nazis because he wanted to save the paintings from being burned: "It's possible that my father may have been offered something privately, but he certainly didn't accept it. He would have found that unsavoury."

Gurlitt likened his situation to that of Franz Kafka's In the Penal Colony. In the short story, Kafka's narrator describes a machine that carves a legal verdict into a man's back, eventually killing the accused without him being able to establish what crime he has been found guilty of.

Has this not been in the hands of government authority for two years now? I had heard that in a radio report.

Well, Walter, we often have to coax such information out of you. I believe i am correct in stating that in the United States (or most jurisdictions here) that if you are in possession of a stolen item, even if you are not criminally responsible, it can be seized as the proceeds of crime.

In principle, the same is true in Germany. But the thefts happened 65 years ago, and there are statutes of limitations on things like this. I'm not familiar enough with the legal details to tell how they apply to this particular case.

The key-word here is "theft"

Section 987 [BGB]
Emoluments after litigation is pending

(1)The possessor must return to the owner the emoluments that he receives after litigation is pending.

(2)If after litigation is pending the possessor fails to take emoluments that he could take under the rules of proper management, he is obliged to reimburse the owner to the extent that he is at fault.