Following criticism of how its object history has been handled, the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin is returning the Dancers’ Fountain to the heirs.
Georg Kolbe’s Dancers’ Fountain from 1922 counts among the sculptor’s and the museum founder’s most beautiful works, according to the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district’s website in Berlin. A nude bronze figure is frozen in an expressive, performative movement, arms stretched upward, one knee sharply bent. She stands on a basin, carried by crouching Black figures. The fountain bears a colonial-coded motif—and its object history is antisemitic.
The Dancers’ Fountain is Nazi-looted art, that much is known today. On the Berlin-Charlottenburg website, however, it is not noted. There it merely states that Georg Kolbe created the fountain for Villa Heinrich Stahl, the head of the Foreign Department of Victoria Insurance and later chairman of the Jewish Community of Berlin. That Heinrich Stahl was forced by the Nazis to sell his property and artworks, including the fountain, and that he was murdered in Theresienstadt in 1942, is not mentioned there. Instead, it is listed on the Georg Kolbe Museum’s website.
The Georg Kolbe Museum has owned the fountain to date. It had arrived in the museum garden in the 1970s under complicated circumstances. In 2001, Stahl’s grandson announced the relinquishment of the Dancers’ Fountain.
When last year the Georg Kolbe Museum examined the antisemitic object history of the fountain and, at the same time, the colonial motif of the carrier figures, it came under criticism. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung accused it of avoiding the term “NS-Raubkunst” in relation to the fountain and of “relativizing Jewish suffering.”
In 2001, Stahl’s grandson had announced the relinquishment of the Dancers’ Fountain
In the past few months, legal clarifications have been made. Now it is stated, according to a press release from the Georg Kolbe Museum, that Werner Stahl, Heinrich Stahl’s grandson, did not act on behalf of the entire family in 2001. The museum and the board of the Georg Kolbe Foundation offer to restitute the work in full to the heirs’ community of Heinrich Stahl.
In September 2025, the museum had presented the heirs with a corresponding offer. The heirs, through their legal representatives, have now agreed to this offer. The heirs and the museum currently want to agree on the next steps within the restitution process. (soj)
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