Page 408 - The Secret Museum

on yourself an opportunity life seldom offers one … nothing is more calming

than the prospect of the peace of death … the one thing common to all. It
leads us back into normal ‘being’. The space between birth and death is an
exception, in which there is much to fear and suffer. The only true, constant,
philosophical comfort is the awareness that this exceptional condition will
pass and that ‘I-conciousness’, which is always restless, always piquant, in
all seriousness inaccessible, will again sink back into its wonderful peace

before birth … whoever strives from purity and knowledge, to him death
always comes as a saviour.

In 1919, the National Gallery in Berlin bought The Tower of the Blue Horses, and
it stayed there for 18 years, until the Nazis declared it ‘degenerate’ and took it down.
It was displayed once in 1937, in a very controversial exhibition called ‘Degenerate
Art’ or ‘Entartete Kunst’, put together by the Nazis to mock ‘degenerate’ avant-garde
art. Pieces were crammed together in the exhibition space with graffiti-style
comments about how much the state had spent to obtain them. The show toured

Germany and Austria and three million people saw it. There were complaints about
The Tower of the Blue Horses appearing in the show, so it was taken out. Then it
disappeared, one of the many countless masterpieces that did so. It may have been
destroyed. There are also rumours that it is in a Swiss vault.

In May 2012, an artist, Martin Gostner, created an outdoor installation at the Neue
Nationalgalerie on the theme of the missing painting called Der Erker der blauen
Pferde (The Oriel of the Blue Horses). He sent out invitations to the show that
featured a reproduction of the painting in an oriel, or bay window. Then, in secret, he

left four pieces of blue horse dung, outside the gallery. Only some people saw them,
others might not have noticed them. He wanted the sculptures to pose questions about
the painting: Where is it? Does it still exist? What traces would the four blue horses
leave behind? What signal could the horses give their owners?

The painting is still very much in the consciousness of art lovers in Berlin, and
still considered a part of the National Gallery’s collection, even though nobody
knows where it is.

Back when the painting hung in the gallery, it was a favourite of Hans Scholl,
brother of Sophie Scholl, German teenagers in the 1930s. Sophie and Hans joined the

Hitler Youth, but their father persuaded them that Hitler was destroying the German
people. Their father was later sent to prison for telling his secretary, ‘The war! It is
already lost. This Hitler is God’s scourge on mankind, and if the war doesn’t end
soon the Russians will be sitting in Berlin.’

Hans and Sophie believed it was their duty as citizens, even during wartime, to
stand up for what they believed, and speak out against the Nazi regime. They wrote a
leaflet entitled ‘The White Rose’, along with other students and professors from the
University of Munich, describing how the Nazi system had imprisoned the German

people and was destroying them.