IF VISITING COUNTRY HOUSES is a national pastime in Britain, in Germany surprisingly little is known about the extraordinary riches within the country’s castles and palaces, not least because such seats remain in private hands and are not easily accessible to the public. The current exhibition at the Munich Haus der Kunst, Treasure Houses of Germany,1 gives some inkling of the variety and quantity of what has survived not only the ravages of the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic occupation, the abolition of the monarchy in 1918 and the expropriations in the Soviet Zone after the Second World War, but also the piecemeal dismantling, owing to financial pressures, of many aristocratic collections.

The exhibition is modelled on Treasure Houses of Britain, shown in Washington in 1985–86. It is billed as a ‘temporary national museum’ and aims to draw attention both to the wealth and to the plight of these historic collections which, while very different in character to the works of art amassed in Britain, are often beset by the same problems: the cost to the owners of maintaining the fabric of the buildings, inheritance taxes, falling agricultural revenues and flamboyant heirs who sell the family silver when their jet-set lifestyle is cramped by their overdraft.

There is much to marvel at in the exhibition. The bronze Resurrection (1618–24), commissioned from Adriaen de Vries for the mausoleum of Count Ernst I of Holstein-Lippe in the small town of Stadthagen in Niedersachsen (see Fig.86 on p.146 below), is itself worth the visit. Although the paintings on view are no match in quality for many of those in British stately homes, the best examples having gone into public collections after 1918, Rembrandt’s Diana and her nymphs bathing with Actaeon and Callisto from the picture gallery of the princes of Salm-Salm at Anholt, in Nordrhein-Westfalen, the only work left by the artist in a German private collection, would be outstanding in any exhibition. So too would the magnificent works by Nuremberg and Augsburg goldsmiths from the treasure vault of Schloss Eltz near the Mosel river. The quality of the prints from Wolfegg in Baden-Württemberg is dazzling, even though the Waldburg-Wolfegg family has not lent its finest sheets (the illustrations by the Housebook Master, for example) from their famous print room where – notwithstanding the sale in 2001 of the Waldseemüller map of 1507 to the Library of Congress, Washington – this venerable collection is still kept as it was three and a half centuries ago.

For all these particular splendours, the impression conveyed by the exhibition is curiously patchy and provincial. Fifteen years after unification, it seems extraordinary that the focus should be almost entirely on collections in the old Federal Republic, although property expropriated from families by the East German state between 1945 and 1949 has, in several cases, been restituted in conformance with a law of compensation passed in 1994. This stipulated that where the title can be proved, moveable items must be returned by 2014. Many cases are still pending, but the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha agreed to relinquish their priceless collections to the Land of Thuringia in return for eight hundred hectares of forest; and the former ruling house of Saxony received one third of its confiscated collections, in addition to remuneration for objects retained by the state as part of its heritage. Some of these restituted goods were sold at auction, and other owners have followed the same route, leading critics to bemoan that the 1994 law is far too generous to the plaintiffs and contradicts the clause in the unification law of 1990 whereby the cultural heritage of East Germany should not be harmed.

The uneasy relationship between private owners and the state accounts for the reluctance of many families to lend their treasures to the exhibition for fear of their being included on the list of works of art deemed to be of national importance. This inadequate, haphazard register of about one thousand items that cannot be exported is compiled by the sixteen Länder. It depends as much on the connoisseurship as on the commitment of those who advise the cultural ministries. Many owners feel that this system is equivalent to expropriation, particularly as there is no way of establishing the market value of the works of art, making it almost impossible to sell them even within Germany. It is not uncommon for owners to take objects abroad and then negotiate their return with the proviso that they be exempt from listing.

As occurred at the time of Treasure Houses of Britain, fears have been voiced that the Munich Haus der Kunst has opened its doors to a preview of items for future sale. These concerns have been compounded by the steady flow of works of art through the sale rooms since the early 1980s, when the German government was forced to pay a record price of more than £8 million at auction to recover for the nation one of its greatest treasures, the Gospels of Henry the Lion, spirited out of the country by the house of Hanover. Since then the descendants of other great families have parted with substantial swathes of their inheritance. Some, notably the Landgraves of Hesse, the owners of Holbein’s Darmstadt Madonna (for which a settlement in lieu is expected in due course), have been exemplary in making their inheritance accessible. Others have made long-term loans to museums. But the rights of private ownership versus public interest are regularly tested and in many instances scant concern has been shown for the national heritage. The German government and the Länder have been able to secure some of the most important items that have recently been put up for sale, but the Munich exhibition serves as a sharp reminder that the current system leaves much to be desired, not least because there is no central organisation in charge of these matters. It is ironic that the patchwork of small principalities responsible for the accumulation of such great visual wealth should now, in its federal guise, be an obstacle to its preservation for the wider national benefit.