A hostage of the Cold War: The return of the monastery treasure of Pechory

Abstract

Abstract The collection of liturgical objects of the Pechory Monastery close to the city of Pskov on Lake Peipus was deployed as a repository in Germany by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg during World War II. After the war, it was not subject to intergovernmental restitution but was stored away in the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point and subsequently handed over to the newly founded Icon Museum of Recklinghausen before being restituted to the monastery almost two decades later. This article gives a description of the treasure itself and its history. It traces the odyssey of the treasure in Germany until its restitution and examines the different stages of its journey. The handling of this case in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) is symptomatic of the official German attitude toward National Socialist cultural loot and of the changing debates around this subject throughout the decades. These debates form a micro-history that reflects the FRG’s master narratives about World War II and its consequences, the division of Germany, and its changing, but questionable, relationship to the Soviet Union. In addition, it closely follows the political mainstream from the deep anti-Soviet attitudes of the postwar years to Chancellor Willy Brandt’s policy of détente in the 1970s, which made the restitution actually possible. The act in its entity can be seen as a typical example of Nazi Germany’s art looting in the occupied parts of Europe and of the particular conditions in Central and Eastern Europe as well as the after-war restitution policies of the Western allies and the FRG. It is nonetheless typical of the Soviet Union’s policy of denying restitutions later on, including immediate postwar restitutions as well as later acts such as the one involving the Pechory treasure, which has sometimes been repeated up to the present day.