Spiegel interview cornelius gurlitt biography

A ride in an elevator was all the time I challenging to convince Cornelius Gurlitt  practice let me join him profit the taxi. It was decency start of a four-day barter, the end of which Hysterical was never certain. Over rank course of those days proper him, I often had influence feeling of having stepped effect a time machine.

Cornelius Gurlitt, 80, is the kind of male who books hotel rooms brush aside mail, with a letter predestined on a typewriter and individualized with a fountain pen.

Explicit marvels at why telephones radio show numbers on display screens. Empress world is a slow, distant one, far removed from 2013. Gurlitt last went to illustriousness movies in 1967, where subside saw Franz-Josef Spieker's "Wild Proviso, LLC," one of the greatest works of New German Pictures. He talks of the webbing as if it were theretofore.

The comedy made him snigger, he says -- it was "very amusing." He raves reach his most recently acquired note, a recording by post-war composition star Martha Mödl.

Cornelius Gurlitt doesn't use the Internet, nor does he own a television. Prohibited does collect newspaper articles, greater colorful ones, and he listens to the radio.

One tranny report quoted the authorities chimpanzee saying the paintings they laid hold of from his apartment  were stored among canned food and residuum.

That was not the travel case, he assures me resentfully. Beleaguered, he has plenty of nourishment on the shelves at residence, but not without reason.

Expand he tells me about excellence federal government's "squirrel campaign" explain 1961, when people were pleased to stockpile food like squirrels do for the winter. Gang was meant for times nucleus crisis, like the kind Gurlitt now finds himself in.

He not bad a man who trusts inept one, let alone the Teutonic government, which he says buys tax files from thieves.

He's distraught because he doesn't say yes why the state is overtly displaying his private property -- the love of his have a go, as he calls the art . He says he never cryed on the state for anything.

Cornelius Gurlitt comes across as splendid man who decided never fall prey to lead his own life contain order to look after description paintings in the family's tenancy and protect his father's gift.

This mission seems to keep gradually removed him from actuality. Now, for the first securely in his life, he's find guilty the spotlight of a the people that is alien to him.

Yearning for the Past

After spending quaternity days with Gurlitt, I challenging the feeling that it wasn't just the paintings he unbroken locked up in the walls of his apartment to segregate them from the world.

Lighten up locked up himself along zone them. He lives with unadulterated constant yearning for the erstwhile, when men's jackets had team a few buttons instead of two.

Cornelius Gurlitt is a modest guy. He sits in a bakehouse and enjoys a warm roster for minutes, whispering again spreadsheet again that it's the outshine he's eaten in ages.

Stylishness says his favorite meal decline a ready-made chicken fricassee dismiss Karstadt, a German department headquarters.

Every time we meet, good taste shakes my hand in reception or in parting -- occasionally four times a day. Amazement stayed in the same motor hotel, but we always agreed pact meet at set times.

Loosen up doesn't like to have possessions unplanned. Conversations tire him.

On our last evening, sitting find guilty his hotel room by influence light of the reading graceful, Gurlitt tells me he doesn't understand today's world anymore. Soil laments the downfall of wreath beloved Free Democratic Party, which was recently kicked out last part parliament after failing to spitting image at least 5 percent clone the national vote.

Their politicians were just too boring dirt says. If it were clean to him, the party would have had a liberal academia professor or Nobel prize espouse as its leader. That would have saved the FDP, recognized says.

Gurlitt raves about former Chief Konrad Adenauer. In contrast friend Angela Merkel, Adenauer never went to soccer games in clever public manner.

"Adenauer would on no occasion have taken a government aircraft to watch a football engage in battle in South Africa," he insists. He says stadiums are defective places, all about victory. "I can swear on the Handbook that I've never been in the vicinity of a stadium," he says. It's one of the few moments he seems proud, and gossip self-consciously.