L’amitié au coeur

You touch my heart – can I introduce myself? They call me L‘amitié au cœur or ‘heartfelt friendship’.

I held my heart in my hands once.

I am already several hundred years old. Perhaps you’re asking yourself why my head and arms are missing, and how I arrived in the Jewish Museum Berlin?

The sculptor who made me in 1765 was called Étienne-Maurice Falconet. I was made from marble for Madame Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV.

My unaffectedness and grace were celebrated when I was first presented in Paris. Later, I found myself in the Maurice de Rothschild family art collection.

My time in France came to an abrupt end in 1940. The Nazis looted me and took me to Hermann Göring’s ostentatious Carinhall hunting lodge northeast of Berlin, which is where Göring displayed his stolen art treasures. Sculptures, paintings, old masters and tapestries were all violently seized from Jewish owners across Europe.

In April 1945, shortly before the end of the war, Göring ordered his estate to be blown up and I lay smashed and buried in an air-raid shelter. I was considered missing until I was recovered in the 1990s.

Who I belong to today is a difficult question to answer. The Rothschild family, my actual owners, were compensated by the West German state at the end of the 1950s for the loss of their assets. So today I am, officially, the property of the German state.

History has left its unmistakable mark on me and on my marble. Maybe now I'm a symbol of abduction, loss, destruction… and of the impossibility of justice ever really being fully restored.