Steal Das Book

Rod Shene paid a paltry few grand for a volume worth $500,000 or more. Only one hitch: The German government wants it back.

Comments (0) By Kathleen McLaughlin Wednesday, Jul 11 2007

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"It's not a slam-dunk. They knew what they were looking for, and they found them," Brown says. "So that was a little embarrassing," he adds.

In all, the family turned over to the Germans three illustrated books, including Das Theater by Karl Walser, and Die Fabeln des Aesop.

The price was right: Rod Shene paid $3,800 for the Augsburg book and he won't give it up without a fight.

Local book dealer Michael Hirschfeld purchased two books from the Doty estate. Hirschfeld flipped his on eBay for about $4,00 apiece.

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In May 2005 they were invited to a ceremony to mark the books' return, held at the German Embassy in Washington, D.C.

A few days before the ceremony, Korte, along with curator Ulrike Gauss and cultural minister Joachim Uhlmann, were in St. Louis to examine a fourth book, another version of Aesop's Fables that had turned up in the possession of collector Jeanne Jarvis.

Jarvis relinquished the book after receiving a letter from Kline that reads in part, "The State hopes you will agree to return Esopus to Baden-Württemberg by presenting it to Dr. Gauss and Mr. Uhlmann this evening. The State is the owner of the book and returning it today will avoid litigation."

Over meals before and after the ceremony, Peter Brown says he told Gauss his uncle's sketchy tale of rescuing the books from a fire. And when he and his wife visited Europe the next fall, they made a detour to Stuttgart.

They expected Gauss to give them a tour of the gallery, but she had a surprise.

She told them she'd been doing some homework. She took them to Waldenburg and related a story she'd been told by two old men who as children had watched the treasures of the Württemberg State Gallery being passed, hand to hand, up the hill to the castle.

Brown was impressed by the castle, which had been rebuilt. The houses had been rebuilt as well. He could make out the original stone foundations.

"It was easy to visualize what it was like for these people, living in all this rubble" and having to burn treasured artifacts in order to keep warm, Brown says today. "According to the old-timers, they had formed human chains to help store them. So they knew they were from a museum. It's hard for us, sitting here in our easy chairs watching television, to imagine what it's like for people whose homes have just been blown up."

Brown believes the Augsburg book belongs in the German museum.

Still, he is unable to reconcile the fundamental legal implications of that position with the image in his mind: of his uncle, the rescuer. "The hard part about this is they're not stolen, [as in] someone broke into a museum and stole them," Brown says.

"In a strictly legal sense, it's stealing — but that wasn't his intent."