The horrible legacy of Nazi expropriation of art work still bedevils German museums as the International Herald Tribune points out. This is not an easy problem to unravel. That may explain the amount of time it has taken for Germany to confront the problem:

It was not until 1998, when the government attended a seminal conference in Washington devoted to returning art to the descendants of Nazi victims, that it began to take the issue seriously. Despite some misgivings from the Foreign Ministry in Berlin that there would be an avalanche of new claims for restitution, Germany, along with 43 other countries, agreed that any art works confiscated during the Nazi era were to be searched for, identified and the rightful heirs determined. Then, “a fair and just solution” would be reached with the heirs.

Last week, the issue bubbled to the forefront once more. Art directors, lawyers and Jewish descendants attended a government-sponsored conference in Berlin to assess the results of the 1998 Washington conference, and the consensus emerged that Germany was still lagging behind other countries.

“The German government has taken very positive steps, but we are disappointed with the approach of most of the museums,” said Gideon Taylor, executive vice president of the nongovernmental Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, a group dating to the 1950s. “Many of the German museums have been very slow to carry out the provenance research which is necessary for there to be a fair and just claims process and, as importantly, an open and proper accounting of history.”

There is no single explanation for this failure. Some museum directors say they lack sufficient staff or funds to undertake the research. Others fear that if they establish the provenance, or legal ownership, they could end up giving back many paintings, leaving several museums bereft of prestigious collections. And if they tried to buy them back, they complain that they would have to compete with big auction houses and could not outbid private collectors or dealers.

Germany Tracing Artwork from Its Nazi Past (International Herald Tribune)