Archaeology Magazine - November/December 1993 - 57

like a graceful bear through his cavernous apartment
Troy by a thousand years. Initially displayed in Berlin's
Ethnographic Museum, the treasure - bracelets, di- on Suarez Street, in the same neighborhood as Charadems, beads, ear ornaments, and two-handled cups lottenburg Palace, a wing of which currently houses his
became part of the collections of the new Museum für museum. (The museum was located before the end of
Vor- und Frühgeschichte (Museum for Pre- and Early World War II in Martin Gropius Bau, a handsome
History) in 1932. There it remained until the early building still standing in western Berlin.)
Goldmann's rounds are orderly. Most mornings he is
years of World War II.
When British bombers began striking at Berlin, the in his office, perusing his mail. A day's yield might incollection was packed in numbered crates and stored in clude a parcel meticulously tied with string, sent by a
the biggest of six massive anti-aircraft towers built in homeowner who has come upon ancient potsherds in a
flea market or a flower garden. Goldmann does his best
1941-42. Known as Flakturm Zoo from its location
to identify them. Then there are letters from strangers
near the zoo in central Berlin and from the acronym
flak (conflating German words for aviator, defense, and who volunteer bits of information about the fate of artcannons), its concrete walls were eight feet thick and works lost during the war's chaotic climax.
When I visited him recently, Goldmann had received
132 feet high, and enclosed a military garrison, a hosjust such a serendipitous prize: a copy of a wartime
pital, an air-raid shelter, and capacious storerooms.
Three levels beneath a roof bristling with anti-airdiary kept by Friederich Winkler, then director of prints
and drawings at Berlin's state museums. "It was sent to
craft guns were masterworks from Berlin's museums:
me by Winkler's son," Goldmann explained, "and the
hundreds of paintings and sculptures, the disassembled
Pergamon Altar, and the Trojan treasure. In early 1945, handwriting was hard to decipher. But the pages for
museum officials began dispersing many of these works 1945 are intact, not ripped out or illegible. It's astonishto caves, castles, mine shafts, and monasteries in west- ing how many of these records have been carefully exern Germany to avoid their capture by the Red Army. In purgated because so much happened that people want
to hide or forget. Winkler deMay 1945, the Battle of Berlin
scribes what happened on
ended as General Zhukov's
forces stormed the city. One
Everybody knew the war was lost
February 1, 1945, when he
went with a museum handyout of three buildings lay in
man to Flakturm Zoo. This
ruins, but Flakturm Zoo still
and the Nazis believed that art could
was two days before a particustood. Soviet troops seized the
famous altar, erected by
larly heavy air raid that led
Hitler to order the removal of
Eumenes II (197-160 b.c.), the
buy them clemency, or favored
from
artworks
important
king of Pergamon, near the
"
Berlin. But there is evidence
Aegean coast of Asia Minor.
treatment - it was foreign
currency.
that things were moving even
Taken to Berlin in the ninebefore that order. Winkler
teenth century by German archaeologists, the altar, with its renowned marble frieze writes that on this day he was ordered - together with
all the other directors - to meet two high-ranking offidepicting the battle of the gods and giants, was trucked
to the Soviet Union. It remained there until 1958, when cials, and their names are legible. They gave the order
Nikita Khrushchev returned it as a goodwill offering to to evacuate the treasures from the Berlin depositories
to the west, immediately. And one of them says, 'This is
Communist East Germany.
Schliemann's treasure, however, vanished without a foreign currency.' Everybody knew the war was lost and
trace. Only after the end of the Cold War would its the Nazis believed that art could buy them clemency, or
favored treatment - it was foreign currency."
whereabouts become known. In 1991, a correspondent
for ARTnews magazine reported that the Trojan materAnd what of Priam's Treasure? I asked Goldmann to
ial had been spirited away to Moscow and hidden in a explain how he got involved. At war's end, he was a
secret depot. What remains uncertain is whether and youngster of nine in Guben/Niederlausitz, a small town
in what circumstances the Schliemann gold will be re- in the flat, fertile country some 60 miles southeast of
turned to Berlin. Whatever happens, major credit for Berlin at today's border with Poland. From 1948 on he
spurring the quest belongs to Klaus Goldmann, the has lived in Neumünster, an industrial city between
distinguished prehistorian and curator at Berlin's Mu- Hamburg and Kiel. He excelled as a student, and came
seum of Pre- and Early History.
to Berlin to study banking, but found, like Schliemann
before him, that archaeology had greater allure. "I was
By avocation, Klaus Goldmann has become a sleuth
and seeker of wartime loot. Living much of his life in good at mathematics, and my great interest was in
divided Berlin, he has had to navigate across, or more Bronze Age chronology," he went on. "I learned about
often around, the political fault lines of East and West. computers and decided to use them for classification
Now in his mid-fifties, Goldmann is genial yet guarded,
purposes, and I believe I was one of the first to do so."
and his eyes, delft blue, tend to widen behind his spec- He began his archaeological studies in Berlin and retacles as he builds an argument with unhurried sen- ceived his doctorate from Cologne University in 1970.
tences and parenthetical sighs. Solidly built, he moves Shortly thereafter, he took part in an archaeological
28 Arc ii a i.o i.o (;v

Archaeology Magazine - November/December 1993

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - November/December 1993