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The 15th Annual Deborah Pulliam Memorial Lecture: "Rising from the Ashes: Building on Restituted Family Property in Post-Nazi Berlin, Germany”

The Castine Historical Society is pleased to announce the 15th Annual Deborah Pulliam Lecture on Thursday, August 8th at 7:00 p.m at Delano Auditorium, Leavitt Hall, Maine Maritime Academy, Castine, entitled “Rising from the Ashes: Building on Restituted Family Property in Post-Nazi Berlin, Germany”. The evening’s guest speaker will be Hans D. Strauch, an architect based in Boston and a Castine summer resident.

Strauch’s illustrated talk will discuss how the Mosse family legacy was all but erased by the time Strauch, a Mosse descendent and founder of Boston’s HDS Architecture, first visited Berlin, Germany.

Before World War II, patriarch Rudolf Mosse had built a sizable publishing and advertising empire which printed 130 newspapers and journals, one of the largest such enterprises in Europe. He was known for his extensive philanthropy, a distinguished art collection, and his family home, the majestic Mosse Palais in Berlin’s Leipziger Platz. Mosse family members were also recognized as leaders of the Berlin Jewish Reform Community.

Following Rudolf’s death in 1920, his son-in-law Hans Lachmann-Mosse assumed management of the Rudolf Mosse Company and continued the family’s philanthropy and arts patronage. However, after the Mosse flagship paper, the Berliner Tageblatt, published anti-Hitler sentiments, the Nazis targeted them. The family fled Germany and eventually came to the United States. Their property on Leipziger Platz was confiscated in 1933, and the Nazis auctioned more than 1,000 pieces of the Mosse art collection.

Strauch’s lecture will discuss his family roots in Berlin, the history of the property, and the family’s successful restitution of the land following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In 1998 construction of the new Mosse Palais, designed by Strauch, was completed. The building’s first occupant, the American Jewish Committee, remains in the building to this day. In addition to creating this physical representation of the Mosse legacy in Berlin, the family has the largest ongoing art restitution project in Europe.

This lecture will also be available on YouTube. Visit castinehistoricalsociety.org for the YouTube link.

7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.