Hans and Walther Heymann

Dr. Nadine Bauer
Provenance researcher at the Brücke-Museum

The Brothers’ Biographies

The brothers Walther and Hans Heymann came from a middle-class Jewish family in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) who were passionate about music, art and literature. Their father, J. Richard Heymann, was a successful grain wholesaler, and their mother, Johanna, was a concert pianist. The couple also had three other sons. J. Richard died in 1908. In 1912, Johanna and her sons left Königsberg and moved to Berlin, where she died not long after (1913). Max Pechstein made a drawing of her in this private moment on her deathbed, which attests to the close relationship between the family and the artist.

Walther Heymann (1882–1915) initially pursued a legal career. However, his success with the publication of an Expressionist volume of poetry, Der Springbrunnen (1907), motivated the 25-year-old to continue writing instead. He greatly admired Max Pechstein’s art, about which he wrote the first monograph in 1914. Walther’s life was cut short while serving as a German soldier ‒ he was killed in France during the First World War.

Hans Heymann (1885–1949) studied philosophy, economics and law. In 1913, he married Ella Jeannette Catz, an opera soprano. He was an innovator and expert in the fields of insurance and international banking, and also noted for developing a new form of insurance that combined the principles of property and life insurance. In 1920, Hans Heymann founded an insurance company (Hausleben Versicherung A.G.) in Berlin, which flourished for a number of years until it went bankrupt in 1931. From 1921 to 1931, he was also an adviser to the German Foreign Office. He wrote a series of highly acclaimed books on insurance, international loans, and banks. At the international Economic and Financial Conference in Genoa in 1922, Walther Rathenau, the Foreign Minister of Germany, recommended Heymann’s plan for a new global bank. This plan subsequently provided the basis for founding the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel in 1930.

With the advance of National Socialism, antisemitic hostilities and reprisals, neither Hans Heymann nor his wife Ella were able to continue working in their professions and faced increasing financial hardships. Heymann and his son Hans Heymann, Jr. emigrated to New York in the summer of 1936. Ella Heymann followed in 1937. The couple’s three other children also left Germany. At the invitation and with the support of a consortium of American investors eager to establish Heymann’s property life invention in the U.S., Heymann gave lectures, wrote publications and worked with his son Hans, Jr. to launch the Property Life Insurance Company of America. Legislation authorizing this insurance was passed in the States of New York and Illinois, and other substantial progress was made. Despite these efforts, deteriorating economic conditions in the U.S. in 1937 and 1938 resulted in the shutdown of the project just before it was to open. In 1939 Heymann was then appointed a research professor of economics at Rutgers University, a post he held until 1943. Thereafter he held various other academic posts until his death in 1949 in Champaign Illinois, where he was a guest professor. Before his death, he continued to write and publish articles and books on international economics.1

Hans Heymann as an Art Collector and the Remembrance of His Brother Walther

Hans Heymann was also a patron of the arts and one of the first collectors of Max Pechstein’s works. From 1909 to 1930, he assembled one of the largest collections of Pechstein’s early period, comprising 41 oil paintings and around 120 other artworks in 1936. The background for forming the collection was quite personal. It was initiated through his brother Walther, who was friends with Pechstein and an early promoter of his work but did not have the funds to purchase the artworks himself. After Walther’s death, Hans named the collection the Walther Heymann Gedächtnissammlung (Walther Heymann Memorial Collection) in tribute to his brother.

When the Heymanns decided to leave Berlin in 1936 because of the mounting pressure of persecution from the Nazi regime, they stored their belongings with a shipping agency. In 1941, the National Socialists confiscated all the Heymanns’ possessions left behind in Berlin, and the trail of what happened to them was lost. Hans Heymann never gave up hope that his art collection would be returned to him. Immediately after the war, on 8 May 1945 (VE Day), he wrote from New Jersey to his brother Werner Richard Heymann in California: “If we would ever see our big Pechstein collection …..?” He compiled a list in 1948, recording all the lost works.2 Hans Heymann continued to search for the collection after the war until he died in 1949. He even got in touch with Max Pechstein, who, of course, shared this great interest in discovering the whereabouts of numerous of his works and initiated a search among the Allied authorities – with no success. Heymann’s widow, Ella, and later their son, Hans, Jr., continued the search. Since then, the generation of grandchildren has taken over the task of trying to find clues to the family’s lost collection. The Heymanns have remained in close contact with the Pechstein family throughout the generations.

Max Pechstein’s Drawing Two Female Dancers is Restituted to the Heymann Family

Hans Heymann compiled a list of the works in his collection in 1948. Along with the list, he cited his brother Walther’s Pechstein monograph, which Hans had published posthumously for him in 1916. That publication includes an illustration of the drawing Zwei Tänzerinnen (Two Female Dancers, 1910) on page 9 (fig.). The drawing, which had been part of the Brücke-Museum collection since 1971, was restituted to the Heymann family in 2024. The museum’s close and constructive exchange with the Heymann family and the HCPO has helped to research and reconstruct the brothers’ lives and Hans Heymann’s art collection.

• 1
  The biographical and personal information presented here relies mainly on the following source: “Biographical Notes for Hans Heymann, Sr., assembled from many sources by Kendra Heymann Sagoff, granddaughter”, 2016.
• 2
  Landesamt für Bürger- und Ordnungsangelegenheiten, Entschädigungsbehörde, Hans Heymann file, no. 64.607, D3 and D4.