# The Wild Turkeys of Schleswig

An episode of [Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1484511465), 25 Nov 2022, 39 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdrl.fm/18db03/tracking.swap.fm/track/SxlTEPDY7xDg35RXkASs/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/c0ae8c6e-22f0-4e9b-ac1c-ae390037ac53/00e59251-27e9-479a-8d78-af540122dfac/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=7f5a4714-6b10-4ccf-a424-ae390037ac70

There are eight American turkeys painted on the walls of Schleswig's Cathedral of St Peter - which is odd... since the frescoes were created two centuries before Columbus even crossed the Atlantic. How did the creatures come to be added to the medieval Biblical scene? Was this proof that the Germans reached the Americas before Columbus? Or do the painted birds tell a different story all together? For a full list of sources used in this episode visit Tim Harford.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:15] Speaker 1: Pushkin for a charming little town. Schleswig in Germany has
[0:25] Speaker 1: a magnificent old cathedral. Parts of the Cathedral of Saint
[0:29] Speaker 1: Peter date back nearly nine hundred years, and King Frederick,
[0:33] Speaker 1: the First of Denmark is buried there. Decade after decade,
[0:37] Speaker 1: century after century, new parts were added to the building,
[0:41] Speaker 1: the new artwork. Late in the eighteen hundreds, Schleswig became
[0:47] Speaker 1: the regional capital and work began on the restoration of
[0:50] Speaker 1: the cathedral's great Gothic frescoes. These pictures were painted on
[0:55] Speaker 1: the walls of the cathedral cloisters. They were glorious, but
[0:59] Speaker 1: they were fading, flaking, being corroded by six centuries of damp,
[1:06] Speaker 1: and so the cathedral commissioned a painter, August Olbas, to
[1:11] Speaker 1: restore the great medieval paintings. His work began in eighteen
[1:15] Speaker 1: eighty eight, and it was widely admired for its beauty
[1:19] Speaker 1: and clarity. Five decades passed and tastes changed, as tastes do.
[1:27] Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty seven, the church authorities decided that August
[1:31] Speaker 1: Olbers had done a terrible job. He'd added too much repainting,
[1:38] Speaker 1: rather than carefully revealing and conserving what was there. The
[1:42] Speaker 1: new conventional wisdom was that a modern restorer shouldn't add
[1:46] Speaker 1: anything to the original work, and in particular shouldn't fill
[1:51] Speaker 1: in the blanks where the original work had disappeared in patches.
[1:55] Speaker 1: Alba's had done all that, it was agreed that his
[1:59] Speaker 1: work must be removed, and the original medieval art, even
[2:04] Speaker 1: if incomplete or damaged, must be revealed. So three men
[2:10] Speaker 1: began the second attempt at restoration. In charge was Professor
[2:15] Speaker 1: Ernst Faye, a noted art restorer and a widely admired
[2:20] Speaker 1: historian of art. Assisting him was Dietrich Faye, his son,
[2:26] Speaker 1: and at the bottom of the pyramid. Assisting them both
[2:29] Speaker 1: was a young painter by the name of Lothar Malskat. Faye,
[2:34] Speaker 1: Faye and Malscat worked diligently for months, protecting the artwork
[2:40] Speaker 1: with scaffolds and tarpaulin, until finally revealing the restored work
[2:45] Speaker 1: in all its glory. The critics were astounded and delighted.
[2:51] Speaker 1: The paintings may have dated all the way back to
[2:54] Speaker 1: the year thirteen hundred or even earlier. Under the sensitive
[2:58] Speaker 1: guidance a Professor Faye, they'd been restored so beautifully that
[3:02] Speaker 1: they might have been painted yesterday. It was a triumph
[3:07] Speaker 1: something for visitors to the Cathedral of Saint Peter to
[3:10] Speaker 1: marvel act. Although there was one curious fact about the
[3:17] Speaker 1: restored frescoes. A local historian was the first to notice it.
[3:23] Speaker 1: Christopher Columbus had reached the Americas in fourteen ninety two.
[3:27] Speaker 1: So wasn't it striking that a biblical fresco painted two
[3:33] Speaker 1: centuries before that voyage depicted eight creatures that were definitely
[3:39] Speaker 1: unmistakably American. Wild turkis I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening
[3:49] Speaker 1: to cautionary tales. If Professor Ernst Faye felt awkward about
[4:16] Speaker 1: the presence of those suspiciously anachronistic turkeys, he didn't show it.
[4:22] Speaker 1: But then he was a man with powerful friends. Faye
[4:26] Speaker 1: was undoubtedly an expert in art history, particularly the history
[4:31] Speaker 1: of church frescoes, and he was a skilled artist too,
[4:36] Speaker 1: that his most valuable ability was as a networker. In
[4:41] Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties, he flattered his way into the circle
[4:44] Speaker 1: of Hermann Gering, the most powerful man in Nazi Germany
[4:49] Speaker 1: other than Adolf Hitler himself. Gerring liked to think of
[4:53] Speaker 1: himself as a great connoisseur of art and loved having
[4:57] Speaker 1: men such as Professor Faye to reassure him that he
[5:00] Speaker 1: was Faye's son. Dietrich learned everything his father had to
[5:06] Speaker 1: teach him about the history of art and the game
[5:09] Speaker 1: of securing powerful patrons. Before taking on the restoration of
[5:14] Speaker 1: Saint Peter's in Schleswig, they had been kept busy with
[5:17] Speaker 1: a string of prestigious commissions to restore paintings across Germany.
[5:22] Speaker 1: They could scarcely keep up with the pace of work.
[5:25] Speaker 1: It was at this moment, in nineteen thirty six, that
[5:28] Speaker 1: Lothar Malskat had knocked on the door of Ernst Faye's
[5:33] Speaker 1: home in Berlin and asked if he was looking for
[5:35] Speaker 1: an assistant. Malskat was twenty three, talented and desperate. He'd
[5:42] Speaker 1: studied at the Art Academy of Kernucksburg, and his professors
[5:46] Speaker 1: had been hugely impressed by the range of styles he
[5:49] Speaker 1: could execute. One of them called his versatility extraordinary, almost uncanny.
[5:57] Speaker 1: But when he'd tried to launch his career as an
[6:00] Speaker 1: artist in nineteen thirties Berlin, he had sunk without trace.
[6:06] Speaker 1: Professor Ernst Faye looked Malskat up and down, coolly, appraising
[6:11] Speaker 1: him as he might have appraised a Flemish still life.
[6:15] Speaker 1: Malskat looked hungry. He'd been sleeping on park benches. Professor
[6:21] Speaker 1: Faye offered him a job whitewashing his house. It was
[6:26] Speaker 1: a start. Malskat was a quick learner. Under the tutelage
[6:32] Speaker 1: of Professor Faye, and with access to Faye's extensive library
[6:36] Speaker 1: of ecclesiastical art, Malskat learned more than most people will
[6:40] Speaker 1: ever know about restoring church paintings. The duo of Faye
[6:47] Speaker 1: and Faye were now a trio, or so it seemed
[6:50] Speaker 1: to Malskat, But to Ernst and Dietrich Faye, the hungry,
[6:55] Speaker 1: homeless guy they'd taken pity on. He'd only ever be
[6:58] Speaker 1: the hired help. A year later, Faye, Faye and Maulscat
[7:04] Speaker 1: stood in the cloisters of Schleswig Cathedral and contemplated the
[7:08] Speaker 1: work of August Olba's Alba's Remember had taken moldering work
[7:14] Speaker 1: from the thirteen hundreds and sumptuously restored it, adding paint
[7:18] Speaker 1: where the original was thinning and freestyling over the gaps
[7:22] Speaker 1: where the original had gone. His work had been admired
[7:25] Speaker 1: of the time, but times had changed. Alba's's renovation had
[7:31] Speaker 1: to be carefully removed. The medieval work underneath needed to
[7:34] Speaker 1: be uncovered and displayed, and so the trio began to
[7:39] Speaker 1: scrape away all traces of Alba's' work, slowly, slowly, slowly.
[7:47] Speaker 1: But perhaps Alba's had been careless, or perhaps his successes
[7:52] Speaker 1: had been because when they'd finished, there's nothing left. Professor
[7:58] Speaker 1: Faye reported, a worried mouse cat nothing well, almost nothing.
[8:05] Speaker 1: See for yourself. No, no, no, just can't be. The
[8:11] Speaker 1: paintings were more than six centuries old. They were jewels
[8:16] Speaker 1: in the crown of German heritage, or at least they
[8:19] Speaker 1: had been. Now they were a few flakes of paint
[8:24] Speaker 1: on a moldy old wall, and Professor Ernst Faye was
[8:28] Speaker 1: in charge of the disaster. Schiser Schis swore Ernst Faye, no, no,
[8:35] Speaker 1: don't worry, you can fix this. Mouscat fetch them whitewash, whitewash,
[8:40] Speaker 1: Professor Faye, We're going to start again. Then start again
[8:45] Speaker 1: they did. Lothar mauscat had started working for Ernst Faye
[8:50] Speaker 1: by whitewashing his house. Now he was whitewashing the cloisters
[8:55] Speaker 1: of Schleswig cathedral. He gave himself a completely blank surface
[9:00] Speaker 1: on which to work, the whitewash slightly tinted to give
[9:04] Speaker 1: the impression of age, and then he began to paint
[9:09] Speaker 1: free hand, finally living up to the promise his Kernicksburg
[9:13] Speaker 1: professors had admired. His uncanny ability to work in any style.
[9:19] Speaker 1: Was the whole scam Malskat's idea or Dietrich phase, we
[9:24] Speaker 1: don't know. Jonathan Keats, and artist and art historian, thinks
[9:29] Speaker 1: that even though Malskat was the one holding the brush,
[9:32] Speaker 1: the mastermind was the man in charge, Professor Ernst Faye himself.
[9:39] Speaker 1: Malskat was not painting purely from his imagination. He had
[9:43] Speaker 1: studied Professor Faye's books, which were filled with medieval art.
[9:47] Speaker 1: He had, of course observed August Olbers's work up close,
[9:51] Speaker 1: as he carefully scraped it away and into the mix
[9:55] Speaker 1: of nineteenth century restoration and medieval work, he stirred other influences.
[10:01] Speaker 1: He based the face of Jesus on an old classmate
[10:05] Speaker 1: from Kernicksburg. He boldly drew a prophet with the features
[10:09] Speaker 1: of his own father, and the Virgin Mary was inspired
[10:14] Speaker 1: by the beautiful young actress Hans Knottec a huge star
[10:18] Speaker 1: in the German movies of the day, After all, reasoned Malskat,
[10:23] Speaker 1: if you're going to draw the Virgin Mary base her
[10:26] Speaker 1: on a woman who also inspired devotion a film star,
[10:31] Speaker 1: it all sounds absurd, and Malskat was certainly improvising more
[10:36] Speaker 1: than one might expect. But he had a gift and
[10:41] Speaker 1: expertly inhabited the simple, almost cartoonish style of the fourteenth century.
[10:48] Speaker 1: The finishing touches came from Professor Faye, who gave the
[10:51] Speaker 1: brown and orange drawings the patina of the ages by
[10:55] Speaker 1: gently rubbing them with a brick. The whole thing looked
[10:59] Speaker 1: rather convincing. Film star or no film star, that said,
[11:05] Speaker 1: in a biblical image that was supposed to have been
[11:08] Speaker 1: painted two centuries before Columbus sailed to America, surely including
[11:14] Speaker 1: eight turkeys, would see the deception immediately unravel, wouldn't it.
[11:21] Speaker 1: Cautionary tales will return after this message. In Nazi Germany,
[11:39] Speaker 1: there was really only one possible reaction to the discovery
[11:43] Speaker 1: of eight turkeys on a supposedly medieval fresco. The murals
[11:49] Speaker 1: were genuine. It was history that had been faked. The
[11:55] Speaker 1: idea had already been circulating that a German explorer named
[11:59] Speaker 1: Diedrich Pinning had reached the Americas in fourteen seventy three,
[12:04] Speaker 1: nineteen years before Columbus. Although there isn't much evidence that
[12:08] Speaker 1: this is true, the theory was enthusiastically endorsed by the
[12:13] Speaker 1: Nazi authorities in the nineteen thirties. Now the Schleswig Turkeys
[12:19] Speaker 1: showed that Pinning hadn't been the first. Here, at last
[12:23] Speaker 1: was definitive proof that the Aryan race had not only
[12:27] Speaker 1: reached the America's centuries earlier than that swore the Mediterranean
[12:32] Speaker 1: scoundrel Columbus, but they'd returned home with a population of
[12:38] Speaker 1: wild turkeys. The theory was ludicrous on its face, but
[12:44] Speaker 1: it was almost universally embraced. The Schleswiger Truthan builder or
[12:50] Speaker 1: Schlesswig Turkey pictures should have been an embarrassment. Instead, they
[12:55] Speaker 1: were a cause for national celebration, and perhaps that shouldn't
[13:01] Speaker 1: be surprising. Germany had become a fascist state, keen to
[13:06] Speaker 1: amplify any idea that suggested and greatness, no matter how
[13:11] Speaker 1: absurd that idea might be. There were rewards for complicity,
[13:17] Speaker 1: and there were punishments for dissent. After all, Professor Faye
[13:22] Speaker 1: was responsible for the restoration. Professor Faye was friends with
[13:27] Speaker 1: Herman Gering, and people who upset Herman Gering had a
[13:31] Speaker 1: tendency to disappear. If you had a problem with the
[13:35] Speaker 1: Turks of Schleswig, Herman Gering had a problem with you.
[13:42] Speaker 1: One of the historians who promoted the Turkey sketches as
[13:46] Speaker 1: vital historical evidence was Professor Alfred Stanger, one of the
[13:51] Speaker 1: leading ideologus in Nazi Germany. Stanger declared that the restoration
[13:56] Speaker 1: was as restrained as it was careful, which when you
[14:01] Speaker 1: think about it, is true, and that the murals were
[14:05] Speaker 1: the last, deepest final word in German art. Is a
[14:12] Speaker 1: lie still a lie when everyone in power agrees to
[14:16] Speaker 1: believe it. Yet there was one notable voice raised to
[14:21] Speaker 1: expose the lie. The original renovator of the murals, eighty
[14:27] Speaker 1: year old August Olbers, was still alive and mightily surprised
[14:31] Speaker 1: to hear so many historians building theories off the back
[14:35] Speaker 1: of those turkeys. Herr Albas came forward to declare that
[14:39] Speaker 1: the Turks of Schleswig hadn't been painted in the year
[14:43] Speaker 1: thirteen hundred. He had painted some himself in eighteen eighty nine,
[14:47] Speaker 1: or so four of them. Anyway, Olbers had been restoring
[14:51] Speaker 1: a mural depicting King Herod's massacre of the Innocence, and
[14:55] Speaker 1: there was a blank space underneath it which had wants
[14:58] Speaker 1: contained medieval work. Olbas decided to add an alternating pattern
[15:03] Speaker 1: of foxes and turkeys. It was a visual allegory for
[15:08] Speaker 1: King Herod's combat nation of cunning and greed. But Alba's,
[15:12] Speaker 1: remember had never pretended to be doing anything other than
[15:16] Speaker 1: filling in the gaps between the original work. It's what
[15:19] Speaker 1: people had wanted back then. As Lothar Malskat had been
[15:24] Speaker 1: riffing away, faking medieval frescoes while drawing inspiration from art
[15:29] Speaker 1: history books, contemporary film stills, and Albas's nineteenth century editions,
[15:35] Speaker 1: he must have seen those turkeys and liked them, not
[15:39] Speaker 1: caring or more likely not realizing that they could never
[15:43] Speaker 1: have been in the underlying medieval work. After all, Malskat
[15:48] Speaker 1: was an artist, not an ornithologist. Alba's had originally painted
[15:57] Speaker 1: four turkeys. Malskat's allegedly medieval restoration now contained eight. And
[16:05] Speaker 1: now there were two awkward facts pointing to the conclusion
[16:08] Speaker 1: that Faye Faye and Malskat were frauds. First, it was
[16:15] Speaker 1: perfectly obvious that Aran Vikings had not brought turkeys back
[16:20] Speaker 1: from the Americus of the twelve hundreds. Second, the man
[16:24] Speaker 1: who had originally put those turkeys on the walls of
[16:27] Speaker 1: the cloisters of Schlesvig Cathedral, August Olbers, was telling everyone
[16:32] Speaker 1: exactly what had happened. Yet given the political context, nobody
[16:38] Speaker 1: wanted to listen. Experts queued up to explain that old
[16:42] Speaker 1: hair Olbers was evidently suffering from dementia. The grand lie
[16:49] Speaker 1: was further cemented in nineteen forty when Heinrich Himmler, head
[16:54] Speaker 1: of the Nazi SS, ordered that every German school should
[16:58] Speaker 1: receive a copy of Schleswig Cathedral and its murals. An
[17:03] Speaker 1: illustrated book by the Nazi art historian Alfred Stanger. It's
[17:08] Speaker 1: quite a book. Stanger notes that the schleshfig figures resemble
[17:13] Speaker 1: those from further west and south in Germany. It's proof
[17:18] Speaker 1: that Germany is one nation. Maltscat had painted them to
[17:23] Speaker 1: fit Nazi racial stereotypes. I had to paint the apostles
[17:27] Speaker 1: as long headed Vikings, he said, because one did not
[17:31] Speaker 1: want Eastern roundheads. Maltscat evidently knew how to please his audience.
[17:38] Speaker 1: Stanger almost purs with pleasure as he uses the murals
[17:42] Speaker 1: to draw a link between the German bloodline and the Vikings.
[17:47] Speaker 1: Stanger explains that the unknown painter, working around twelve eighty,
[17:53] Speaker 1: displayed astonishing powers of discernment in portraying the turkeys he
[17:59] Speaker 1: had observed and reproduced the creature's individuality and smallest idiosyncrasies. Well,
[18:08] Speaker 1: I'll grant this, They definitely looked like turkeys. Stanger added
[18:15] Speaker 1: that the portrayals are not, as so often borrowed from
[18:19] Speaker 1: reference books, but based on a high degree of personal observation.
[18:25] Speaker 1: But good to know, just in case you'd been thinking
[18:27] Speaker 1: that the Vikings had reached the Americas. That brought back
[18:30] Speaker 1: nothing but an encyclopedia, and just in case there was
[18:34] Speaker 1: any doubt about the subtext. A guidebook for tourists visiting
[18:39] Speaker 1: the cathedral of Saint Peter in Schleswig explained that Aryan
[18:43] Speaker 1: seafarers went to America long before Columbus did. Incidentally, Columbus
[18:48] Speaker 1: is the descendant of Spanish Jews from Barcelona. Combine one
[18:53] Speaker 1: part comical fraud with one part fascist ideology, stirwell, add
[18:59] Speaker 1: a pinch of intimidation and you have a lie baked
[19:03] Speaker 1: in so thoroughly that nobody seems to be able to
[19:07] Speaker 1: even imagine the truth. The only comfort, surely is that
[19:12] Speaker 1: such a thing could never happen in a democracy. Or
[19:17] Speaker 1: could it? The answer may be less encouraging than we'd
[19:21] Speaker 1: like to think. Let me explain. Sunday, March the twenty ninth,
[19:28] Speaker 1: nineteen forty two Palm Sunday. In fact, Winston Churchill has
[19:34] Speaker 1: grown tired of trying to bomb small and well defended
[19:38] Speaker 1: German factories and has decided to fire bomb a civilian
[19:42] Speaker 1: population instead. The British choose Lubeck, a beautiful medieval port
[19:49] Speaker 1: less than one hundred miles away from Schleswig. Lubeck is
[19:54] Speaker 1: a soft target, largely undefended buildings supported by ancient dry
[20:00] Speaker 1: wooden beams. The darkness of the blacked out city unmistakable
[20:05] Speaker 1: in contrast with nearby fields dusted with sparkling late spring
[20:10] Speaker 1: frost and waterways glinting in the light of the full moon.
[20:15] Speaker 1: The Royal Air Force come in low. They dropped four
[20:20] Speaker 1: hundred tons of bombs, most of them in centuries, and
[20:25] Speaker 1: the center of the Lubeck burns right in the middle
[20:30] Speaker 1: of it. All is Lubec's great medieval church, the Marian Kiyoshi.
[20:35] Speaker 1: The firestorm is so hot that the church bells melt,
[20:42] Speaker 1: And yet after the embers had cooled, came the miracle
[20:46] Speaker 1: of Marion Kiyoshi. On the walls of the church, huge
[20:52] Speaker 1: Gothic frescoes had been exposed. They'd been concealed under centuries
[20:57] Speaker 1: of whitewash, but the whitewash had been peeled away in
[21:00] Speaker 1: the heat. It was the most astonishing inspiring discovery. Of course,
[21:06] Speaker 1: those frescoes now needed to be preserved by the best
[21:10] Speaker 1: experts in Germany. But there was a war on, so
[21:14] Speaker 1: Ubec's authorities put up some temporary roofing and awaited the
[21:19] Speaker 1: day that the war ended. That day didn't come for
[21:23] Speaker 1: another three years. Lothar Malscat had been jobless and penniless
[21:31] Speaker 1: at the end of the war, trying to make a
[21:33] Speaker 1: living by painting erotic pictures. If the German economy hadn't
[21:38] Speaker 1: been wrecked many young German men killed in the war,
[21:41] Speaker 1: and if he hadn't been selling them on the streets,
[21:44] Speaker 1: he might have scraped together a living. But he didn't, so,
[21:49] Speaker 1: just as he had done back in the nineteen thirties,
[21:51] Speaker 1: he had gone to the Phay's house in desperation and
[21:54] Speaker 1: asked for work. Old Professor Faye had died, but his son,
[22:00] Speaker 1: Dietrich was the same as ever. The art historian Jonathan
[22:04] Speaker 1: Keats says that Dietrich Faye seemed to be the only
[22:07] Speaker 1: man in Germany unaffected by the war. He was still
[22:11] Speaker 1: wearing expensive suits and still smoking expensive cigarettes. And just
[22:18] Speaker 1: as Dietrich's father had done, Faye Junior treated Mauscat as
[22:22] Speaker 1: a servant. He set him to work forging paintings by
[22:26] Speaker 1: the yard chagal Deaga, Gogan, Matisse, Picasso, Rembrandt, Renoir, van Gogh.
[22:35] Speaker 1: Even working at speed, Malskat could do them all, not
[22:39] Speaker 1: always well, but well enough, and Faye had the connections
[22:44] Speaker 1: to convince people to buy. Not that buyers needed much convincing.
[22:50] Speaker 1: They were afraid of hyperinflation, which had struck Germany after
[22:53] Speaker 1: the previous war, and so they were desperate to find
[22:57] Speaker 1: assets that might keep their value. And after so many
[23:01] Speaker 1: Jewish connoisseurs had fled Germany or been sent to their
[23:05] Speaker 1: deaths in extermination camps and their art collection had been stolen,
[23:10] Speaker 1: it didn't seem strange to find all these paintings floating around,
[23:15] Speaker 1: and nobody wanted to ask questions about where they'd come from. Then,
[23:21] Speaker 1: in nineteen forty eight, with post war Germany finally in
[23:25] Speaker 1: a position to contemplate medieval restoration work, the authorities in
[23:30] Speaker 1: Lubeck sought out Dietrich Faye, the acclaimed restorer of Saint
[23:35] Speaker 1: Peter's Cathedral in Schleswig, and asked him to conserve the
[23:39] Speaker 1: Marion Kirsha murals that had been revealed during the fire
[23:43] Speaker 1: bombing of Lubeck. Dietrich was given eighty eight thousand marks
[23:48] Speaker 1: to fund the work. It was a substantial sum relative
[23:52] Speaker 1: to the wages of the day, something like two hundred
[23:55] Speaker 1: thousand dollars in today's money. Lothar Malskat was still working
[24:01] Speaker 1: for Faye on a wage of three marks about seven
[24:05] Speaker 1: dollars per hour. He duly climbed the scaffold to take
[24:10] Speaker 1: a look at the enormous murals. When he returned, he
[24:14] Speaker 1: shook his head. There's nothing there, just dust, a shadow
[24:19] Speaker 1: of the original. All I have to do is blow
[24:22] Speaker 1: on it and the shadow disappears. Faye and Malscat could
[24:27] Speaker 1: see that it would take more than one miracle to
[24:30] Speaker 1: restore the frescoes of Marion Kirsha. Still they were nothing
[24:35] Speaker 1: if not miracle workers, right, and so Lothar Malscat got
[24:40] Speaker 1: to work again, and as always Malscat worked fast. There
[24:46] Speaker 1: was a deadline. The seven hundredth anniversary celebrations of the
[24:50] Speaker 1: church were approaching. But so quickly did Malscat restore, or
[24:55] Speaker 1: rather reimagine, the fourteenth century frescoes that Faye suggested they
[25:01] Speaker 1: keep working. The pair put up some scaffolding in a
[25:05] Speaker 1: different part of the church and discovered another wall full
[25:11] Speaker 1: of fourteenth century paintings. Not everyone was happy with what
[25:16] Speaker 1: was going on behind that scaffolding. The State Curator of
[25:20] Speaker 1: Art wrote a confidential report suggesting that Dietrich Faye had
[25:24] Speaker 1: probably overpainted previous restorations, and a young researcher named Johannah
[25:30] Speaker 1: Colba managed to examine the work at close range and
[25:34] Speaker 1: submit her concerns to the city authorities. I regret to
[25:38] Speaker 1: report that the overpainting is much too thick. There are
[25:41] Speaker 1: also some strange discrepancies. For example, photographs of the fire
[25:46] Speaker 1: damaged church in nineteen forty two show that Mary Magdalene
[25:50] Speaker 1: has sandals in the restored frescoes. She has bare feet,
[25:55] Speaker 1: some of the saints appeared to have moved. Dietrich Faye
[26:00] Speaker 1: threatened to sue Johannah Colber. He was a rich and
[26:03] Speaker 1: powerful man. She was just a doctoral student. She recanted,
[26:09] Speaker 1: saying that she must have misremembered. But more than a
[26:14] Speaker 1: faulty memory was required. Anyone examining those wartime photographs of
[26:19] Speaker 1: the original frescoes revealed after the fire could see clearly
[26:23] Speaker 1: how much Mouscat had simply invented. Yet, just as in
[26:28] Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties, such doubts were waved away when the
[26:33] Speaker 1: restored paintings were revealed. The response was ecstatic. Images of
[26:38] Speaker 1: the murals were put on millions of postage stamps. Tourists
[26:43] Speaker 1: flocked to Lubeck to visit the church. Journalists wrote about
[26:47] Speaker 1: the striking discovery, while academics breathlessly explained that it would
[26:51] Speaker 1: rewrite the history of ecclesiastical art. Dietrich Fay was given
[26:57] Speaker 1: another one hundred and fifty thousand marks and nominated for
[27:01] Speaker 1: a professorship. In nineteen fifty one, the leader of West
[27:06] Speaker 1: Germany's fledgling democracy, Conrad Adenau, visited the church to celebrate
[27:12] Speaker 1: its septuous centenary and stood in the nave, examining the work.
[27:18] Speaker 1: This is uplifting, gentleman. He gestured up at the rows
[27:24] Speaker 1: of saints seventy feet above them, ten feet tall, green
[27:29] Speaker 1: red and earthy brown, revealed by the wartime inferno, and
[27:34] Speaker 1: restored to their original glory by Dietrich Faye and his assistant.
[27:40] Speaker 1: What was the fellow's name? Again, nobody knew the name
[27:45] Speaker 1: of Lothar Malscat, but soon that name would be on
[27:49] Speaker 1: the lips of everyone in Germany. Cautionary tales will return
[27:59] Speaker 1: in a moment. Lothar Malskat was fuming. It wasn't the money,
[28:15] Speaker 1: although heaven knows Dietrich Faye paid him little enough. It
[28:19] Speaker 1: was the credit. Malskat had created all this art, the
[28:24] Speaker 1: images that were being reprinted on stamps, and which were
[28:28] Speaker 1: yet again rewriting the textbooks, and yet nobody even knew
[28:32] Speaker 1: his name. Faye was publicly honored by Conrad Adnauer, the
[28:37] Speaker 1: leader of post war West Germany, and Malskat. Malskat was
[28:42] Speaker 1: hanging out with the other craftsman. He was a nobody.
[28:49] Speaker 1: Phaye's plan required Malskat's anonymity. The whole point was to
[28:54] Speaker 1: claim that the work was done by an anonymous artist
[28:57] Speaker 1: in the fourteenth century. But Malskat wasn't interested in anonymity anymore.
[29:04] Speaker 1: He didn't want Faye to take the credit. He didn't
[29:07] Speaker 1: want a fourteenth century painter to take the credit, and
[29:10] Speaker 1: so he wrote on the wall of the Marion koshare
[29:14] Speaker 1: all paintings in this church are by Lothar Malskat. They
[29:20] Speaker 1: of course painted over that inconvenient declaration immediately, and so
[29:26] Speaker 1: Malskat took an even more extraordinary step. He went to
[29:31] Speaker 1: the local police station and made a full confession he
[29:35] Speaker 1: had faked the Marion Kyoshia murals. The police laughed him
[29:41] Speaker 1: out of town. Much like August Olbas, the elderly restorer
[29:46] Speaker 1: who had first put turkeys on the walls of Schleshviig
[29:50] Speaker 1: Cathedral in the late eighteen hundreds, Lothar Malskat was explaining
[29:54] Speaker 1: to the world exactly what he had done, and he
[29:57] Speaker 1: was being sneered at, demeaned, and disbelieved. The local newspaper
[30:03] Speaker 1: pityingly described it as the lamentable case of a painter
[30:08] Speaker 1: gone crazy. But unlike August Olbers, Malskat had a secret
[30:14] Speaker 1: weapon are like a camera. He documented every step in
[30:21] Speaker 1: the process from obliterating the fragile murals with a steel
[30:26] Speaker 1: brush where necessary, to slapping on fresh whitewash, to exuberantly
[30:31] Speaker 1: painting on the blank walls. And while the local authorities
[30:35] Speaker 1: had no interest in even looking at these photographs, the
[30:38] Speaker 1: national media found Malskat's story and his photographs rather more intriguing.
[30:46] Speaker 1: For a few months there was a stalemate. The wider
[30:49] Speaker 1: world believed Malskat, but the great and the good of
[30:53] Speaker 1: Lubeck were outraged that perceived slander and backed their man,
[30:58] Speaker 1: the renowned art expert doctor Fay. When Lothar Malskat confessed
[31:03] Speaker 1: to also forging the turkeys of Saint Peter's Church at Schleswig,
[31:08] Speaker 1: they regarded this as further proof that he was deranged
[31:11] Speaker 1: and with delusions of grandeur too, and so Malskat took
[31:18] Speaker 1: the fight to a surreal new level. He sued himself
[31:24] Speaker 1: for forgery under German law. This forced the police to
[31:29] Speaker 1: take action. Malskat's attorney handed over a dossier full of evidence,
[31:35] Speaker 1: including accounts of those forged Van Goghs and Rembrandts. When
[31:39] Speaker 1: the police searched Dietrich Faye's house, they found several more forgeries.
[31:45] Speaker 1: Dietrich Faye was arrested and taken into custody. Within days,
[31:50] Speaker 1: an expert commission had been assembled, inspected the Marion Kirsha
[31:54] Speaker 1: and published a report which agreed with Malskat. None of
[31:59] Speaker 1: the medieval remains were visible at all. The modern pictures
[32:04] Speaker 1: followed completely new outlines. The twenty one figures in the
[32:09] Speaker 1: choir are not Gothic, but painted freehand by Mouscat. The
[32:14] Speaker 1: painting described as old by the restorer Faye, does not
[32:18] Speaker 1: lie on the medieval layer, but on a post medieval layer,
[32:22] Speaker 1: and cannot, if for this reason alone, be considered original. Finally,
[32:29] Speaker 1: the reckoning was coming. Lubeck was about to hold the
[32:34] Speaker 1: most sensational trial in the city's history. This isn't really
[32:43] Speaker 1: a cautionary tale about a forgery. It's a cautionary tale
[32:48] Speaker 1: about complicity, about who amplifies a lie, who tries to
[32:54] Speaker 1: silence the truth tellers, and who looks the other way.
[32:58] Speaker 1: I think we can all understand why, in nineteen thirty
[33:01] Speaker 1: six nobody really wanted to tell the truth about the
[33:05] Speaker 1: Turkey pictures of Schleswig. In a fascist state where every
[33:10] Speaker 1: day political dissidents disappeared into the concentration camps, were beaten
[33:14] Speaker 1: up or murdered. Who really would put their neck on
[33:17] Speaker 1: the chopping block for the sake of some anachronistic birds.
[33:23] Speaker 1: But after the war you might have hoped things would
[33:26] Speaker 1: go differently. Himmler and Gering were both dead by suicide.
[33:32] Speaker 1: That ridiculous racist book which claimed that the Schleswig murals
[33:36] Speaker 1: demonstrated the national unity of Germany had been written by
[33:40] Speaker 1: Alfred Stanger. He had lost his job as a professor,
[33:44] Speaker 1: the Nazis had lost, so there was nothing standing in
[33:48] Speaker 1: the way of recognizing the self evident truth that the
[33:52] Speaker 1: Schleswig murals were modern, except that Germans had already lost
[33:58] Speaker 1: so much in the disastrous evils of the Third Reich
[34:01] Speaker 1: and the war, they didn't really fancy facing up to
[34:05] Speaker 1: any more losses, such as acknowledging that the schless Big
[34:09] Speaker 1: murals must be fake. And so, even though the state
[34:13] Speaker 1: curator had recorded his doubts about Dietrich Faye, Faye was
[34:19] Speaker 1: put in charge of the fragile miracle of the Marion Kirsha.
[34:23] Speaker 1: You have to suspect that Lubec's authorities had a sense
[34:27] Speaker 1: that Faye and his assistant would do more than merely
[34:31] Speaker 1: conserving the old murals. We want no museum. The architect
[34:37] Speaker 1: of the restoration project had said, lay on more paint.
[34:41] Speaker 1: Paint out the church beautifully, agreed the Bishop of Lubeck,
[34:46] Speaker 1: only later to declare that he had been betrayed by
[34:49] Speaker 1: an extremely cunning deception. Jonathan Keats, the author of Forged,
[34:56] Speaker 1: Why Fakes of the Great Art of our Age, says
[34:59] Speaker 1: the trial in nineteen fifty four of Malskat and Faye
[35:04] Speaker 1: actually became a trial of all the powerful institutions which
[35:08] Speaker 1: had supported, protected, and perhaps quietly encouraged them. The local
[35:14] Speaker 1: newspapers agreed. The real defendants are not the forgers, but
[35:18] Speaker 1: the experts and officials who failed to exercise proper care
[35:23] Speaker 1: read the newspaper, they didn't mind being deceived. Had Mouscat
[35:27] Speaker 1: not photographed the empty church walls before he started painting
[35:30] Speaker 1: his murals, the evidence would have been suppressed by the
[35:33] Speaker 1: very people who employed him. They are as much to
[35:36] Speaker 1: blame as the fortres themselves. Indeed, we all want to
[35:41] Speaker 1: believe in miracles, and when someone punctures our little bubble
[35:46] Speaker 1: of wishful thinking, we're less likely to thank them than
[35:50] Speaker 1: to resent them. The Turkeys of Schleswig showed us that
[35:54] Speaker 1: in a fascist state people will queue up to endorse
[35:58] Speaker 1: an obvious lie. But the miracle of Marion Kirsha showed
[36:03] Speaker 1: us that even a democracy isn't invulnerable to grand self deceptions.
[36:09] Speaker 1: As Lothar Malskat explained at the trial, people liked to
[36:14] Speaker 1: be fooled. Today we just gave them what they wanted.
[36:18] Speaker 1: In the end, Lothar Malskat got what he wanted to.
[36:23] Speaker 1: He was finally acknowledged as the artist who painted the
[36:27] Speaker 1: interior of the Marion Kyosha. He also got something he
[36:31] Speaker 1: didn't want. Eighteen months in prison. Dietrich Faye got twenty
[36:39] Speaker 1: and the Marion Kosher. The melted church bells still lie
[36:44] Speaker 1: where they fell to the floor of the church, a
[36:47] Speaker 1: solemn memorial to the horror of war. But not everything
[36:52] Speaker 1: has been so carefully remembered. Many of Malskat's paintings stayed up.
[36:59] Speaker 1: He would have liked that, but he would not have
[37:02] Speaker 1: liked what the guide books now say about the church.
[37:07] Speaker 1: Gothic crescoes of Christ and Saints add color to otherwise
[37:10] Speaker 1: plain walls. The pastel images only resurfaced when a fire
[37:15] Speaker 1: caused by the nineteen forty two air raid licked away
[37:18] Speaker 1: the coat of whitewash. What an injustice. Surely the guidebook
[37:24] Speaker 1: should add all paintings in this church are by loth
[37:28] Speaker 1: arm Mouscat, but it does not. Apparently you can't keep
[37:35] Speaker 1: a good miracle down. The definitive account of loth arm
[37:55] Speaker 1: Mouscat's forgery is in Jonathan Keats's book Forged, Why Fakes
[38:01] Speaker 1: Are the Great Art of our Age. For a full
[38:04] Speaker 1: list of our sources, please see the show notes at
[38:06] Speaker 1: Tim Parford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me
[38:12] Speaker 1: Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley
[38:16] Speaker 1: with support from Courtney Guarino and Emily Vaughan. A sound
[38:20] Speaker 1: design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise.
[38:24] Speaker 1: It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge,
[38:28] Speaker 1: Stella Harford, and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have
[38:32] Speaker 1: been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg,
[38:35] Speaker 1: Heather Fane, John Schnas, Julia Barton, Kylie mcgliori, Eric Sandler,
[38:41] Speaker 1: Royston Basserve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano, Danielle Lakhan, and Maya Kanig.
[38:47] Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you
[38:51] Speaker 1: like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,
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