Vintage View: The Amber Room

The mystery of the golden Amber Room continues to shine, says Kya deLongchamps

MOST of us are drawn to collecting not only by love for the thing, but by the chase to find the thing. Aside from the hunt from the Holy Grail itself, few stories of real events fascinate like that of the 60-year hunt for the Amber Room. Worthy of a grizzled Indiana Jones clapping on his leather fedora, this is a mystery of cinematic dimensions. It has everything — fabulous beauty beyond imagining, politics; royal vanity; courage; villainy; a ruined castle and a good sprinkling of Stephen’s Spielberg’s nemesis — the Nazis.

We know that in 1701, work began on a panelled room constructed almost entirely of 55 square metres of carved amber for Charlottenburg Palace, the home of Friedrig I of Prussia. Gottfried Wolfram, master craftsman to the Court of Frederick I of Denmark, was in charge of the project. It took a decade to craft and complete. In 1716 the entire miracle of Baroque splendour of amber embellished in gold and semi-precious stones was presented as a diplomatically expedient gift to Tsar Peter the Great. It left Berlin for the Palace of Tsarskoye in St Petersburg, later known as Leningrad.

The Russians put another 40 years of work into the piece and it was regarded at the time as the “eight wonder of the world”. Its loss as a piece of German cultural treasure would not be forgotten. Two centuries later, in 1941, a Nazi raiding party attempted to bring the Amber Room back to the Fatherland as part of Operation Barbarossa. The Russian curators in charge of the Amber Room (or Amber Cabinet), put their lives at risk in an effort to save the work, desperately cladding it behind aged wallpaper in the hope it would be overlooked. Crackling with symbolic and political importance, the room was clearly high on the loot list and was taken from the walls in a mere 36 hours, crated up and removed. Even with the attention of two supervising German specialists, the sheer speed of the deconstruction of six tonnes of fragile amber by German soldiers can only have resulted in extensive damage.

The last fully documented location for the 27 crates holding the Amber Room was Königsberg Castle in East Prussia, now known at Kalingrad. As it became clear that the war was lost, Hitler became increasingly twitchy and gave orders for priceless artworks including the Amber Room to be moved from Königsberg, which had been under heavy attack from the Allies since the summer of 1944.

To this day, there is little evidence to suggest that the room left the castle at all. After the war Königsberg was largely demolished by the invading Russians. The structure collapsed down into a series of ancient tunnels and was finally incorporated under the centre square of the new town.

So what may have happened to the 27 precious crates containing the Amber Room? Legend, fiction, theories and unproven eyewitness accounts are finely blended in one of the great mysteries of Western art and antiquities.

Could tons of finely worked amber be lying on the bottom of the Baltic Sea aboard the wreck of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff with the 9,000 souls who went down with her on the January 30, 1945?

The Soviets who investigated the matter in the months following the end of the war concluded the Room had perished irretrievably with Königsberg at some point after the Allied bombing of April 1945 and the burning of the castle by the Red Army. This argument is backed up by the work of English investigators Catherine Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy in their book The Amber Room: The Fate of the World’s Greatest Lost Treasure (2004). Oddly, the Russians undertook extensive efforts to find the room but the only pieces that may or may not be part of the Amber Room were some stone mosaics, which were later used to recreate its decoration. They were given up in 1998 by an elderly man who claimed he was one of the division of soldiers who packed up the room in Russia in 1941.

A stunning reproduction of the Amber Room now exists in Tsarskoye Selo in Pushkin, Saint Petersburg, a former residence of the Russian royal family and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Fittingly, this second room was financed by the German and Russian authorities and private industry since 1979 and was completed in 2003. Featuring hundreds of shades of the resinous jewel we know as amber, it’s a staggering accomplishment which closely follows the Amber Room from surviving drawings and grainy photographs or the 18th century original.

As for the first Amber Room? Can you see those 27 crates shrouded by tarps on a foggy 1940s railway platform? Could they be sleeping on the floor of a forgotten mine in the woods of Eastern Germany? Is some James Bond style villain enjoying the panels spread dazzling over the walls of his fortified basement club?

Cornelius Gurlitt, the eccentric pensioner found in February 2012 resolutely guarding 1,280 artworks collected during the war in his flat in Munich, says he knows where the Amber Room is and will reveal the location before his death. The glinting golden mystery seems set to continue.

You can visit the reconstructed Amber Room as part of Catherine Palace and Park, 7, Sadovaya Str, Pushkin, St Petersburg 196601, Russia.

www.saint-petersburg.com.