About Paul Davidsohn
Paul Davidsohn, the second oldest brother of Robert, was born in 1839. At the age of nineteen he emigrated to Scotland, where he lived for three years. In 1862 he settled as a merchant in London. Like his uncle, Alexander Rosenberg, and his older brother, he started his print and art collection in 1870 . In 1882 he moved to Vienna and finally, in 1886, to Berlin, where he lived until his death in 1931 at the age of 92. In our family stories, the word was that he was a regular at every large art sale in Europe over a 50-year span that ended in 1920. When 6,000 of his 10,000 prints where put up for auction that year, the collection had grown to become the largest of its kind in the world. It included hundreds of prints by Dürer, Rembrandt and Ruben. The sale came at a time when the proceeds, which were mainly in U.S. Dollars, were welcome in Germany, where most fortunes had been lost as a result of the First World War or devoured by inflation. In a letter Tante Fili (his sister in-law) wrote in 1919 to her friend Isolde Kurz, she tells her that during the war they lost between 5 and 6 million Reichs Mark, an amount that at the time was equivalent to 1.5 million U.S. Dollars. In an extant art catalogue, the price for which each print was sold, is recorded. The sale brought in over 11 million Reichs Marks, which was equivalent to over 3 million U.S. Dollars, a large fortune in the early 1920's. In an April 12, 1921 entry in his diary, my grandfather notes that ”Onkel Paul gives us 100,000 Marks to pay for construction of our home.” And so, at the end of August 1921, thanks to Paul Davidsohn's collection, my grandparents moved into their new house on the Rosenhagen Strasse 22, in Ottmarschen, a beautiful suburb of Hamburg. The home still belongs to the family. In my grandfather’s diary, he describes many trips to Berlin during the 1920’s to visit Onkel Paul. During those years, my grandfather, who was the only surviving member of his generation, took care of various matters for his aging uncle, including managing the unsold prints and artworks from his collection. Most of the time he traveled alone, and sometimes with my grandmother and the children. My mother remembered staying at Onkel Paul’s villa in Berlin-Grunewald during the late 1920’s . In 1929 my grandfather received the power-of-attorney for his 90 year old uncle. After Onkel Paul's death 2 years later, my grandfather dissolved his estate, which included the sale of the villa, and dealing with the extant prints of his uncle's collection. Paul Davidsohn was the namesake of my grandfather’s brother, Paul Victor, his nephew. Sixty years after Paul Davidsohn’s death, my son, Paul Victor Osswald was born and now carries Paul Davidsohn and Paul Victor’s name.
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