On November 11, the government started to put up some of Cornelius’s works on a Web site (lostart.de), and there were so many visits the site crashed. To date it has posted 458 works and announced that about 590 of the trove of what has been adjusted to 1,280—due to multiples and sets—may have been looted from Jewish owners. The provenance work is far from done.

German restitution laws that apply to looted art are highly complex. In fact, the 1938 Nazi law that allowed the government to confiscate Degenerate Art has still not been repealed. Germany is a signatory to the 1998 Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, which say that museums and other public institutions with Raubkunst should return it to its rightful owners, or their heirs. But compliance is voluntary, and few institutions in any of the signatory countries have complied. Even so, the Principles don’t apply to Degenerate Art in Germany, nor do they apply to works possessed by individuals, such as Cornelius. Ronald Lauder told me that “there is a huge amount of looted art in the museums of Germany, most of it not on display.” He called for a commission of international experts to scour Germany’s museums and government institutions, and in February the German government announced that it would set up an independent center to begin looking closely at museums’ collections.

To this date, Cornelius has not been charged with any crime, bringing into question the legality of the seizure—which was probably not covered by the search warrant under which authorities entered his apartment. Furthermore, there is a 30-year statute of limitations on making claims on stolen property, and Cornelius has been in possession of the art for more than 40 years. The pieces are still in a warehouse in a sort of limbo. Numerous parties are making claims to the ones that have been posted on the government’s Web site. It is unclear whether the law requires or enables the government to return the art to its rightful owners, or whether it needs to be returned to Cornelius on the grounds of an illegal seizure or under the protection of the statute of limitations.

“He must not be a happy man, having lived a lie for so many years,” Nana Dix, the granddaughter of the Degenerate artist Otto Dix, said to me about Cornelius. Nana is herself an artist, and we spent three hours in her studio in Schwabing, about half a mile from Cornelius’s apartment, looking at reproductions of her grandfather’s work and tracing his remarkable career—how he had transcendently documented the horrors he had lived through on the front lines of both wars, at one point being forbidden by the Gestapo to paint or even buy art materials. Dix, who came from humble origins (his father worked in an iron foundry in Gera), was one of the great under-recognized artists of the 20th century. Only Picasso expressed himself as masterfully in so many styles: Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, Impressionism, abstract, grotesque hyper-realism. Dix’s powerful, searingly honest images reflect—as Hildebrand Gurlitt described the unsettling modern art he collected—“the struggle to come to terms with who we are.” According to Nana Dix, 200 of his major works are still missing.

The Ghost

Within hours of the Focus piece’s publication, the sensational story of Cornelius Gurlitt and his billion-dollar secret hoard of art had been picked up by major media all over the world. Every time he stepped out of his building, microphones were thrust in his face and cameras started to roll. After being mobbed by paparazzi, he spent 10 days in his empty apartment without leaving it. According to Der Spiegel, the last movie he saw was in 1967. He hadn’t watched television since 1963. He did read the paper and listened to the radio, so he had some idea of what was going on in the world, but his actual experience of it was very limited and he was out of touch with a lot of developments. He rarely traveled—he had gone to Paris, once, with his sister years ago. He said he had never been in love with an actual person. The pictures were his whole life. And now they were gone. The grief he had been going through for the last year and a half, alone in his empty apartment, the bereavement, was unimaginable. The loss of his pictures, he told Özlem Gezer, Der Spiegel’s reporter—it was the only interview he would grant—hit him harder than the loss of his parents, or his sister, who died of cancer in 2012. He blamed his mother for bringing them to Munich, the seat of evil, where it all began, with Hitler’s abortive Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. He insisted his father had only associated with Nazis in order to save these precious works of art, and Cornelius felt it was his duty to protect them, just as his father had heroically done. Gradually the artworks became his entire world, a parallel universe full of horror, passion, beauty, and endless fascination, in which he was a spectator. He was like a character in a Russian novel—intense, obsessed, isolated, and increasingly out of touch with reality.