16 facts about Lothar Malskat

Lothar Malskat (May 3, 1913 – February 10, 1988) was a German painter and art restorer who repainted medieval frescoes of the Marienkirche in Lübeck, critically damaged during WWII.

Malskat was a painter from Königsberg. In 1951 he was employed by Dietrich Fey, whose firm was commissioned to restore the frescoes of cathedral of Marienkirche in Lübeck. The cathedral had been highly damaged in World War II bombings and left neglected after the war, so the medieval frescoes on its walls had approximately disappeared. The church had expected donations worth DM 150,000 for restoration and Fey’s company did the play in behind closed doors. The feign was over and ended with September 2, 1951.

The restorers were praised for their great work. The frescoes were unveiled during the seven-hundredth anniversary celebrations of the founding of the Marienkirche; dignitaries gift included various government ministers, including Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The West German executive printed 2 million postage stamps depicting the frescoes.

The adjacent year Malskat announced that he had painted the frescoes himself. When he was ignored, he told his own lawyer to sue both Fey and himself. Both men were eventually arrested.

The trial began in 1954. Evidence included Malskat’s extra forgeries of works of Marc Chagall and Toulouse-Lautrec. One estimate of the total value of his forgeries is exceeding 15 million Euros in today’s money.

Malskat told that as soon as the law had begun, the walls had been nearly empty of frescoes; he proved it by presenting a film depicting the unpainted walls. Instead of restoring the indigenous frescoes, Malskat had whitewashed the walls and painted them over. New pictures included various anachronisms afterward an image of a turkey, which had not reached Europe at the epoch the original frescoes had been painted. Malskat had modelled various religious figures upon his sister Freyda, actresses afterward Marlene Dietrich and even historical figures afterward Rasputin.

Fey was sentenced for 20 months and Malskat for 18. The frescoes were washed off the church walls.

After Malskat was released, he began to paint in his own name. He painted decorations upon restaurants and inns, including the Tre Kronor Inn in Stockholm. He also decided exhibitions of his works in northern Germany. He died in Wulfsdorf near Lübeck.

A fictionalised financial credit of Malskat’s painting of the Marienkirche frescoes appears in the Günter Grass novel The Rat. Malskat’s forgeries are a major theme of the novel, as a tale of the alleged ruination of post-war Germany.