Utz Read Free

family honour by winning Germany’s highest military decoration ‘Pour le Mérite’. His widow, whom he had met at Marienbad in 1905 – and had married to the anguish of his parents – was the daughter of a Czech revivalist historian, and of a Jewish heiress whose fortune came from railway shares.
    Kaspar was her only grandchild.
    As a boy, he spent a month of each summer at České Křížové, a neo-mediaeval castle between Prague and Tabor where this wasted old woman, whose sallow skin refused to wrinkle or hair turn to grey, sat crippled with arthritis in a salon hung with crimson brocade and overvarnished paintings of the Virgin.
    A convert to Catholicism, she surrounded herself with unctuous and genuflecting priests who would extol the purity of her faith in the hope of financial rewards. The banks of begonias and cinerarias in her conservatory protected her from a magnificent sweep of the Central Bohemian countryside.
    Various neighbours were affronted that a woman of her race should affect the outward forms of aristocratic life: to the extent of peopling her staircase with suits of armour, and of keeping a bear in a walled-off section of the moat. Yet, even before Sarajevo, she had foreseen the rising tide of Socialism in Europe, and, twirling a terrestrial globe as another woman might recite the rosary, she would point a finger to the far-flung places in which she had diversified her investments: a copper-mine in Chile, cotton in Egypt, a cannery in Australia, gold in South Africa.
    She rejoiced in the thought that her fortune would go on increasing after her death. Theirs would vanish: in war or revolution; on horses, women and the gaming-tables. In Kaspar, a dark-haired, introspective boy with none of his father’s high complexion, she recognised the pallor of the ghetto – and adored him.
    It was at České Křížové that this precocious child, standing on tiptoe before a vitrine of antique porcelain, found himself bewitched by a figurine of Harlequin that had been modelled by the greatest of Meissen modellers, J. J. Kaendler.
    The Harlequin sat on a tree trunk. His taut frame was sheathed in a costume of multi-coloured chevrons. In one hand he waved an oxidised silver tankard; in the other a floppy yellow hat. Over his face there was a leering orange mask.
    â€˜I want him,’ said Kaspar.
    The grandmother blanched. Her impulse was to give him everything he asked for. But this time she said, ‘No! One day perhaps. Not now.’
    Four years later, to console him for the death of his father, the Harlequin arrived in Dresden in a specially made leather box, in time for a dismal Christmas celebration. Kaspar pivoted the figurine in the flickering candlelight and ran his pudgy fingers, lovingly, over the glaze and brilliant enamels. He had found his vocation: he would devote his life to collecting – ‘rescuing’ as he came to call it – the porcelains of the Meissen factory.
    He neglected his schoolroom studies, yet studied the history of porcelain manufacture, from its origins in China to its rediscovery in Saxony in the reign of Augustus the Strong. He bought new pieces. He sold off those which were inferior, or cracked. By the age of nineteen he had published in the journal Nunc a lively defence of the Rococo style in porcelain — an art of playful curves from an age when men adored women — against the slur of the pederast Winckelmann : ‘Porcelain is almost always made into idiotic puppets.’
    Utz spent hours in the museums of Dresden, scrutinising the ranks of Commedia dell’ Arte figures that had come from the royal collections. Locked behind glass, they seemed to beckon him into their secret, Lilliputian world – and also to cry for their release. His second publication was entitled ‘The Private Collector’:
    â€˜An object in a museum case’, he wrote, ‘must suffer the de-natured