Lothar Malskat — the restorer who painted his own “medieval” frescoes, turkeys and all

Summary

In the city of Lübeck in northern Germany, between 1948 and 1951, a restorer named Lothar Malskat was hired to conserve a set of Gothic frescoes that an Allied firebombing had dramatically uncovered in the choir of the Marienkirche, the great brick church of St. Mary. Instead of conserving the medieval paintings, Malskat found that almost nothing survived — the original pigment, he said, "turned to dust when I blew on it" — and so he whitewashed the walls and painted entirely new "thirteenth-century" frescoes of his own invention. When the work was unveiled at the church's 700th-anniversary celebrations on 2 September 1951, it was hailed as a national treasure. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer attended, and the West German post office issued some two million stamps reproducing the forged saints.

The fraud was exposed not by an expert but by the forger himself. On 9 May 1952, Lothar Malskat walked into a Lübeck police station and announced that the celebrated frescoes were his own modern inventions, painted on the orders of his employer Dietrich Fey, who had taken the credit and the bulk of the money. The confession was so improbable that the authorities did not believe him; a local newspaper dismissed it as "the lamentable case of a painter gone crazy," and townspeople reportedly suggested he be committed. Only after Malskat had his lawyer formally file criminal charges — against Fey and against himself — in October 1952, backed by photographs documenting his process, did the state investigate.

An expert commission confirmed the obvious. The frescoes were painted freehand on fresh, post-medieval plaster, and they were riddled with impossibilities — most famously a flock of turkeys, a New World bird that no thirteenth-century European could have seen, since turkeys did not reach Europe until after the Spanish conquests of the sixteenth century. Malskat had also given his "medieval" figures the faces of his contemporaries, including the film actress Marlene Dietrich, the mystic Rasputin, and his own sister. At a trial that opened on 10 August 1954, both men were convicted: Dietrich Fey received 20 months in prison and Lothar Malskat 18.

The case is a study in how spectacle, civic pride, and the desire for a redemptive postwar miracle can suspend ordinary scrutiny. A bombed nation wanted its medieval glory restored, the "miracle of the Marienkirche" supplied exactly that story, and almost no one looked closely enough at the painted birds — until the man who painted them insisted, against all resistance, on being disbelieved.

Timeline

A nation that wanted a miracle on the wall

The deception began with a genuine and moving event. On Palm Sunday 1942, the firebombing of Lübeck gutted the Marienkirche, and as the building burned, the heat blistered away the lime-wash that had covered its interior since the Reformation, revealing the ghosts of vast Gothic frescoes beneath. In a country that would soon lie in ruins, this looked like a sign — "the miracle of the Marienkirche" — that something old and beautiful had survived the catastrophe. The story created an appetite that the truth could not satisfy: the revealed paintings were, in fact, almost entirely destroyed, faint stains that disintegrated at a touch.

Into that gap stepped Dietrich Fey, a restorer with a contract to bring the frescoes back, and Lothar Malskat, the skilled painter Fey employed to do the actual work. Fey took the public role and the bulk of the fee — reportedly some 150,000 marks against Malskat's modest weekly wage — while Malskat, on scaffolding behind screens, confronted bare walls where the medieval art was supposed to be. The commission, the publicity, and the national mood all demanded a glorious restoration. What they got was a glorious invention, because the only way to deliver the expected miracle was to manufacture it.

Inventing the Middle Ages, with the wrong birds

Malskat was not copying damaged originals; he was composing. He primed the walls fresh and painted some twenty large figures of saints and prophets in a convincing Gothic idiom, drawing on his real training and on his earlier practice run at Schleswig Cathedral, where he had done the same thing in 1937. To populate his pantheon he reached, with a forger's private humor, into his own century: contemporaries later learned that his "medieval" faces included the actress Marlene Dietrich, the Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin as a bearded king, and his own sister, among others. None of his admirers recognized the borrowed faces, because no one was looking for a twentieth-century woman in a thirteenth-century saint.

The decisive anachronism was zoological, not human. Among the decorative motifs Malskat painted were turkeys — a bird native to the Americas that did not reach Europe until after Spanish contact in the sixteenth century, and so could not possibly have been known to a medieval Lübeck painter. The turkeys were visible to anyone who knew their natural history, yet for years they hung in plain sight, celebrated rather than questioned. Earlier, the Schleswig turkeys had even been pressed into ideological service, cited by some as evidence of pre-Columbian Norse contact with America; in Lübeck they were simply admired. The lesson is sharp: an impossibility on display is not the same as an impossibility detected, and a confident frame around an object teaches viewers what to see and what to overlook.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The Malskat affair was a national embarrassment with an unusually clean evidentiary record, because the perpetrator had documented and then denounced his own work. The forged choir frescoes were removed, the stamps became collector's curiosities of a different kind, and Dietrich Fey's career as a restorer ended. Malskat served his sentence, worked afterward on decorative commissions, and died in obscurity in 1988, near Lübeck. The church chose to keep some of his other paintings on view, labeled for what they are — a rare instance of an institution preserving a forgery as a deliberate caution rather than quietly destroying the evidence of its own gullibility.

The case entered the literature of art crime as a cautionary model for restoration ethics. It hardened the principle that conservation must be documented, reversible, and transparent — that a restorer should record and disclose exactly what survives and what is reconstruction, so that invention can never again be passed off as recovery behind a screen. The turkeys, in particular, endure as a teaching image: proof that the most damning anachronism is worthless until someone is willing to notice it.

Lessons

References

• Lothar Malskat WIKIPEDIA
• Pious Fraud ART & ANTIQUES MAGAZINE
• Art: Master Forger TIME
• Lothar Malskat: the man who sued himself THE JOHNS HOPKINS NEWS-LETTER