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

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.