4 ideas
After the 1938 Anschluss, the Gestapo stripped the Ephrussi palais on Vienna's Ringstrasse and seized the family's art, furniture and library. Anna, the family's maid, took the 264 netsuke from Emmy Ephrussi's dressing-room vitrine a few at a time in her apron pocket and hid them in her straw mattress. After the war she returned them to the family's daughter Elisabeth, and they were almost the only thing to survive from a whole household of wealth.
If you follow one portable, handled object through time, recording each place it sat, whose hands touched it and why it moved, it links private rooms to public events that would otherwise read as abstract history. The object's changing role across owners makes visible the social changes around it: in Paris it was a fashionable collector's piece, in Vienna a children's plaything, then a thing saved from the Nazis, then an exile's link to Japan.
The Ephrussi turned their money into belonging. They built palaces, gave to patrons and collections, and married and socialised into Parisian and Viennese elites. The hostility after the Dreyfus affair and the 1938 confiscations showed that this acceptance could be withdrawn. Because the family's security depended on visible property, that property could simply be seized and taken over, and the family could be erased.
Netsuke are made to be handled. They are small, rounded and worn by fingers, so their meaning builds up through touch rather than through looking at them in a display case. De Waal, a potter, argues that an object's value comes from the long line of people who picked it up. Handling it today continues a physical relationship with the dead that paperwork and stories cannot fully reproduce.