When Heinz Berggruen left Germany for America in 1936, he was not allowed more than 10 marks in his pocket. As a young journalist in Berlin, Berggruen had been forced to publish under the pseudonym “h.b.” in order to hide his Jewish heritage and evade the Nazi party’s antisemitism.
In the decades that would follow, he became an art dealer, regularly rubbing shoulders with the most important artists of the 20th century, and amassing one of the most impressive private collections of modern art ever to exist. On the day he left Berlin for Berkeley, however, such a future would have seemed impossible.
