Kunzelmann & Kunzelmann

In June 2004, 83-year-old conservator Viktor Kunzelmann is found in front of his easel with symptoms of poisoning. His son Joakim begins to research his father's life story. The track takes him from the Swedish Falkenberg to Berlin, from the end of the century back to the thirties and forties. Fascinated and frightened, he realizes that Viktor Kunzelmann, the famous restorer of old paintings, was at the same time a gifted image counterfeiter. He had sold his "masterpieces" for expensive money to industrialists and politicians in Sweden and Germany. In flashbacks and from the son's perspective, Vallgren tells the story of Viktor Kunzelmann, he tells of the art scene of Berlin and of the Nazi hordes that travel through the streets of the city. Viktor, born in Berlin, and his friend Georg Haman camouflage themselves with the NSDAP membership. You will be successful with fake stamps, food cards, appraisals and paintings. Having first made good business with the Nazis, then with the Americans in post-war Berlin, Viktor goes to Sweden in 1949, where he, the important art connoisseur, is called into an expert group to develop new methods for detecting art fakes. At the same time, however, he continues his own counterfeiting activity until he destroys his pictures at the end of his life. "Ultimately, there was a truth he valued higher than anything else: that of art itself." Carl-Johan Vallgren tells in his new novel of a life between worlds, between authenticity, truthfulness, fraud and crime.