This publication is the first to devote itself in detail to the biography of the Frankfurt banker and philanthropist Maximilian von Goldschmidt-Rothschild (1843-1940).

By tracing the history of his famous art collection, it examines the loss of the collection due to the persecution of its owner and its appropriation by the City of Frankfurt during the National Socialist regime. It undertakes a critical assessment of the institutional history of the Museum fuer Kunsthandwerk (today the Museum Angewandte Kunst) and its involvement in these processes, as well as reviewing the behavior of the directors of Frankfurt's museums concerning the restitution of the collection in the postwar years.

The publication not only provides the latest research findings on the provenance of 129 objects from the original collection, but it is also the first to contain a comprehensive selection of the large number of contemporary photographs depicting most of the 1,500 items in the collection.