Great masters and unicorns

According to legend, the horn of the unicorn could counteract poison and purify water. Lehmann Bernheimer used to say this aphorism about the object which for centuries had been collected and treasured as the horn of the mythical unicorn. In 1954, when Konrad Bernheimer is four years old, his grandfather brings him back from Venezuela, where the family had fled from Nazi persecution, to Munich. The Bernheimers had been renowned art antique dealers in this city, and the time has come to start all over again. In the grandfather’s salon there is a narwhale tusk, a family talisman, which has accompanied them through highs and lows . . . In this vivid and fascinating narrative, Konrad Bernheimer tells the history of his family, a German-Jewish dynasty of art dealers, and gives insights into the exciting and unusual life of an art dealer between Lucas Cranach and Peter Paul Rubens.