Auction Houses Set Up Shop in Unified Berlin : Art: Sotheby’s and Christie’s hope to acquire and sell treasures hidden during Communist rule in Eastern Europe.

BERLIN —  The world’s top auction houses have set up shop in Berlin, seeking to acquire and sell treasures kept hidden during Communist rule in Eastern Europe.

Sotheby’s, the world’s largest art auction house, has chosen a former Prussian palace in eastern Berlin as the site of its new office. The previous tenant was the German-Soviet Friendship Society.

Rival Christie’s has selected a posh ground-floor setting just off the Kurfuerstendamm, western Berlin’s most fashionable shopping boulevard.

The arrival of the two major auction houses could signal the start of a revival of Berlin’s prewar role as Germany’s major art center.

Both aim to explore the art world of the formerly Communist east, largely closed off to capitalist dealers during the Cold War.

“Sotheby’s had long thought about going to Berlin. With the opening of the wall, it became necessary to open,” said H. Josef Koenig, director of the Berlin office.

Koenig says he gets offers every day from eastern Germans seeking appraisals of silver, paintings or antiques they had hidden for years.

The objects include old Meissen porcelain, pieces of Biedermeier furniture, silver, jewelry and paintings. Sometimes works of real value appear and can make their owners rich.

Shortly before unity on Oct. 3, an East German from Dresden showed up at the Frankfurt branch of Sotheby’s with a painting he had inherited. The retired worker had hidden the painting after the 1945 Red Army invasion and kept it secret from East German authorities, who had forbidden private ownership of art.

Experts identified the painting as a portrait by the 20th-Century German Expressionist Emil Nolde. The work, out of sight for half a century, had been given up for lost by art connoisseurs. It was valued at $900,000.