A grail with walls

Los Angeles Times. By Elizabeth Kolbert

Last week, nearly 150 reporters from around the world converged on the tiny German town of Deutschneudorf to hear an announcement by the mayor, Heinz-Peter Haustein, who is also a member of Parliament and, in his spare time, a treasure hunter.

Haustein declared that he was "well over 90% sure" that the fabled Amber Room had been found nearby, in an underground chamber next to an abandoned railway station. Excavation of the chamber is expected to take several weeks. When it is completed, Haustein's claim will almost certainly prove to be untrue. But despite -- or, really, because of -- this, his announcement marks yet another curious twist in an amazingly durable mystery.

The origins of Amber Room saga date back to 1701, when Frederick I, the new -- and rather dimwitted -- king of Prussia, decided he needed a room made entirely out of amber. It took dozens of craftsmen a decade to carry out Frederick's wishes. When the room was completed -- its walls covered in tens of thousands of carved amber tiles -- it was said that it seemed to glow from within.

After Frederick I's death, his son gave the Amber Room to Peter the Great, the czar of Russia. It was shipped to St. Petersburg, in panels, and eventually installed in the Catherine Palace, where it remained for 200 years. When the Nazis arrived in the city in September 1941, however, they decided that the Amber Room, along with thousands of other artworks, belonged in Germany. Adolf Hitler supposedly wanted the room for the monumental Führermuseum that he intended to build. So they boxed up the panels again and sent them to the city of Königsberg (now the Russian city of Kaliningrad).

Two years later, as the war began to turn against the Germans, the local museum director had the panels packed up for a third time and stored in a secret location. (He died shortly thereafter under mysterious circumstances.) The room has not been seen since, although -- tantalizingly -- a fragment of one of the panels surfaced on the black market in 1997.

By now, the Amber Room must count as the most thoroughly searched-for artwork in history. It has been sought on both sides of what was the Iron Curtain, from the Baltic coast to the Thuringian Hills, in caves, churches, salt mines, tunnels, bunkers, ice cellars and shipwrecks. In its day, the East German secret police systematically explored 150 possible hiding places, at one point spending $1 million to excavate a clay pit south of Leipzig.

Almost no clue has been considered too trivial to pursue. In 1998, a German radio station, acting on a tip from an 80-year-old resident of Preila, Lithuania, dredged a lagoon in the town. In 2000, two teams, both using information allegedly provided by former SS men, excavated a defunct silver mine spanning the German-Czech border. A German journalist I know who worked for the magazine Der Spiegel was once sent to look for the Amber Room in Russia, based on information provided by his cleaning lady's boyfriend.

In 2003, in time for St. Petersburg's tricentennial, a replica of the Amber Room -- painstakingly copied from old photographs -- was completed. Just before it opened, I went to Russia to report on the reconstruction and, inevitably, became drawn into the hunt for the original.

I traveled to Germany to speak to people who were actively looking for the room. One explained to me -- quite convincingly, I thought -- that the room was buried in Russian territory and that if the Russians would just tear down a skyscraper they had erected on top of it, he could prove this. A year later, a pair of British journalists claimed to have discovered that the panels had been destroyed in a fire in Königsberg in 1945. But the hunt continued.

The latest announcement -- that the room is buried near Deutschneudorf, in Germany's southeast corner -- follows from a tip provided to Haustein by a man whose late father was a member of the Luftwaffe. The father's papers supposedly contained maps and notes indicating concealed treasure.

Why are people still searching for the Amber Room? Since I started my own files on the room five years ago, I've thought about this question quite a bit. One obvious explanation is that the Amber Room was very beautiful (albeit in a kitschy sort of way). Another is that the panels are immensely valuable; estimates put their worth at about $300 million.

Ultimately, though, I've come to think that the allure of the Amber Room lies in the fact that it cannot be found. Today, almost everyone who could have had direct knowledge of the fate of the Amber Room is dead, yet the traffic continues in rumors, secondhand stories and supposed deathbed confessions.

Missing things exert a hold on our imagination that those that are present cannot. The Amber Room is exquisite and precious and lost. Like all great objects of desire, it is unattainable. And so the search goes on.

Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer for the New Yorker, is the author of "Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change" and "The Prophet of Love and Other Tales of Power and Deceit."