Max James Emden (28 October 1874 – 26 June 1940) was a German-born Swiss businessman, art collector, heir and bon vivant.

[1][2] Emden primarily collected 19th century of old masters as well as French and German painters such as Canaletto, Böcklin, Feuerbach, Liebermann, Courbet, Degas, Gauguin, van Gogh and Monet.

For the stores, Emden acquired plots of land in the centres of German and foreign cities, throughout Europe, in Berlin, Potsdam, Chemnitz, Plauen, Munich, Danzig, Stockholm, Helsinki and Budapest.

At the age of almost 50, the internationally successful mercery goods entrepreneur, sold most of his company holdings to the department store group Karstadt (and others) and then withdrew more and more from his commercial activities.

[1] Shortly after, Emden's first task was to have the island's existing residence blown up, the spectacle saw the baroness's abandoned haul of cellar junk and tattered documents swirling in the light of day, probably for the first time in some forty years.

[1] Emden replaced the island's residence with a Palazzo style 24-room villa, finished with a luxurious interior, designed by the Berlin architect Alfred Breslauer.

[1] Though surrounded by a picturesque lake, Emden included a 33-meter-long Roman-style bathing pool decorated with the statue The Bathers by the sculptor Georg Wrba.

The present botanical garden there, which Emden continued to preserve and maintain, is essentially the work of the previous owner of the Brissago Islands, the Saint Léger family.

Up until the 1930s, Emden also owned the premises of the Hamburger Polo Club in Klein Flottbek, which he had to sell to the city of Altona in 1935 for a low price.

In 1934 Emden acquired the Swiss civil rights (Bürgerrecht) from the municipality of Ronco sopra Ascona, which is adjacent to the Brissago Islands, but could not secure the same for his son Hans Erich.

[1][2][13] On his island residence, Emden was visited by numerous celebrities, such as Aga Khan III, the King of Siam Ananda Mahidol, members of the German nobility, the international best-seller novelist and good friend Erich Maria Remarque, including annually Emden's ex-wife and her entourage—who had remarried and was now Countess Einsiedel; the countess' visits were a sensation for Ascona, as the beautiful woman completely ignored the fact that one never got dressed properly there.

The inheritance included the archipelago of the Brissago Islands on Lake Maggiore, which became orphaned and neglected from 1941 when Emden's son, branded and deported from Germany as a "first-degree hybrid Jew" and could neither secure permanent Swiss residence in 1940, eventually managed to emigrate to his mother's birthplace Chile.

After the Second World War, Emden's son returned to the Brissago Islands but discovered that some of the furniture had been stolen and several works of art were missing.

[2][8] Emden's son had to give up the Brissago Islands after the Second World War and sold them to the canton of Ticino and the surrounding communities in 1949 for around 600,000 Swiss francs.

[14] Interviewed in The Times of Israel, Juan Carlos Emden (grandson)[13] described his grandfather's situation: "The Nazis financially ruined him, forcing him to sell his stores and real estate.

"[15] The fate of property that belonged to Emden before the rise of the Nazis, including paintings from his collection that ended up in German museums, has been the subject of debate in Germany.

[16] The German weekly Der Spiegel questioned in a 2017 article about Max Emden "whether people in this country have ever really taken the commitment to reparation and also to the establishment of the truth seriously".

[20] On 26 March 2019 Germany's Advisory Commission on the Return of Cultural Property Seized as a Result of Nazi Persecution announced that, in the case of Dr Max James Emden vs. the Federal Republic of Germany, it recommended that the paintings "The Moat of the Zwinger in Dresden" and the "Karlskirche in Vienna" (both by Bernardo Bellotto) be restituted to the heirs of Dr Max James Emden.

[17] In its decision, the Commission stated: "The systematic destruction of people's economic livelihoods by the Third Reich as a tool of National Socialist racial policy (and precursor to the Final Solution) thus also applied in the case of Max Emden.".

The film works on the story of Max Emden and depicts the heirs' lavish struggle for restitution and justice against the authorities and private art collectors.