The
Loss of Intellectual and Aesthetic Property:
Stolen
History
Then
those phantasmagorical passengers might have tolerated my presence in their
midst and nothing would have happened.
But I was ignorant, and my foolhardiness in supposing that I was
entitled to breathe the same air as they almost cost me my life.[1]
While there has
already been much debate and many legal techniques for adjudicating differences
about the restitution of stolen, looted, plundered and displaced works of art,
the matter of intellectual and aesthetic ownership remains open: that is,
question of misattribution and its consequences has not been fully
addressed. These are matters of
aesthetic and art history and of epistemology and historiography.
If the role
played by pre-Shoah patrons, collectors, art dealers, art critics, professors
of art history, museum directors and gallery owners have either knowingly or
innocently been denied or distorted, then the entire of history of art and
culture in Europe needs to be corrected.
If current textbooks, encyclopaedias, academic lecturers, museum
directors and curators and everyone else involved in the preservation and
explanation of that history is wrong, how can the problem be fixed? Who since the Second World War are
responsible for rewriting basic textbooks, redesigning museum exhibitions,
retraining teachers at all levels, and monitoring journalists and commentators,
as well as bureaucrats, politicians and civil servants who make basic decisions
relating to the purchase, display, evaluation and exchange of works of art and
the publication of catalogues, coffee-table books, documentary television
programmes, and other popular sources? This
is no easy question, not just because the authoritative sources are so often
wrong to some degree or other or because general knowledge has become skewered
as a consequence, but because there are still particular individuals and
institutions that actively engage in perpetuating these misunderstandings. In some countries many of the same experts
and bureaucrats who collaborated with the Nazi government and occupying forces
returned to their old position almost immediately after World War Two
concluded. They entrenched their views
in the structures of these supposedly denazified organizations, trained the
next generation of managers and experts in maintaining the Aryanised version of
what constitutes art and how it should be presented to specialists and the
general public, and they obstruct or resist the efforts to correct errors as
much as they do to prevent objects being returned to their rightful owners, to
compensate Jewish families for losses incurred as a consequence of these
confiscations and destructions, and to force Holocaust survivors and their
families into expensive and humiliating law cases.
Scholarship in
the secular modern western nations allows for debate and disagreement on
interpretations, but there is a limit as to how far it allowable—ethically, juridical,
morally—for writers, teachers, curators to base their arguments on false
versions of the truth, distorted facts, gaps that are not recognized and
ill-founded truisms and supposedly authoritative givens. The example of Holocaust Denial comes to mind
as a manifest example. While it is permissible
to keep revising interpretations of the basic facts, thanks to the discovery of
new evidence, as well as to the refinement of critical questions, it is not
legitimate to deny those basic facts concerned with the enormity of the crimes
committed that constitute the Shoah, the specific times and places that make it
unique in history, and the essential rent in European culture and civilization
it caused. If the murder of six million
Jews did not occur, then all who claim compensation must be liars, dupes or
insane; if six million did not die, then they either did not exist at all or
are now hiding in secret bunkers counting their ill-gotten gains; if the Nazis
had not been obsessed by the Jewish Question and the Final Solution, they would
have made more strategic decisions in their war policy and would now be in
control of the world.
But what we are
discussing is not the refusal to believe that the Shoah actually happened with
its murder of six million Jews and the destruction of a civilization of both
Yiddishkeit and Sephardic culture in Europe; rather what is at issue is more
subtle—those why attempt to deny the existence of Jewish participation in the
formation of modern western civilization itself, especially during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
While in the early 1890s Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu attempted to blunt the
sting of a violent racial Judeophobia by arguing that it was not so much—if at
all—Jews attempting to dechristianize the nations of the west by promoting
their own version of civilization and to gain control over the social and
cultural life of these nations in the same way they were attempting to do in an
economic way, but rather that Judaism like Christianity were being paganized by
the same forced let loose by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.[2] However well-intentioned his efforts may have
been, Leroy-Beaulieu could not unstick himself from his disparagement of
Judaism as a religion and his fear of the contamination of Christendom by the
Orientalism of the Jewish culture and personality. More virulent version of anti-Semitism were
able to win out because because both the faithful Christians and the ordinary
working men and women of the west felt threatened by the modernization,
urbanization and secularization they felt stemmed from Jewish sources. Intellectuals went further, insofar as they
usually could divorce their instinctive disgust with the appearance and
behaviour of Jews in their midst, they identified the rising waves of
degenerate, decadent and primitivist art and philosophy with Jewishness: they
would say that Jews infected healthy national traditions with an Oriental
flavour of irrationalism and ritualistic mysticism or, which in a strange way
amounted to the same thing, that Jews were constitutionally incapable of
composing real music, painting representational art, dancing in an orderly
rhythmic manner, in fact, of any proper creativity or interpretation of art at
all.
Another example,
smaller in scale but no less significant in regard to moral and legal
implications, is the Dreyfus Affair, in which judicial procedures and
parliamentary processes were bent to conform to prejudice (the presumption of
guilt: a Jew must be a spy because he had no loyalty to his host country),
forgery (if no incriminating document exists, it must be created many times
over to serve the higher truth of the people and the nation), perjury (the
honour of the Army overtakes an oath to truth since the republic is at risk) and
other features of the arrogance of power.
Interpretation of the reasons why the case against Dreyfus spread and
consumed so much of the political arguments of the day may go in various
directions and apply different valences to specific causes; but no one today
can argue that Dreyfus was guilty or that the high command and governments of
the period acted in good faith.[3] To deny the importance of anti-Semitism in
the Affair and to claim it was only a marginal or incidental factor distorts
the essential driving power of the Affair, insofar as it leaves almost
inexplicable the subsequent rise of the same individuals and issues in the
1930s that culminate in the Nazi-collaborationist government and the Vichy
regime. Moreover, by not recognizing the
Jewish character of Alfred Dreyfus, his wife and extended family, their
strength in surviving and fighting for rehabilitation remains mysterious.[4]
Because Jews
were written out of the human family, in the most extreme form of racist
ideology the Nazi policy could articulate,[5] it
was assumed that they could not be creators, possessors or proper judges of
what constituted art.[6] In the same way as Jews became a stateless
people on the grounds that they were rootless and constitutionally incapable of
behaving of a lawful, civil manner, they were not recognized as artists,
composers, collectors, patrons or other necessary and valued members of the art
world. If they were holding anything of
value, those goods had to be taken away from them and placed in safe places
under civilized care. If any work of the
national (“Aryan”) patrimony had been credited to their talent or genius, such
attribution was deemed an error and needed to be corrected and the object or
idea assigned to a proper Aryan source.
In the case of art considered degenerate,[7]
such work had to be carefully labelled as such and displayed to expose the
insidious and dangerous qualities in it before being either destroyed, stored
for scientific examination out of public view, or auctioned to non-Germanic
buyers in order to raise funds to develop the new art of the Nazi revolution or
to purchase correct works of art from private owners for exhibition in public
institutions. In the case of ideas
deemed degenerate, they were to be destroyed: books were to be burnt, basic textbooks
and encyclopaedia rewritten to remove the offending concepts, and where
possible the ideas to be recast into more acceptable forms.
There was an
important exception, or rather two, or perhaps three to this last point. First, certain works deemed highly typical of
their Jewish origins were to be taken from private and public collections and
placed in a special museum to be established in Prague for future study of the
no-longer Hebrew race. Second, works of
art considered of high value in various senses of the word, because they were
unworthy of being owned by Jews, would be given to leading members of the
National Socialist Party for their own private collections, such as the one
established in Linz for Adolf Hitler’s honour.
Third, other objets d’art,
despite their manifestly racial inferiority and degenerate contagion, were of
such value that they would be sold through various secret and quasi-open
channels, much through Swiss dealers, in order to raise money for the war
effort. One should not expect the goons
and thugs who constituted the Nazi
hierarchy to be consistent about these distinctions nor to be immune to bribes;
one should, though, have expected greater professional integrity on the part of
all those participating in the international art market to have been aware of
the dangers in their own actions, to have been suspicious of any sudden run on
masterpieces of all sorts, and to have at the very least kept scrupulous
records to ensure rectification of provenance and legal return of stolen,
confiscated, and coerced works to their rightful owners as soon as the war
ended. Most horrible in this
trade—although nothing has the enormity of the torture and killing of human
beings themselves—are those intellectual and aesthetic specialists who did more
than collaborate, whether as many later claimed under duress or in ignorance of
the full extent of what was going on, : the art dealers, collectors, museum
directors, academic professors, etc., who helped to mastermind the programme of
confiscation, theft under quasi-legal proceedings and sales, especially
falsifying the attribution and other provenance history of the hundreds and
hundreds of thousands of works of art.[8]
As we have
already suggested, the problems roused by the plunder and destruction of art
works by the Nazis involves more than the objects themselves, or the individual
men and women they murdered, but also the matter of ideas, concepts and
aesthetic values. For instance, as
Richard Began explains,
...the Nazis’ Blut und Boden ideology assumes
that art can directly connect the viewer or the auditor with the deep structure
of reality, whether this consists of the primal patterns of Nature or the
enduring wisdom of das Volk.[9]
Taken in
context, the thuggish behaviour of the Nazi storm troopers, described so
graphically, for instance, by Edmond de Waal in The Hare with the Amber Eyes[10]—precious
art objects being thrown out of windows, smashed up with clubs, and spat or
defecated upon—constitutes only one aspect of the attempt to possess and
redefine the world of art undertaken by the leading Nazis and their dupes. The
larger picture, the Weltanschaaung, they tried to impose was one they
claimed to be directly emergent from
“the blood, the soil and the folk” and articulated already by the great
German Romantic philosophers of the nineteenth century.
Hence the aim of
the various branches of the National Socialist government and their carious
Quisling and other collaborationist underlings throughout occupied Europre to
implement these transformations was to teach, practice and worship a new kind
of epistemology and aesthetic philosophy, embodied in music, pictures,
statuary, architecture, street theatre and ritual, and the very shape of
everyday life. But in our assessment of
these aims, it is important to distinguish between the totalitarian methodology
of the programme, clearly something undemocratic and arbitrary, and the actual
rationalizations and theoretical underpinnings of the policy, insofar as one
can disentangle Nazi rant and racial bigotry from more serious and significant
discourse. For unlike a scholarly
approach to the actions of the Nazi government where a Manichean distinction
can be made between the crude, evil intentions of the party hacks and thugs and
the democratic principles and procedures they set out to crack, when we come to
the implementation of the ideology we find that not every single idea was
manifestly wrong, stupid, evil or confused.[11] It is not possible to argue that because the
National Socialist ideologues misused Kant, Schopenhauer, Wagner and other
philosophers and artists that this body of German tradition has no value
today—or that there is nothing abhorrent in the writings and musical
compositions that made them amenable to such manipulation. Though no one today would want to dismiss holus
bolus all of the avant garde artistic innovations of the Weimar
Republic on the grounds that such works offend public morality or continue to
arouse anti-social disgust in a minority of the population, so too we would
hesitate about any state-sanctioned decree of aesthetic acceptability. Some artists believe, on the contrary, that
whatever they do as art is not only their right to do, but that they
accordingly deserve, as citizens, the right to display their work in public and
at the state’s expense, with any rejection by a museum director or concert
master taken as a fascist act of censorship.
As the history
of the salon system in France through most of the nineteenth century
demonstrates, virtually no committee established by whatever means was able to
satisfy the demands of all the artists to show their work and thereby have a
formal sanction by the institutions of the state; any standards used to
adjudicate entry and prizes caused disagreements. The official salons were the primary means by
which artists could present themselves for selling their works, gaining
commissions, and receiving critical attention in newspapers and magazines. Private exhibitions by small groups of
dissidents, professional salesrooms run by private dealers, and occasional support
of individual patrons offered some compensation to the artists who failed to
reach the officially-decreed standards or who offended the judges or
politicians associated with the salons. Yet
on the face of it, more often than not, the election and appointment of judges
seem to have been democratic enough, and even the integrity of the men serving
on these juries cannot be faulted as driven by political agendas or blind
prejudice. The judges were professional
artists on the teaching staff of one or other of the academies set up by the
government, men whose works had already won prizes through a series of yearly
competitions, and whose credentials were confirmed by years of successful work
on public projects. The system, however,
favoured artists who were older, more conservative and committed to the
institutional system, and hence were inimitable to younger, more radical and
innovative artists, with ideas as yet unproven in the public domain. Great crowds of ordinary citizens viewed the
official salons and gave their seal of approval by their presence, just as most
professional critics in the newspapers agreed with the choices of the
juries.
Though violence
to persons or objects of art was rare, in the sense that the police did not
raid the exhibition space to take down or destroy any offending works or to
arrest recalcitrant artists, the consequences were often to make life difficult
for men and women who could not please the judges, and who were unable to sell
their works at all or at sufficient prices as to keep themselves and their families
housed, healthy and emotionally stable.
Gradually, as the nineteenth century wound down, and thus through
attrition, as older generations passed away and younger artists came to the
fore and brought with them a greater openness to the once incomprehensible
ideas about how to make art, why and for whom, the situation became less
dire. More and more private dealers and
collectors came to offer their patronage and protection to the avant garde
creators and so the ability of alternative schools of thought and feeling could
survive and occasionally flourish despite the natural inertia of conservative
tastes.
Nevertheless,
freedom of thought and action in regard to art has its limits, insofar as pubic
space and monumental projects require selection and choice by those controlling
the state purse strings. In the modern
world prior to the Nazi regime and its imitators, European states tended to
develop elaborate, complex systems of support for the arts, systems, however,
which allowed for the role of private, commercial and individual patrons,
collectors, critics, instructors and galleries.
What the totalitarian regimes[12]
sought to do was to take control of both the state-run institutions and the private,
individual and commercial enterprises and merge them into a single,
totalitarian system. And they wished to
do so, at least under fascist law, in a duplicitous manner, whereas under
communist rule the private sector would simply cease to exist. The Nazis pretended that the formal state
institutions were continuing to operate as they always had, with any changes in
official purchasing and display policy registered in plebiscites and party
elections, and permitting many of the same individuals to occupy the same
positions they had previously held.
State control was administered from within by the choice of particular
party officials placed in key positions and from without by means of budgetary
measures and laws that seemed only tangential to the epistemological and
aesthetic considerations. They also
pretended that private, individual and commercial aspects of the art world
continued as before, only with certain persons excluded because they were no
longer considered citizens of the Reich—those who were forced into exile, sent
to concentration camps, or died in the course of the revolution. Other persons filled their shoes, gained
possession of the older collections, and carried on businesses that had been
Aryanized or left vacant by individuals and families who had departed the
Reich. A glimpse at the process of
making German culture and art Jüdenrein in 1936 can be seen in these
words by Judith Bring Ingber:
Jewish performing artists were no longer heard in
concert or on the radio. Books by Jewish
and liberal intellectuals were burned in public bonfires. Professionals were forced to quit their
posts, especially in law courts and at universities. Official policy was the plundering of Jewish
property and boycotting of Jewish businesses.[13]
More insidious
changes occurred as well, insidious because they were as visible in their
implementation. As we suggested earlier,
misattributions, substitutions of works of art and names of creators occurred,
the historical record was altered, the meaning of different key words and
concepts was altered to match with current circumstances, as they really were
or as they were asserted to be, and priorities were shifted to make central
what had been marginal and vice versa.
If these transformations set in motion by the National Socialist
revolution in the 1930s had come to an end at the conclusion of the Second
World War, the damage would have been bad enough, to be sure, but rectification
would have been possible, with looted art objects returned to their original
owners or at least places of origin, destroyed buildings reconstructed or at
least recognized to have existed, and textbooks and other catalogues corrected
to remove ideological distortions.
Unfortunately, the end of the war did not end the confusion and
duplicity. Not only did large numbers of
previous owners, collectors, dealers, directors and other persons involved in
the old system fail to survive the war, as well as artists, composers and
sculptors, but neither did their families—or even communities; so that
traditions were broken and memories lost.
[1] Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Journey to the End of the Night, trans. Ralph
Manheim (New York: New Directions Paperback, 1983; 1934) p. 96.
[2]
Leroy-Beaulieu, Israel chez les nations,
pp. 40-41.
[3] Norman Simms, review of Piers
Paul Read, The Dreyfus Affair in East European Jewish History (EEJH)
online at eejh@yahoogroups.com. 30 March 2013.
[4] In addition
to my three book-length studies of
Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus, see Norman Simms “Yes, Dreyfus Still Matters, But Not
the Way Some People Think” Family
Security Matters (20 May 2012) http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/yes-dreyfus-still-matters-but-not-the-way-some-people-think#ixzz1vRgEmsDv and “Alfred
Dreyfus, Philippe Karsenty and the Arrogance of Power” East European Jewish History (22 August 2013)
at eejh@yahoogroups .com
[5]
They were considered
vermin, bacteria, or cancerous cells.
Animals could not in law own or rent property, sign contacts or conduct
business.
[6] A lesson learned from Richard
Wagner and his son-in-law Chamberlain.
[7] Whereas early writers on the
nature of “degeneracy” were never strictly clear on whether this referred to
the products only as designations of a style or to the producers and thus to a
physical-mental state of regression to a more primitive, less perfect
constitution; “decadence” was the term more clearly shown as deriving from
pernicious aesthetic ideas and cultural values.
The Nazis made all things derive from and turn on race.
[8] It was not a matter of a few
score collections being broken up and few hundred paintings assigned to artists
who did not produce them, but of vast numbers, so great that the distortion of
the real picture of who had acted as patrons, who had enriched the entire world
patrimony is yet to be recognized.
[10]
Edmund de Waal. The Hare
with the Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (London: Vintage Books. 2011);
see particularly the chapters dealing with Anschluss in 1938 when
Austria joined the Third Reich. De Waal
here records how the valuable furniture, paintings, sculpture and other items
owned by his Jewish relatives, the Ephrussi Family, were gratuitously
destroyed, while their mansion was confiscated through laws of Aryanization.
[11]
Robert McCormick,
“‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant Garde in Nazi Germany” The
Art Bulletin (1 June 1907) online at http://www/accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-20824272/degenerate-art-fate-avant (seen 05/10/2011).
[12] This is not the place to make
nice distinctions between various Nazi, Fascist and Soviet regimes.
[13] Judith Brin Ingber,
“Vilified or Glorified? Nazi versus Zionist Views of the Jewish Body” in Seeing
Israeli and Jewish Dance, ed. Judith Brin Ingber (Detroit, MI: Wayne State
University Press, 2011) p. 257.
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