The Distortions of Cultural
History
The widespread
plunder, known as Mőbel Aktion,
occurred in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. From 1942 to 1944, at least 70,000 dwellings
were emptied: in Paris 38,000 apartments were stripped bare by French moving
companies at the request of the German authorities. It took 674 trains to transport the loot to
Germany. Some 2,700 train cars supplied
Hamburg alone.[i]
There is a scene in a French film about the round-ups of Jews in Paris
during the Second World War in which one of the main characters goes into a
huge warehouse to look around and sees room after room after room of stacked up
furniture, cabinets, dishes, books, clothing and all the other items removed
from apartments left vacant after the Jews were taken away to the death camps
of the East. The visual effect is
increasingly numbing as viewers realize that thousands of families have been
destroyed, literally in the sense of being taken to their deaths under horrible
conditions and infinite cruelty, and in the sense that all that these people
have inherited, purchased, imbued with their social reality will be stripped of
its individuality and sold here in Paris or shipped into Germany for the use of
people whose government and agents have been what Goldhagen calls Hitler’s
willing executioners. The moral effect is stunning: no one in Europe at the
time could have been unaware of why so many apartments were placed on the
market for rent again, why so many used items of domestic provenance became
available after years of scarcity—or why so many neighbors, workmates,
passers-by on the street had disappeared.
This, not Eichmann’s putative passivity as he organized the details of
the Holocaust, is the true banality of evil.
Vast amounts of wealth was stolen from Jews throughout Europe where the
Nazis went. Sometimes it was the banal
items—bicycles, dishes, clothing, and sticks of furniture; sometimes, as the
process of Aryanization continued, it meant factories, banks, shops, homes,
newspapers, department stores, diamond workshops, virtually anything that Jews
ever possessed or created or worked at.
Jews were outside the law, considered animals—and animals neither have
possessions of their own or manufacture anything worth while.
While those banal goods and businesses were taken back to the Reich to
be given in compensation for good and loyal German citizens who had their homes
bombed, their livelihoods destroyed and their sons killed or injured, as though
it were all the Jews fault—and the Jews were considered also the instigators of
the War, by nature traitors and spies; the most long-lasting result of the
destruction, confiscation and Aryanization of works of art—only second to the
enormity of the genocide—is the distortion of European cultural history. Not only were the Jews as a people to be gotten
rid of, so that Europe and eventually the whole world would be Jüdenrein, cleansed of the Jewish stink
and taint, but so too their place in cultural history.
Collections of art they formed were to be broken up so as to make their
original purposes and credibility unrecognizable and thus they were given new
provenances. Commissions and orders for
paintings, architecturally designed buildings, and museums or galleries they
oversaw had to be stripped of all Jewish signs, assigned to other more
appropriate owners and directors, the Aryans, and thus presented in a
German-national perspective. Courses in
the universities, ateliers and conservatories to be renamed, recast, and
scrubbed clean of Jewified ideas and
techniques: knowledge had to be unjewified,
brought back to a state of health from its condition of degeneracy and
decadence. Pictures were to be given new
names, characters and places depicted were to be re-identified, chronology and
place of origin had to be shifted to fit with a purified paradigm.
As remarked before, the processes of denazification after the Allied
victories in 1945 were not complete or coherent. The western need to bring stability quickly
in Germany in order to meet the challenge of the Soviet Union and the failure
to understand clearly the implications of what the Nazis did in their cultural
revolution led to many of the very same individuals being returned to their old
positions or analogous posts in universities, museums, galleries, and cultural
ministries. In Austria the process of
denazification was even less enthusiastically carried out, the new independent
republic being seen and allowed to believe itself to be Hitler’s first victim,
and hence less responsible for the war crimes and crimes against humanity. So
that this new state could be used in juggling power relations between the Free
World and what lay now behind the Iron Curtain.
As a result, although some compensation and restitution was carried out,
more in (West) Germany than in (neutral) Austria, all the old ideas of Aryan
superiority and Semitic inferiority were not swept away—albeit much was swept
under the carpet and so avoided in polite conversations. School textbooks, museum catalogues, and
formal histories either avoided or downplayed the extent of the empty places
left by Nazi destruction of so much art—both in the physical sense of burning,
pulverizing and breaking apart and in the other sense of replacement
provenances, renamed movements and objects, and rejigged chronological
developments. What was omitted in the
books could be passed on in lectures and seminars, where tones of voice, winks
and hand gestures could make clear to new generations what a properly Jüdenrein history of culture should look
like. Not just Jews themselves were
gone—so many killed, so many dispersed, whether to America or Israel or
elsewhere, so many traumatized into numbness and unable to speak of their
ordeals or pass on clear accounts of what they had owned and known before the
War—but other German and Austrian intellectuals, artists and entrepreneurs who
fled voluntarily or under threat of arrest and who never could bring themselves
to return to the lands of their persecution.
These included the novelists, painters, musicians and scholars whose
ideas were considered Jewified by the Nazi regime.
These great cultural gaps and losses need to be noted as much as the
actual breaks and falsified versions of cultural history, not just in Germany
and Austria or in the lands occupied and ruined by the Nazis and their local
collaborators. But the whole of Western Civilization. Indeed, to a certain extent the United States
and the State of Israel benefitted immensely from the immigrants from the Lands
of Persecution and Death into these new settings, with generations of young
students reaping the intellectual and aesthetic rewards. The history, the physical evidence, and the
cultural experiences of so many hundreds of thousands of brilliant minds,
hearts and hands could not, however, be compensated for, even in welcoming more
tolerant societies. The sudden
appearance of thousands of art works thought lost or never even known to be
missing, such as the great hoard of Gurlitt’s in Munich and also perhaps in
Stuttgart and Salzberg, make painfully evident that the picture we have of what
modern art once consisted of is incorrect, and how it came into being needs to
be reassessed and rewritten, and what happened when it was shattered revealed
in all its horrid details. What is at
stake, then, is every single textbook, every museum catalogue, every course in
art history, every accepted and standardized view of the past.
Personal
Note: People sometimes ask me why in
my writing I do not use the most up-to-date art histories or other received
versions of the past and its culture.
They wonder why I keep using nineteenth and early twentieth century
authorities. They also ask why use
quirky theories such as psychohistory and histoire
de mentalités, or even older paradigms from Gabriel Tarde and Jules
Michelet, Salomon Reinach and so forth.
Well, to begin with, I have no faith in the latest versions of
post-modernism and post-structuralism, and certainly less for the schools that
can be traced right back to Nazi and Stalinist theories. Second, even when the new studies are
pursued with the best of intentions and honest attempts at objectivity, their
own sourcs, stated and implied, take them right back to the distortions
mentioned above, to the mythical constructions meant to obscure generations of
denial and slander. Third, in those
older books and authors, though they were themselves often working within
questionable theoretical approaches and with limited knowledge of many facts
that have since become available, not all their questions have been answered
adequately—many, indeed, have been pushed aside and merely labelled, if taken
into account at all, as irrelevant, but I still find them compelling and try to
work out from them. This means too, aside
from the fact that I have grown old and curmudgeonly about neologisms and
jargon, that avoid many (I wish I could say most) of the syntactical
constructions and lexical monstrosities that support the very distortions in
epistemology I am trying to avoid. Such vague
terms as research as a verb, issue as a catch-all for problem and
point of discussion, and reference as
a process of allusion, contextualization and indication of proof-text strip the
language of rational discourse of its subtleties. They imply mechanistic determinism (e.g.,
metaphors drawn from computer speech, such as hard-wired and default or
from genetics and DNA codes) where I want to find dynamic, multi-layered and
reversible forces.
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