Susan Roland. Hitler’s Art Thief: Hildebrand Gurlitt,
the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe’s Treasures. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2015. xiv + 386 pp + 16 pp of unnumbered
black-and-white and coloured plates.
Since the early 1990s, books and
articles on Nazi art looting, plundering and confiscations from private Jewish
collectors and public museums have proliferated, and these added to the
innumerable courtroom documents and legal reports prepared by lawyers, co-opted
scholars and bureaucrats to fight for and against cases of restitution make up
an irrefutable argument for the extent of the crime, its significance to the
history of the Holocaust, and, more and more, to the way in which the trade in
stolen paintings provided much-needed cash to keep the Third Reich fighting at
least two or three years beyond that its own industrial and financial base
would have allowed. How many millions of
lives could have been saved had not the Swiss provided a means for using art
sales to finance the purchase of vital materiel for the Wehrmacht and
the Luftwaffe, let alone the construction of death camps and crematoria?
Or what destruction could have been prevented throughout the battlefields and
cities of Europe had not the greedy private and institutional dealers in North
America circled the auction houses to feed off the vast amount of under-priced
masterpieces that flooded into the market from the late 1930s through to the
end of World War Two (and even beyond)?
Documentary and feature films,
glamorous and gritty, as well as novels and television dramas, romantic and
ridiculous, provide another dimension, the human tragedy of so many millions of
lives ruined and so much art lost and the grotesque and even farcical scenes of
perfidious buffoons stealing and cheating from one another. Some of these
materials deal with the victims, some with the
victimizers, and some with the inadvertent heroes or abetters of further
grief and humiliation, naïve judges who have no sense of history, perplexed
family members who are bamboozled into bad deals, ambitious lawyers blinded to
the personal feelings they trample on, cynical politicians trying to hide their
own or their parents’ collusion during the war, idealist scholars trudging on
through the mud unaware of how far their own careers are being stunted….
Art was not just big business in
the Third Reich run by wretched little creatures, it was what mattered, at a
time when currencies around the world had suffered enormously during the Great
Depression, often as philatelists know from a hyperinflation that made a letter
across town cost several million marks or pengos, objets d’art
substituted for other kinds of investment and savings, so that robbing Jewish
families of their possessions was effectively destroying their lives. Not just outright pilfering but also forced
sales imposed on desperate people—some made to sign documents while already in
a concentration camp—and huge taxes that had to be paid in order to cross
borders, all this signalled a feeding frenzy among the unscrupulous dealers,
auction houses, museum directors and individuals seeking bargains at the
expense of other people’s misery.
And there they all are laid out
before us in this book, from the bigwigs, like Hitler and Goering, who credited
themselves with enormous knowledge and sensitivity as art connoisseurs, to the
lesser beings who scurried about like rats and cockroaches, doing their duty,
cheating on one another, trying to protect their personal collections and their
families, willing to betray anyone and everyone and especially to see Jews and
political dissidents be taken away to certain death, preparing complicated lies
and half-truths to exonerate themselves when the inevitable end came to the
Third Reich.
The whole enterprise of documenting
this sad and ridiculous, horrible and pathetic series of events is far from
over, not just because museum directors and legal experts still clash over
unresolved cases in hundreds of unresolved cases—in the United States, as well
as in Europe—as second and third generation heirs to murdered and plundered
victims become aware of what had been done to their families and where
long-lost or presumably destroyed objects of great financial as well as
sentimental value emerge in auction catalogues and provenance records of
respectable institutions, as well as in misattributed displays in scholarly
tomes and much-touted travelling exhibitions.
Moreover, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the running out of
time-limits on locked archives around the world, greater stores of documents,
photographs and private memoirs become available to be sifted through.
What Susan Roland does, for she is
more novelist than historian, is extrapolate from the evidence the feelings,
personality and thus the motivations of the family she focuses on, especially
Cornelius the grandfather who was an architect historian, Hildebrand the father
who as the title indicated was Hitler’s art thief (or “king Raffke”),
and Cornelius Gurlitt the son who recently was discovered to be hoarding
thousands of supposedly lost paintings in his Munich flat. She synthesises many of the latest books on
Nazi Art Looting, ferrets out details from the scholarly articles, legal
documents and private memoirs now available and sets these facts within the
contexts of political, military, diplomatic and artistic events and theories;
but then, what fictional writers have always done in creating historical novels
and romances, Roland imagines what the characters think, and feel, paints
word-pictures of how they converse and dream, and creates the illusion of
coherent understanding where professional historians are limited to probable
scenarios, debatable missing links in the chain of cause-and-effect, and honest
confessions of ignorance as to the meaning of it all.
After the death of the elder
Hildebrand in an automobile accident and soon after that of his mother by
cancer, young Cornelius was left alone, and had only his married sister to
relate to. He eventually became, in Roland’s
expression, a “phantasmagorical man”, perhaps autistic, certainly withdrawn,
secretive, and cut off from most of the post-war and then even the digitally
communicative world, but all in all no fool.
Living within the law, as he understood it, he kept to himself and “his
friends”, the paintings his father had collected through means that for the
most part Cornelius—who is presented as a somewhat pathetic figure of a child
whose personality and mind was blighted by his parents’ greed—was unaware of,
always maintaining to himself and others that Hildebrand had been a heroic
saviour and protector of art from the Nazis.
After nearly seventy years of a rather furtive existence of selling one
painting at a time for cash, he was finally caught put on suspicion of tax
evasion, hounded by the police and the press, bewildered by the unwanted
attention, grieved by the confiscation of his “friends,” and then, shortly
before his death in his nineties, he made a will, leaving his whole collection
to a small museum in Bern, Switzerland.
That museum agreed to accept all but contested works of art, and thus
the matter stands, with few instances of restitution made, much gnashing of
teeth by German officials, and most of the world not much the wiser as to the
full extent of whereabouts all the hoard Hildebrand Gurlitt had amassed by one
shady deal or nefarious transaction or another
Catherine
Hickley. The Munich Art Hoard: Hitler’s
Dealer and his Secret Legacy. London: Thames & Hudson, 2016. 272 pp. +
40 Illustrations. Pbk, 2018.
The accidental discovery of
Cornelius Gurlitt’s hoard of paintings in 2012 tipped over the fragile notion
that just about everything that could be found still intact—for much was
deliberately or inadvertently destroyed during World War Two—had been brought
to light, barring perhaps the occasional canvas that was lost in someone’s
attic or hidden in a private vault. But
the 1200 or so items in Gurlitt’s apartment—and subsequently in his house in
Linz, and then a few more in his relatives’ homes—threw open the possibility
that much that was supposedly lost forever might not be. Considering that perhaps a quarter to a third
of great art works had been misappropriated by the Nazis from public and
private collections—constituting the most outrageous act of pillaging ever, if
not at least from the Napoleonic Wars—the cramped and confused state of this
old man’s heritage from his father, the notorious and nasty (if not quite Nazi)
collaborator and liar, Hildebrand Gurlitt is sufficient to remind us that the
history of art has been drastically distorted.
This is not, of course, what
Catherine Hickley is most interested in. She carefully weaves together the
stories of Hildebrand Gurlitt and other individuals, among them art dealers,
gallery directors, museum curators and clever shysters without any specific
professional status, amassing of so many paintings, along with the biographies
of some of the leading Jewish families who owned those works of art before they
had them physically forced from them or coerced into selling them way below
their real value. While not focusing on
the evil figures behind all this, Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring et al., those greedy and stupid
masterminds behind this grand theft of European art, Hickley shows the
opportunists at work who feasted off both the Jewish suffering and the greed of
the Nazis.
In her depiction of Cornelius
Gurlitt, he emerges as a broken, confused and pathetic figure. He was frail and
ill at the time he was finally outed on what seemed at first a minor charge of
not reporting the sale of paintings he sold off occasionally to pay his rent
and keep up with his medical expenses. He only partly pretended to be too
feeble to follow the actions of the German tax collectors and police
investigators as they swooped down on his collection and took it away for
proper study, a process that took an ordinate long time, as the officials
themselves were not sure what they had uncovered and unclear as to how to
proceed in deciding on restitution to the original owners of the art treasures.
Insofar as he realized what the situation was, Cornelius seems to have tried to
cooperate and to offer to return works to their proper owners, if such could be
located.
Hickley is rather good in outlining
the complexities of identifying painters, re-establishing correct provenance
for these important works of art, and what legal niceties have to be observed,
especially when German and Austrian laws do not quite conform to American or
Canadian standards. After all, when a canvas has been sold and re-sold several
times over more than fifty years, and the later purchasers as well as auction
houses have acted in good faith, is it the sole responsibility of the last
owner to hand back the work, as though it were a stolen car or necklace: some
of the in-between sales were made by public museums dealing with what they
consider national treasures. Often enough, a solution is reached which can
satisfy everyone, such as the return of the work to the family from which the
painting was confiscated and then it is repurchased legitimately by the
institution. However, things don’t always go smoothly. Museums resist
restitution claims, government bureaucrats hold up the process for years hoping
the individual making a claim will die or just give up, and others, unfortunately
with their historical ties to the ideological regime that justified and carried
out the looting, do what they can to inflict further pains on the survivors of
the Holocaust or their children. Because it takes a great deal of time and
money to push through such claims to a satisfactory conclusion, many families
do give up, no matter how much they wish to see justice done and find some
sentimental closure to an ordeal that begin with the mass murder of their
relatives and the ruin of their wealth and status built up over many
generations. In the end, the enormity of the original crimes should outweigh
later inconveniences to good faith purchasers and guardians of the national
glory; so that the teasing, annoyances and slandering of the Jewish claimants becomes
a continuation of the anti-Semitic policies practiced under National
Socialism. One has to resist feeling
sorry for Cornelius Gurlitt.
The other major factor in the story
of the Nazi looting of Jewish art collections and the persistence in trying to
obscure or deny what happened has to do with the history of European or even
world art. Not only have hundreds of thousands of works of art disappeared
through destruction and removal from public or scholarly scrutiny. But the
attempt to erase from the accurate provenance of each work its Jewish
connections skewers what can be known of how modern art came into existence—who
were the patrons, the purchasers, the museum directors, the art critics, the
academic historians and amateur lovers of art?
The story moves from being merely
tragic or sad, when the viciousness of anti-Semitism still lurks in the halls
of power and in the well-furnished offices of the decision-makers. It is bad
enough when the same old Nazis and their heirs rule the processes of restitution,
much worse when Jewish collectors, museum directors and gallery owners are
exposed as those who joined the feeding frenzy, whether operating out of
Switzerland or through more occluded channels back into the United States.
Disingenuous arguments—statute of limitations, good faith purchases under
dubious circumstances, family
traditions--still surface when American owners—private and public—refuse to
cooperate with those seeking to have them go through due process in checking
out their holdings.
The recovery of looted art goes on,
the identification of the last legitimate owners and the history of each work
over the subsequent years remains incomplete. Too often, when an objet d’art is indeed unequivocally
identified and matched to a specific family or individual, the stodgy wheels of
bureaucracy grind on, the nasty anti-Semites—not so unusually the very
individuals who were responsible for the theft and the illegitimate
on-selling—twist the knife in the wound of survivors and their heirs waiting for
closure: regaining possession of the often only physical connection to previous
lives is delayed, the claims questioned in obscene and insulting questioning of
motives and a questioning of memories by those who have been clinging on to
these sentimental images in their mind for three quarters of a century or more.
The belated discovery of a single
or small group of paintings, statues or other work of art reminds everyone that
the search cannot be considered completed, not by a long shot. But every
forgotten piece of art also makes it impossible to complete the history of an
artist’s or a collector’s or a fashionable trend to be considered sufficient to
draw valid generalizations. Deliberate misidentifications in standard
catalogues and histories of art made fifty, sixty or seventy years ago have to
be sought out and rectified. Statements made by those who have never examined
closely lost paintings cannot be sustained once those works have come back into
the light. Biographies, even autobiographies by all those involved have to be
reassessed—lacunae filled, errors corrected, conclusions reassessed.
Misnaming the artist, giving a new
title to a painting, leaving out the people who encouraged and supported
intellectually as well as financially the founding of new aesthetic movements,
along with the creating of societies, institutions and media to develop
audiences as well as artists makes it difficult for later generations to
understand why tastes change, fashions develop and new influences flow out to
the general public. It is not that Jews dominated the entire enterprise of
modern art—clearly they didn’t—but that to remove their active presence at all
levels of participation distorts the basic contours of national and
international culture. In a sense, resistance to restitution gives in to the
obscene notion that Jews played only a very minor and unimportant part in the
creation of modern civilization, that, as anti-Semites like Richard Wagner
argued, they lacked the innate genius and talent to innovate and create, that
they could at best perform mechanically and imitate the imagination of others.
By correcting the errors and generating a more dynamic and inclusive view of
the past few hundreds of years, at least, the lies and slanders about who and
what the Jews were and are, and what they can still become, can be overcome.
