The Art of Nazi
Confiscation
and the Eccentric
Hoarding of Art
Introduction
There are several important areas to be
discussed in relation to the discovery (a
doubtful word it now seems given that Bavarian police were involved at least
two years ago) of the 1406 art works—121 framed and 1285 unframed pieces[i], made
up of oil and water paintings, along with drawings, engravings, woodcuts and
prints[ii]—in
the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt in Munich (and now a further fourteen in his
brother-in-law’s house in Stuttgart and suspicions about his small house in
Austria), as well as those sold off before, during and after World War Two by
his father Hildebrand and himself. Not
just the identification and provenance of these paintings, only some of which
were part of the exhibition of “Degenerate Art” the Nazis put on in 1937, these
particular canvases having been stripped from public galleries across Germany
or confiscated from Jewish collectors and art dealers; many more came from
Jewish families desperate for cash to escape from the persecutions mounting in
the Third Reich, those confiscated or openly looted throughout the occupied
territories, and some more or less legitimately collected earlier in Hildebrand
Gurlitt’s career as art dealer and museum director. This range of sources requires some
discussion of how Jews played an inordinate part as artists themselves, private
collectors, commercial dealers, museum directors or curators, art historians
and reviewers in newspapers and magazines.
Then one needs to be accurate in describing what the Nazis considered to
be degenerate art, art treasures deemed too valuable, important or beautiful to
be in the hands of Jews, which works they designated for their own museums and
private collections, and which they wanted to sell on the overseas market to
raise much needed funds for the war effort.
Who were the Gurlitt family, what were their relationships to their
Jewish background and to Jews they dealt with, and how did Cornelius become an
agent of the Nazis, with special relationships to Hitler, Goebbels and other
leaders of the Third Reich? Who are the likely original owners of these
paintings prior to their collections being looted, forcibly purchased at a
fraction of their proper value, and what claims can they make now that almost
all the statutes of limitations for return of stolen goods (including goods coerced
out of their possession) have passed? With many Holocaust survivors now in
their 80s and 90s, what claims can their children and grandchildren make for
restitution on moral grounds? If no
legitimate claimants can be found, to whom and where do these art works
belong? It would be obnoxious if they
were given to persons or institutions or even countries who remain closely
linked to the Nazis. Then finally what
needs to be examined are the comments and letters from those persons who
maintain that Jews are unworthy of owning national treasures of Germany, who
could not by their racial heritage have actually been legal owners to begin
with, and who to treat these discovered paintings as any other great
masterpieces—the oldest work in Gurlitt’s collection is a sixteenth-century
copper engraving of an Albert Dũrer Crucifixion[iii]—acquired
as part of the historical plunder of war and conquest. For what is at stake is much more than
revenge, justice, or commercial fairness: there are the deeper and more lasting
questions of the on-going theft intellectual property and the consequent
distortions of cultural history.
Hildebrand Gurlitt and his Family Background
The father of
the eccentric 79-year-old in whose Munich apartment the mysterious and huge treasure
trove was found was born into a well-known artistic family, a family with
nineteenth and twentieth century musicians, architects and painters in it, as
well as art historians and dealers.[iv] Because of a Jewish grandmother,[v]
Hildbrand, who had been a supporter of many modernist artists and a dealer in
decadent works according to conservative critics, lost his poisition as a
museum director when the Nazis came to power and removed Jews, even Mishlingen
from such positions. By the Nazi racial
laws Gurlitt was one-quarter Jewish which put him in a somewhat ambiguous
position—part of the subhuman category to have his official positions Aryanized
and yet German enough to work for the Reich until it was time to liquidate
him. Nevertheless, though he continued
to trade in Impressionist and Expressionist works, Gurlitt was chosen by the
new National Socialist government to be of the four-man Commission for the Exploitation
of Degenerate Art tasked with obtaining and then selling-off such degenerate
art.[vi]
From 1939 to 1942, he operated under the project of Sonderauftrag Linz to stock
a museum in the Fũhrer’s hometown with the best and most “healthy” works of art
in Europe.[vii] Still later, he was put in charge of the
section in France and Belgium doing the same, and extended his range of
activities to other German-occupied territories. This was part of Rosenberg’s’s infamous
Taskforce, the ERR (Einsatzstab
Reichsleiter Rosenberg).[viii] He was, as Keith Girard puts it, “ruthlessly
efficient in his work.”[ix]
Here, then,
is the seemingly inexplicable paradox of Gurlitt the father On the one hand, he was educated and gained
experience in the art world as a supporter of new, innovative trends in
painting, rose up through the ranks by the force of his willingness to go
against the tide of majority tastes, and suffered for his principles. On the other hand, when the times proved
difficult, he seems to have gone with the rising power of the racially-based
Nazi party (without, however, becoming a member), accepted lucrative jobs and
worked assiduously to serve his new masters, including having personal
relations with me like Goebbels. As an
anonymous writer in The Economist puts it, “somehow he managed to become one of
the few dealers chosen by Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda boss, to
sell much of the art the Nazis confiscated.”[x]
He took the
opportunity this new kind of relationship to feather his own nest through
skimming off many works of art for his own private collection, whether through
purchase at absurdly low prices from desperate Jewish owners, working
hand-in-glove with other collaborationist art dealers to draw into the Third Reich
goods similarly purchased under duress, Aryanized (that is, confiscated, in
other words, stolen), or removed from
the mass of works without noting their provenance or supposed destinations. When questioned by the Allies at the end of
the War, he and his wife prevaricated, made up a story that both the objets d’art and the records of their
purchase had been destroyed during the Dresden incendiary bombing raids. One American interrogator, Theodore Heinrich,
the future director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wrote of having negative
feelings about Gurlitt senior: that he was uncooperative and a devious witness,
claiming he was forced to be a dealer, and had no recollection of most of the
transactions he took part in or directed.[xi]
Between 1945
and 1956, the year of his death, Gurlitt had the goods the Allies had sequestered
from him on suspicion of being an active agent for the Nazis, built up his
private business as a dealer again, and even exhibited some of his collection
in New York, where it was noted that several of the paintings and prints put on
show had been part of the Degenerate Art Exhibition.[xii] It would seem, then, that he passed to his
teen age son certain key skills and knowledge about art, a devious personality,
and a vast heritage of dubiously obtained works by great masters worth in
today’s terms more than US$1 billion. He
does not seem to have bequeathed to young Cornelius any sense of Jewish ethical
responsibilities and social morality, let alone professional integrity and
family connections.
The Eccentric Cornelius Gurlitt
A teenager
when his father Hildebrand Gurlitt died in an automobile accident in 1957, this
strange heir to the art works that have caused such a stir seems to have
emerged from almost a cloud of unknowing with the discovery of his secret
horde. At age seventy-nine, “Cornelius
Gurlitt was not registered with Munich municipal authorities and had no tax
number or pension,” seems to have “any direct family,” and was barely known by
more distant relatives who, by the way, had distanced himself from Hildebrand
and his wife when it became known that he had collaborated with the Nazis
during the War.[xiii] Gurlitt is an eccentric, his flat in Munich
being stuffed with rubbish and rotting food; nevertheless the impressive
collection of paintings, prints, lithographs and other art works were all
professionally stored. According to a
police report, “The framed works were stored in a vertical stack the way you
would see it in an art museum depot… The works on paper were stored in drawers,
out of light.”[xiv] This means that somehow the son had picked up
techniques and knowledge from his father, though, aside from the few occasional
sales he made to provide a living for himself, he seems to have never been in
the profession of art dealer or museum curator.
The Nazi View of Degenerate Art
While only
380 or so of the more than 1400 pieces in the Gurlitt horde taken by Munich
police[xv]
seem to be taken from the Degeneracy in Art show put on by the Nazis from 1937
through 1942, probably all swept from German museums, it should be remembered
that not all, not even two-thirds of these modernist art works were produced by
Jews.[xvi] The notion of degeneracy (Entartung) as a form of dangerous
regressive heredity was a popular notion in the late nineteenth century,
involving such Jews as the criminologist Caesar Lombroso and the physician and
philosopher Max Nordau. The notion of degeneracy was related to that of decadence, the sense that everything was
in decline and falling apart. The
popular Catholic newspaper La Croix,
for instance, on 5 May 1889 described the current situation in France:
La religion est persécute, la noblesse est anéantie, la magistrature a
perdu son indépendance et son caractère, l’armée est vaincue et humiliée,
l’industrie meurt, l’agriculture est ruinée.
Partout des cris de détresse.[xvii]
Religion [i.e.,
Roman Catholicism] is persecuted, the nobility diminished, the judiciary has
lost its independence and its character, the army is defeated and humiliated,
industry is dying, agriculture is ruined.
Everywhere there are cries of distress.
The remedy to
those who felt this whole sense of collapse and despair, which they scapegoated
on to the Jews, was a more radical shift to the right in politics, a longing
for a return to elitism in society, a desire for a strong leader (as in
Boulangism), a purifying of the national character, and a nostalgia for the new
spiritualism and clerical strictness of the Church.[xviii]
But for most nineteenth-century
thinkers the idea of degeneracy was something brought about by inbreeding and
required to restore families and communities to health the mixing of blood
lines from diverse races. For them, too,
when they spoke of anti-Semitism it was more religious, cultural and
psychological than biological—the mechanics of heredity and genetics was not
yet known. The Nazis twisted this
concept of mixed blood and weakened nerves to mean loss of racial purity, with
a consequent program of controlled breeding, sterilization and extermination.
The National Socialists also distorted the original discussion of how
degenerate individuals brought about the moral breakdown of the old classical
order in the arts, including literature, architecture, painting, sculpture and
music, using this term to describe virtually all of the innovative movements of
the nineteenth century to a perverse plan to restore the Aryan national body
and soul through a vast collective effort of mind-control and vigorous
exercise.
In the 1937
show Hitler and his band of would-be artistic dictators wanted to expose to the
German(ic) people how degenerate they already were on the way to becoming as
depicted in the “Jewified” paintings, sculptures, drawings and so on. When the Degenerate Art Exhibition first
opened its doors, its immediate aim was to balance another exhibition called “Great
German Art” a day earlier. The first
show was meant to point out what Germany had once been and what it was going to
become again, even to exceed under the National Socialist regime; the second
was to indicate what would happen if, as already evident in these distortions
of healthy, vigorous Aryan expression, the various forms of post-Impressionism
were allowed to continue to dominate the field.[xix] Only a small proportion of the paintings and
other works of art swept out of museums and public galleries were put on
display. What was shown was art that the
Nazis considered clearly manifesting the Jewification of taste and execution;[xx]
not those more subtle works they feared would insinuate their way still further
into public consciousness and sensibility.
By turning Jew into a synonym for degenerate and seeing it as a physical
disease that infected every corner of German life, the Nazis sought approval
for their impending genocide of all Jews and other groups already infected by
the cancer of Jewification.[xxi]
At the same
time, most of the modernist works were held back for other reasons. Like most of the artistic booty collected
during the War, the bulk of what was deemed unworthy of state sponsored
exhibition or, worse, ownership by the less-than-human Jewish collectors and
dealers, was considered of such a high quality that the would-be connoisseurs
in the party hierarchy wanted it for themselves—or saw a good way to raise much
needed money from abroad. Of the
probably 21,000 objects of art stolen and illegally purchased by the Nazis,
only about 5.000 were actually destroyed; the rest were destined either for the
private collections or museums of the leadership or for sale on the
international market, often through Switzerland, to raise vital funds. The Jewification of Aryan society was not
always intrinsic to Jewish artists, collectors and critics, but the supposed
falsification and demoralizing of taste, the illegality and insulting quality
of Jewish ownership of German treasures, and the reflection of degeneracy the
paintings exposed to the general public.
That is why such degenerate works of art had to be removed from the
possession or control of Jewish hands and institutions or sent overseas, while
the healthy and classical paintings, prints and sculptures could be held by the
Nazi themselves or used for the good of the nation.
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