Tuesday, 19 November 2013

Nazi-Looted A rt, Part 4

                                                


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.



[i] Gensburger, “The Banality of Robbing the Jews” .  See also Gensberger, “Images d’un pillage”.

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