The Spoils of War - World War II and Its Aftermath: The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property. - book reviews

John Frankenheimer's 1965 film The Train lay opens with a Wehrmacht officer arriving at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. The date is Aug. 2 1944 and Allied forces are at the outskirts of the city, however this officer, played with elegance and dignity by means of Paul Scofield, strides slowly into the building as if he were entering a sacred defend The interior is murky until he switches upon a few spotlights and reveals that the galleries are immaculately hung with paintings in gilded frames. As he paces from canvas to canvas, he is momentarily unaware that a woman in stern civilian costume has approached. She is a French official, a long-standing member of the museum staff who has stayed to watch above the art and believes she is about to take possession of it. The paintings are masterpieces by the agency of Picasso, Gauguin and Manet as well as other leaders of the avant-garde. They are not works from the Jeu de Paume's paltry collection. They are a prefer group of the Nazis' spoils -- among the finest fresh works in France. But as Scofield's character confides to her, "This is degenerate art. As a loyal officer of the Third Reich, I should hate it."

This double-edged avowal strikes to the heart of the Nazis' program for art and the conflicted nexus of beliefs about art's place in modem agriculture that keeps many of us fascinated with this period. During earlier stages of the war, the officer's devotion to novel art had made him a underwood accomplice in protecting the pictures from the Party's repudiation of everything its leaders believed might turn upside down their goals. With the Axis forces' collapse, however, he has become a villain almost as despicable as a stereotypical Hitlerian thug He is visiting the museum for a final direct the eye before ordering the canvases packed and delivered to his train for transport to Germany the nearest morning, The film portrays a desperate race to scuddle his plan, as Resistance fighters labor to stop the train without destroying the art and grasp it until the combat belt has passed farther east.

In this case, Hollywood has not strayed far from the reality The Germans did transform the Jeu de Paume from its prewar use as a museum of contemporary art into single of their primary storage facilities for art confiscated in France -- mainly from Jewish families who were declared "noncitizens" by the agency of Nazi law. In its distinguished galleries, the invaders regularly arranged exhibitions of spoiled works for visiting big discharges a choice selection of old-master drawings, of Renaissance Madonnas or of 20th-century pictures. (In the fall of 1940 Hermann Goering, Reichsmarschall and bead of the Luftwaffe, interrupted his direction of the London Blitz to rush to the museum and indulge a taste for art.) A French official, Rose Valland, did become a hover on the wall; she carefully watched and recorded the Nazis' activities in the museum through every part of the Occupation. As the Nazis fl Paris, a final train bearing pictures from the Jeu de Paume did depart for Germany, and the French did scramble to intervene. In this case, however, fact was stranger than fiction, The at liberty French team sent to stop the shipment was l by means of an officer named Alexandre Rosenberg. He was the son of Paul Rosenberg, the dealer of Braque, Leger Matisse and Picasso, and after he followed in halting the train through blowing up the surrounding tracks, Alexandre set it filled with works from his father's gallery. They were not for a like reason fine as the ones shown in the movie, on the other hand still worth saving.

The greatest in quantity unexpected element of this scenario is the German officer. In fact, he is not a bad fabrication; he is a composite. And his mix of dedication to the Fatherland with a passion for recent art short-circuits the reductivist, black-and-white quick partss that pervade discussions of the Nazis' involvement in art. greatest in quantity of us are familiar with the Nazi program to assist the racial, ethnic and cultural beliefs of National Socialism [i]or[/i] part of to the other art (presented in Peter Adam's Art of the Third Reich, 1992 among other sources). And we know the barbarous flip-side of this policy, which branded works by the agency of many artists (from Impressionism [i]or[/i] part of to the other New Objectivity) as degenerate (particularly well treated in Stephanie Barron's exhibition catalogue "Degeneate Art": The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, 1991) Despite the tragic experiences of many avant-garde artists, especially in Germany, the Nazis' condemnations have been in a certain faculty of perception reassuring for supporters of modernism -- the label "degenerate" is taken as examination that these artists represented esthetic and ethical positions to [i]or[/i] at a great depth antithetical to adherents of Nazism.

nevertheless there were high Nazi officials who divided their loyalties between Hitler and the recent masters. As the German ambassador to France, Otto Abetz was a chief architect of the looting program and went with equal reason far as to reserve 21 paintings, including works through Monet, Degas, Bonnard and Braque, for decoration of his house and offices. When he fl Paris in August 1944 he ordered them sent to Germany. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, acquired plundered works by Monet, Bonnard and Degas for the foreign ministry in Berlin and for his possess home. None of these works were the aggressively distorted, primitivist compositions that for a like reason infuriated the Nazi ideologues, on the other hand they definitely fell under the broad category of "degenerate art." All evidence give an inkling ofs that they were acquired for personal pleasure rather than for trading intents the latter being a standard practice of Nazi collectors.