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Cargando... Hitler's Last Hostages: Looted Art and the Soul of the Third Reichpor Mary M. Lane
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"The story of art is integral to the story of the rise of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler, an artist himself, was obsessed with art--in particular, the aesthetic of a purified regime, scoured of 'degenerate' influences that characterized Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. When they came to power in 1933, Hitler and Goebbels set their aesthetic vision into motion and removed degenerate art from German life: artists fled the country; museums were purged; and great works disappeared, only a fraction of which were rediscovered at the end of the Second World War. Most remained in garrets and cellars, the last hostages of the era of the Reich. In 2013, 1290 works by Chagall, Picasso, Matisse, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and others were rediscovered. In Hitler's Last Hostages, Mary Lane brilliantly tells the story of art and the Third Reich, and the fate of Germany's great artists as they fought to survive the Nazi era"-- No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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The story has been told before, of course, but Lane's thorough and detailed (perhaps too detailed sometimes?) account is still compelling. Hitler's youth and rise to power is covered, focusing largely on his artistic aspirations and passions. The biographies of various prominent artists of the era are also provided, notably George Grosz and Emil Nolde - the first a veteran of the Great War and a brilliant illustrator and painter who warned against the rising evil through his savage images, who fled to the US days before the Nazis came looking for him; the second a confused, self-pitying and also dazzling painter who became a fawning Hitler supporter to the extent of reporting a fellow painter as Jewish, who was not. I was familiar with some of these artists, but not others... mostly the "approved" Aryan / German / heroic types favored by Hitler. Here's where it got interesting, as I Googled away on my iPad to see what kind of work they produced, like Adolf Ziegler ("master of pubic hair") and Hermann Hoyer. Sources on these fellows was much sparser, and I discovered I had almost immediately fallen down a white supremacist rabbit hole in NeoNaziLand... Ai yi yi. I shudder to think what kind of Facebook and Google ads I'll be seeing.
Coverage then shifts to the lootings, confiscations, and shady dealings that deprived many households of their art belongings. Gurlitt was very shrewd about covering his tracks - or not leaving any, and accumulated a massive collection he squirreled away as the war ended. A selected fraction was obediently turned over to the Allies' "monuments men," whose resources were stretched so thin and under such pressure they couldn't unravel the hidden treasures. And so this particular trove winds up stacked on shelves, stuffed into cupboards, and leaned against the walls of an isolated, paranoid old man. The German authorities were - are still are, mostly - interested only in the tax aspects. In terminally failing health - and no fool - Cornelius hastily writes up a will from his hospital bed, leaving his collection entirely to a small art museum in Switzerland. Upon his death, that's where it goes. Four works - out of over 1500 - have been eventually restored to their original owners after literally years of lawsuits, which the German government has little interest in discussing. Their stance is that the statute of limitations for reclaiming these stolen works has run out. Of course it has: the art has been stashed away in utter secret for decades, and reclamation would require proofs and papers that the owners would not have. Well, one did: the Toren family managed to send out their papers with a child gotten out via the Kindertransport before the parents were sent to death camps. The son kept them, ended up as an attorney in the US, and kept the papers in a safe in his office. His office was in the World Trade Center.
George Grosz, the expat painter, returned eventually to Germany after the war, in hopes of relocating some of his work left behind. He did not, and died a sad alcoholic's death. I have not been able to find an image of a drawing he did in 1940: Adolf Hitler, dead in an armchair from a self-inflicted gunshot, and a news story on the wall about Germany's defeat by Russia. 1940! Though we perhaps get more pages of Grosz than is strictly necessary, I came away with a new admiration and sympathy for this damaged, angry, gifted, tragic man.
Even with some of the content well-known historically, there is still something to surprise (I didn't know the disturbing story of Hitler's half-niece, Geli), unsettle (Hitler's aides knew to present him with only brief summaries of issues as "the Fuhrer doesn't like to read reports," and his insistence on the military swearing their oaths of loyalty to him personally, not the citizens or state of Germany), infuriate (the current German government's unwillingness to exert any pressure to restitute works of art), and fascinate. Crisply written, well-researched, with perhaps a little pacing trouble, this is well worth the read. ( )