I thought I had a pretty good understanding of what the German artists of the 1930’s had suffered. I knew that Hitler had fired the staff and completely shut down the Bauhaus school (founded by Gropius, it boasted a roster of amazing teachers including Klee, Kandinsky, van der Rohe & Albers). I knew that Beckmann and Ernst, like so many others, had fled across the Atlantic with as many of their works as they could salvage. I knew that the “degenerate” art exhibition that he put together to ridicule the modernists had succeeded in turning most of the German public against those artists. I knew that Kirchner had burned many of his own paintings just to prevent the Fuhrer from having the pleasure, and I knew that he eventually took his own life as a result of having over 600 of his works confiscated, then either sold or destroyed. But what I didn’t understand, until reading “The Rape of Europa,” was the sheer scale of the theft and destruction of art all over Europe carried out by the Nazi forces and very often ordered directly by Hitler himself, or the enormous number of art works still unaccounted for.
Nicholas spent 10 years researching her book and to say it is exhaustive would be an understatement. For such a scholarly work (and even for a not-so-scholarly work) it is a page turner from start to finish. There is so much drama, so much tension, so many “I can’t believe they did that!” moments, that as emotionally wrenching as it can be, it is infinitely readable and I had a hard time putting it down. Reading about the staff at the Louvre packing up their entire collection and shipping it out to the countryside sends a shiver down the spine. And every time I remember the words of one of their curators, as he sunk to the stairs watching “Winged Victory” being inched gently down a ramp and out the door, “I shall not see her returned,” I tear up. When I think about the Tchaikovsky museum being used by the Nazis as a motorcycle garage, and pages and pages of his original manuscripts found later with tire marks and oil on them, my hands curl into fists. When I remember the staff of the Hermitage Museum, whose collection is even larger than that of the Louvre, suffering through winters with broken windows, constantly under threat of shelling, taking turns chiseling ice from the walls, many of them starving to death during the siege, it breaks my heart.
There is always looting and destruction in war, but Hitler took it to a level never seen before. He stole the entire Amber Room from Catherine the Great’s palace—literally took every piece of amber lining the walls. To this day the panels have never surfaced. He took the enormous and invaluable Ghent altarpiece, painted by van Eyck and measuring over 15 feet wide, he had stone fountains disassembled and shipped to Berlin. And he sold or destroyed anything he didn’t want for himself or for his new museum.
After the war, castles and salt mines were found crammed floor to ceiling with art. Hundreds of rail cars, packed to capacity, on their way into or out of Germany were recovered. When the dozens of trucks carrying art back into Florence came parading down the streets, people gathered to cheer them on and to weep with joy that their cultural treasures were being brought back home.
More than 60 years later, however, the story is still not over. Tens of thousands of art works just from Poland alone have not yet been found and returned. The contemporary art world struggles constantly with determining the true provenance of pre-WWII artworks and most major museums and auction houses have been sued by holocaust survivors who claim rightful ownership of major pieces.
“The Rape of Europa” tells the first part of this story, and it is a complicated, emotional, and fascinating one.
If the book sounds interesting to you, you’ll also enjoy the documentary of the same name, which was an additional 6 years in the making. Here’s the trailer: http://www.rapeofeuropa.com/theTrailer.aspx
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