The spoils of war

In G G Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude (translated into English), there's an entertaining description of the coming of the cinema to the citizens of "Macondo":

They became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theatre with the lion-head windows, for the character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears of affliction had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many felt that they had been the victims of some new and showy gypsy business and they decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings.

Last week I had the chance to see an unusual film, not fictional but a documentary. A series of interviews with art historians was illustrated by photos and footage from historical archives of the events they were describing: the pillaging of Europe's art and artifacts during the era of Hitler's Third Reich and the stories of the loss of these treasures or of their rescue, before, during and after the 2nd World War. The film was called The Rape of Europa. In the course of the narrative came many sequences that also showed the destruction of the buildings that housed the art, churches, museums, castles, ordinary homes (more often than not Jewish), shocking because in deliberately ruining people's heritage the Nazis were assaulting their souls. Warsaw and St Petersburg came in for particularly hellish treatment.

When the time came, Berlin was razed to the ground in revenge.

Much of the art lusted after by the Nazis simply vanished but an astonishing amount of it was saved or retrieved, much of it horded by the Nazis themselves in Schloß Neuschwanstein or in salt mines and later recovered. Some art was saved from harm, the treasures of the Louvre hidden in châteaux all over the south of France, for example.

I hadn't realised what rapacious thieves Hitler and Goering were. Goering had no taste; he was merely acquisitive. Hitler's motives were more interesting. As a young man (orphaned and so short of money that he was living in a doss house) he'd been rejected by the Viennese Akademie der Bildenden Künste (its selection board largely Jewish, or so he believed) in favour of his rivals Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoshka whose work he afterwards condemned as "degenerate", and it looks as if a lot of Hitler's viciousness stemmed from his incapacity to be a respected artist; he decided to be the world's greatest "collector" instead, by whatever violent means. Some historians believe that his invasion campaign was planned with reference to the art he coveted. Trapped and defeated in his Berlin bunker at the end of the war, just before committing suicide, Hitler was still planning or fantasizing about building vast, neoclassical art museums that would exhibit his loot and make his hometown of Linz world famous.

When it came to the last part of the film that dealt with the recovery of the stolen art, it struck me how important it was to the people of those days, crowds and individuals welcoming the return of their treasures with cheers, tears and dancing. Almost as if the artworks had been long lost people.