Franz Fühmann's "The Car with the Yellow Star"

by Marc Masurovsky

In order to understand how antisemitism works, it’s often wise to hear it from the proverbial horse’s mouth. In this instance, Franz Fühmann’s autobiographical novel, “The car with the Yellow Star” is a good starting point. Although understated in its treatment of the Jews, it remains nevertheless a sobering account of a Nazi antisemite who eventually “saw the light” and closed the door on a decades-long love affair with National Socialism and Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

Fūhmann was raised in a highly nationalistic pro-German village in the Sudetenland region of interwar Czechoslovakia. He was raised as a blindly loyal Nazi, swearing allegiance to his hero Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. 

The Sudetenland region

From SA member, he joined the Wehrmacht and ended up on the Eastern Front as a Private First Class, fighting the Soviets in the Ukraine. On his retreat back to central Europe, he was captured by Soviet troops while making his way to the American front lines. He spent four years in a Soviet prisoner of war camp doing hard labor. He was eventually set free and settled down in the newly-minted German Democratic Republic (East Germany) where he spent the rest of his life, asserting himself as a prominent poet and writer. 

If you can set aside the fact that he lived in East Germany and was published by an East German publishing house, I highly recommend this short book which has the benefit of giving us a snapshot of the Third Reich as experienced by an unquestioning follower. Up to us to decide how sincere Fühmann is. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. If there is a propagandistic aspect to his self-reflective novel, you can glimpse it at the very end and it does not detract from the historical value of his testimonial.

Sources:

The map of the Sudetenland comes from the following website:

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/10188/where-exactly-was-the-sudetenland

The cover for Fühmann's novel comes from AbeBooks.

Pots and pans

by Marc Masurovsky

Since the first Holocaust memorial was built in Europe, soon followed by dozens of others, the story line that these venerable institutions have conveyed to a global public has been exemplified by the Holocaust is not about property but about people.

Put another way, the vast majority of the six million Jewish men, women and children who lost their lives in the Holocaust were so downtrodden that all they owned were pots and pans and the clothes that they wore. Or so the conventional story goes. Those lucky enough to collect art were people of means who hailed for the most part from Central and Western Europe. The facts speak for themselves: 75 per cent of Jews lived in Eastern Europe; 90 per cent of them were murdered. In other words, the Holocaust is for the most part an Eastern European Ashkenazi story.

This stale stereotyping of Jews as living in substandard poverty across Europe has gone hand in hand with a stubborn refusal by Jewish communities worldwide to address the more complex question of property loss as one of the keystones of 20th century anti-Jewish behavior. If we follow this line of reasoning, there were only two classes of Jews-on top, the wealthy who had enough disposable income to collect fineries of all sorts including lavish furniture and expensive art, and the “shtetl” Jews, the peddlers, the pieceworkers who lived “on the other side of the tracks”, the inhabitants of the Jewish Pale in Eastern Europe. Forgotten or ignored are the lower middle class, artisans, skilled workers, cultural and intellectual workers, the midde class whom we find in every community, town, city, region of Europe. What of them? Do they fit in this story? They do but their property does not count. It’s not part of the Holocaust story. Or so we are told.

Fast forward to November 15, 2019, to the 20th anniversary celebration of the Paris-based CIVS—Commission for indemnification of Victims of Spoliation during WWII. Participants to that conference heard from some speakers that most Jews living in France were of “humble backgrounds” and did not collect any art. They were more about “pots and pans.” That did not stop the Vichy authorities and their Nazi friends In the Paris region alone, from confiscating and transferring to non-Jewish owners (a process known as “Aryanization”) the intangible and tangible property of 31000 owners. Moreover, close to 70000 residences where Jews lived were literally emptied during the so-called “M-Aktion” between March 1942 and the summer of 1944 in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. I doubt that those responsible for this wholesale campaign of ransacking Jewish dwellings would have committed so many resources and logistics if it were just about “pots and pans.” 

You do not have to be an “art collector” or “art dealer” to amass works and objects of art. There are multiple tiers of value in the art world and the art market whereby individuals can amass an impressive amount of esthetic objects of small value---paintings, works on paper, even sculpture, decorative objects, books, musical instruments, Judaica, produced by talented artists and craftsmen whose names are not Bellini, Tintoretto, Fragonard and Rembrandt.

In short, it is too convenient and shameful to oversimplify in order to deflect attention from the real problem:
-Culture is an integral part of the discussion on National Socialism, anti-Jewish policies and the Holocaust;
-Jewish culture was thriving in the interwar years;
-The Nazis and their local Fascist allies nearly extinguished it;
-Human beings—Jewish and non-Jewish alike—are attracted to objects that please them and, if they can, they acquire them so that they can live with them, appreciate them and share them with family, friends, acquaintances and complete strangers.

Thousands of artists, writers, poets, musicians, craftsmen from close to twenty nations lost their livelihood and their lives between 1933 and 1945, their property was seized, never to be seen again. The cumulative impact of those losses triggered a lessening, an impoverishment of the cultural heritage of Europe from which we have not fully recovered.

These losses were part of a well-orchestrated State-sponsored attempt (2/3 successful) by the Third Reich and its allies to erase all traces of Jewish life and activity across Europe—a continental form of “Aryanization” which witnessed a multi-billion dollar transfer of property from Jewish ownership into the hands of non-Jews and their businesses which powered the wartime and postwar economies of European countries.

So, no, it was not about “pots and pans.” It was about much more. To deny this fact is to deny and rewrite history.

The time is long overdue for these longstanding revisionist trends in the teaching of the Holocaust to come to an end.

Washington Principle #7: A Critique

by Marc Masurovsky

[Editor's note: Due to the momentous nature of the upcoming international conference in Berlin, Germany, entitled "20 years Washington Principles: Roadmap for the Future," it would be worthwhile to revisit these Principles and to put them through a linguistic, methodological and substantive meat grinder, and see what comes out of this critique. There will be eleven articles, each one devoted to one of the Principles enacted in a non-binding fashion in Washington, DC, on December 3, 1998.]

Principle #7
Pre-War owners and their heirs should be encouraged to come forward and make known their claims to art that was confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted.

In June 2011, we noted the following:

“There is nothing good to be said about Principle VII except for the fact that there are no solid mechanisms put into place to allow all owners to come forward and make their claims known regardless of socio-economic background. It is one thing to make their claims known, but the purpose of publicizing a claim is to obtain justice. Principle VII is uninformed and useless until effective national and international public policies are enacted to systematize the processes inherent to this principle and protective of the rights of claimants to seek redress without penalties.”

Seven years later, there has not been substantial progress in establishing mechanisms for “pre-war owners and their heirs to come forward.” Those who are directly related to the victims of plunder are now the grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In other words, they are three to four times removed from the crime and the loss suffered during the Third Reich. What little memory of the events stayed with the victims proper has all but vanished and few of those evidentiary strands have been transmitted to the next generation so that it can sue for redress.

The more likely path is from the outside—researchers, genealogists, aggressive lawyers, historians and the like—are those more likely to stumble on the evidence of the crime and the losses suffered by individuals. These external players are more likely than not to contact the heirs of the pre-war owners with the evidence of their losses. For a fee, unfortunately. In this regard, governments have created little monsters on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, by not rising above the fray and taking on the mantle of justice for the victims of plunder. Leaving the field wide open for entrepreneurs and private sector players to set the rules for how research is conducted and, more importantly, how claims are to be handled and prosecuted.

Seven years after our initial assessment of the effectiveness of Principle #7, it is time to call it for what it is—a total failure and an open invitation for profiteering at the expense of the claimants, of history and of justice.

Principle #7 could be rewritten and expanded as follows:

The parties signatory to the Washington Principles of December 3, 1998, must ensure that all efforts will be made to disseminate information to as wide public as possible regarding the mechanisms by which pre-war owners and their heirs can make their claims known. Also, pre-1933 owners and their heirs must be encouraged to submit their claims for artistic, cultural and ritual objects confiscated, misappropriated, sold under duress and/or forced sales, subjected to other forms of illicit acts of dispossession by the Nazis, their supporters, profiteers and Fascist allies across Europe between 1933 and 1945 and not subsequently restituted.

Once upon a time...

US Soldiers toast victory at Berchtesgaden
Source: Wikipedia via US Army

Once upon a time, an American private first class entered Adolf Hitler’s lair in Berchtesgaden, tantamount to taking a stroll through Ali Baba’s cave. He and his commanding officer could not resist and assembled an elaborate, yet simple scheme to misappropriate objects of all kinds, from Hitler’s desk, cabinets, works lying on the floor, against walls and so forth. They sent these items including an engraving by Cranach, to the US via the military postal system—APO. An untold number of objects left the lair in that fashion. Only one was recovered, only because the soldier, who had registered as a graduate student at a New York City college in the late 1940s, had admitted his wayward behavior to his counselor who reported it to the dean who alerted the State Department. Next thing we know, after arduous negotiations, the student ceded the stolen item without revealing the existence of the other items. To this day, he has protected the identity of his commanding officer, fumbling and stuttering when explaining the reasons for his action. This individual became a leading Holocaust scholar and one of the foremost academic opponents of restitution as an ethical concept, as a teachable concept, as a historical phenomenon following acts of genocide and plunder driven by ideological crimes against an entire people, and as a strategy of justice for Holocaust victims and their heirs. This irrational behavior regarding his crime mirrors strangely the comportment of Jewish officials, Holocaust museum directors, Holocaust studies faculty and administrators, curriculum designers and Holocaust educators as they reject a cardinal principle of the Third Reich policy against its Jewish victims, as well as a pillar of antisemitic behavior--the forcible removal of all property belonging to Jews as the first step towards their dehumanization and marginalization as productive members of civil society.

Art world officials have behaved in similar fashion when confronted with the realization that they might have to part with objects in the collections that they steward. They behave much like the former PFC from Berchtesgaden, with an inflated sense of proprietariness, a very kindisch behavior that one might expect more from an outraged, self-righteous child. And yet, the grandstanding indignation of museum officials and curators and dealers and collectors and their attorneys and even art historians and so-called provenance research specialists in those very institutions, all behave as if they are the self-anointed guardians of Kultur.

It’s all very weird.

When the gloves come off, does this mean WAR?

by Marc Masurovsky

As we say in the United States, ‘them’s fightin’ words’! True, they are. Perhaps, they deliver more bang than bite. But they emerge from the deepest recesses of my fractured soul, enraged at the inability of our leaders, our representatives, our specialists, our experts, all of them, no exceptions made, to come up with solutions that make it possible for the victims of the Holocaust and the Second World War and the Third Reich and the Axis powers in Europe, North Africa, the Near East, and Asia, writ large, to find some measure of justice in the aftermath of global genocidal and ethnocidal conflict, to recover what was ripped from the bosom of so many as the extensions of their souls and likes. After all, it is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If this is true, the loss of cultural assets feels like the forcible removal of light from the eyes of the victims to benefit those who feel anointed to possess what is not rightfully theirs. At a larger scale, one can argue that the rights of individuals are trumped by the arrogance of groups and the States that lend succor to their racial and expansionist ambitions by which they impose their ideological and political will through force of law and arms. In short, the victims of cultural plunder—Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, atheist, agnostic, Buddhist, e tutti quanti….—are united in theory and principle under a single banner. Unfortunately, the trauma of loss through confiscation, requisition, outright theft, incarceration, and exploitation, was not sufficient to bring the victims under one flag, regardless of origin, race, ethnicity, creed, and belief.

The cynics tell us that this is what makes us human, that division is a prelude to conquest. Divide and conquer has always been the motto of those who wage war against their own people and those of other nations. Divided, we were at the end of the Second World War, made to rely on our communal groups, political parties, and national governments, to “do the right thing” for us all. By the way, the “we” and the “us” are used symbolically since my parents had not even met at V-E Day while I was an errant molecule in search of a home. The “we” and the “us” reverberate across generations, starting with the unmarked graveyards and mass burial pits of the former Soviet Union, the ash piles of Birkenau, the burial mounds of Katyn, the massacred villages of Northern Italy, Yugoslavia, and the thousands of unnamed places of death and destruction that pockmark the map of a warring planet.

Divided…. Why should we be divided in the first place? That is my question to all of you who read these pages. What is the benefit of arguing from one’s narrow communitarian interest? Better, more effective representation? Some of you might feel that there is nothing else that can be done and we should simply move on. That is definitely an option. But, if moving on is an option, then we should shutter down these pages and no longer discuss restitution as a basic human right of the victims of cultural plunder. As some cocky military leaders have repeatedly stated on the battlefields of history, surrender is not an option.

Not surrendering is an acknowledgment of a will to fight, to struggle, to advocate, to press, for something as vague and ambiguous as “justice.” Is it to be justice for all ? Or will it be justice for me? How about justice for you? Or is it really justice for them? Should justice be meted out in equal measures or in proportionate measures? Justice that is proportionate to the crime? How much is too much? How much is too little? What does it take to sate a broken soul and allow it to “move on”, to “find closure”?

Reality is altogether different. As history shows us repeatedly, the scars of trauma induced by all forms of violence are transmitted from one generation to the next. The degree to which the successive generations absorb and internalize the legacies of abuse and cruelty wrought upon their parents and grand-parents can determine whether or not they will act to avenge them or “act out” these inherited scars—to wit: most internal civil conflicts can be linked to the absence of meaningful settlements between members of divided communities. This is as old as history. But does it have to continue to be that way?

Looking ahead at the advent of 2012, how do we ensure that the crime of cultural plunder is appropriately punished and its victims fairly treated, across the board, regardless of who they are and where they live and what they represent? Yes, indeed, regardless of social class, status, rank, socio-economic standing, color-blind, community-blind, religion-blind, idea-blind. Blind to division and schism, solutions that are for all, not for the few, or the select.

I must tell you that nothing will be accomplished without an explicit recognition that cultural thefts cut across all boundaries, because the end result is the same—the rape of culture, way beyond that of “Europa” as Lynn Nicholas has postulated. We have to recognize that cultural theft violates the basic rights of all human beings living in a social and cultural matrix. Once we can recognize this basic fact, we can actually get to the next level. Cultural crime is a universal crime against all peoples, it is a crime which drives deep stakes into the specificity of what makes us who we are, which targets our identity as members of specific groups. Depending on the severity of the crime, it can result in an outright attempt at genocide or ethnocide. To acknowledge and accept the specificities of these crimes as bounded by cultural, social, and oftentimes religious matrices, is vital to our ability to move forward if we are to unite under one flag and fight for what is legitimately ours, that is the right to culture, our cultural rights, our right to own and display cultural assets without the fear of taking, without fear of forcible removals, because of who we are and what we are and where we live and for whom we vote or do not vote and what we speak or pray to, especially during times of internal or external conflicts.

The next level consists in agreeing that cultural plunder is a crime against humanity, perpetrated against individuals and the groups to which they belong.

Once we reach this particular point, the big question emerges: what is to be done?

What next? In all cases, national governments will endorse but not enforce the explicit righting of cultural crimes against individual citizens, arguing that these are the facts of life, and their citizens should settle for what they can. Moreover, statutes of limitations, problems associated with current possession of stolen cultural assets which are condoned as inalienable aspects of life in a civilized society—to the current possessor go the spoils!—will prevent or forestall any possible semblance of justice.

Hence, the only conceivable strategy to address the crime of cultural plunder is the international community of nations and groups that have a vested interest in righting the wrongs wrought against their cultural rights and to press for restitution of ill-gotten cultural assets.

I will leave you with this thought. As the strategy for global redress unfurls, you will hear more in these pages. Stay tuned as 2012 might become a very interesting year. After all, we have not much to lose and everything to gain.