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.

Review: Alas Another Tale of French Antisemitism and Cultural Property

 By Ori Z Soltes

Among the myriad angles from which one finds an expanding literature that considers the Nazi plunder of cultural property is that which places emphasis on some of the specifics of how a given Jewish family, or series of Jewish families, had hoped and believed that they were solidly embedded within the culture and community that ultimately discarded them as eternal foreigners when the SS knocked at the national door. The Austrians famously demonstrated this ugly truth in the immediate aftermath of the March 1938 Nazi Anschluss. So, too the Vichy government: “Free France”—except to the Jewish children and adults that the government and much (not all) of its population so easily (a better word would be “eagerly”) helped deport to Auschwitz and similar destinations. Such ease and eagerness can only have resonated from a history of gut-level Jew-hatred of long duration.

James McAuley’s deeply researched and elegantly written The House of Fragile Things plunges into the expansive efforts on the part of a key group of successful Jewish families in nineteenth-century France to shape their place within French cultural identity. These efforts played out against a backdrop of relentless antisemitism and the inability of key mouthpieces for France’s sense of self to accept Jews—any Jews, regardless of what they contributed to the national ethos—as truly French, in the century since the French Revolution and its declarations of acceptance.

McAuley explores families—the Rothschilds, Ephrussis, Reinachs, Camondos, Cahen d’Anvers, et al—and the extraordinary art and artefact collections that they amassed, the opulent homes that they created as settings for those collections, and their eventual deeding of such structures and their contents to their beloved France. On the other, he recounts the commentaries by renowned and vicious critics like the Goncourt brothers and above all Edouard Drumont—the “Pope of antisemitism”—capable only of expressing contempt for these individuals whose lavish and expansive dinner parties they frequently enjoyed.

McAuley’s text is not simply focused on dueling sensibilities. He provides an astute and perceptive analysis of each Jewish family and its key figures, and reflects on how we ultimately know so little about them beyond their possessions. His account resonates with an appreciation of the paradoxes defining their interweave into a multi-colored if flawed tapestry—and the psychological issues that motivated them, whether escapism (e.g., Moïse de Camondo), profound loss (the Reinach and Camondo deaths in military service during World War I), or gender (e.g., Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild); whether rooted in the collapse of relational certainties (the sense, for Moïse de Camondo, of losing control of familial, communal, and national situations around him); or in self-inflicted disasters that provided critics with fuel for their antisemitic screeds (the Reinachs and the Panama Canal scandal or the Ephrussis and the Alfassa Affair). 

Above all, he delineates their struggle to present themselves as champions of France and the 1789 Revolution’s assertions regarding universalism—and thus of the unequivocal compatibility of being French and being Jewish—against the diverse failures of their beloved patrie to live up to those assertions. The narrative threads its way through the tapestry of fragile things to the culminating catastrophe for these and virtually every Jewish family within France and across Europe: the Holocaust.

There is double irony in the fact that in 1935, two of the major cultural donations to France—18^th-century-styled villas filled with 18^th-century objects, one left in his will by Moïse de Camondo and the other donated by his brother-in-law, Charles Cahen d’Anvers. First, because these gifts were immediately subject to ecstatic reviews, 

Charles Cahen d'Anvers

completely devoid of the antisemitic invective of the previous two generations regarding these very collections. Second, because in that very year, the Nuremberg Race Laws drafted by the Nazi authorities tightened the noose around the necks of Jews in Germany, and Nazism was not far from imposing itself on a largely cooperative France.

Among the many quotable lines in McAuley’s volume, one (p. 227) stands out as a concise summary of one of the story’s endings: “By March 1944…. [t]he mansion that had once hosted glittering banquets in the fin-de-siècle, with guests like Marcel Proust and the King of Serbia, now imprisoned sixty Jews”—who would shortly be sent to Drancy and thence to Auschwitz. Nor is this the only terminus: the epilogue focuses on the moving portrait painted by Renoir in 1880, of Irène Cahen d’Anvers as a beautiful little girl with exuberant light-brown hair and a wistful look in her eye—stolen by the Nazis in 1941. (Renoir, by the way, had nothing but excoriating comments to make regarding the Jewish patrons who kept him afloat—including references to their cheapness, although he received far more for this and several other Jewish family portraits than for any works before or after from any other clients).

Irène Cahen d'Anvers

The painting had belonged to Irène’s daughter, Béatrice, whom Irène had abandoned when she divorced her husband, Charles, in 1902, (it was largely a mismatch, from the bride’s and groom’s ages to their personalities, but Charles never really recovered from the shock of the separation and its concomitants). Irène also abandoned her Judaism for Catholicism. The painting of Irène as a little girl was, sadly, the only tangible connection that Béatrice had to her mother as the years moved forward after the divorce. Béatrice perished at Auschwitz and Irène—who managed to survive the war hiding in Paris—was able to assert a claim and gain possession of the painting in 1946—but in 1949 sold it to Emil G. Bührle, the notorious Swiss collector whose wealth derived largely from selling armaments to the Nazis. One might suppose that Béatrice rolled in her grave.

A dust-up emerged at the founding of HARP during an international conference held on September 4, 1997 in which the issue of how the National Gallery of Art (NGA) had allowed Bührle to be misrepresented as a virtual anti-Nazi crusader when the museum hosted his collection in a traveling exhibition in 1990. Bührle most notoriously acquired (during the war) four works plundered from another French Jewish collector, Paul Rosenberg, through Nazi connections. Rosenberg, who survived WWII, showed up at Buehrle’s doorstep to claim them—but that is another story for another day. 

McAuley’s nuanced narrative leaves the reader with a range of villains from whom to choose in the century that encompasses the Holocaust and its aftermath, the handful of heroes mostly turned to ashes, like the unique world that they shaped—except for the lush array of objects and museums left to be enjoyed by the patrie. The Western world has suffered from remarkable bouts of amnesia—both willful and simply out of ignorance—(see the previous review by this writer in HARP’s “plundered art” blog), as the decades since the Holocaust spread out and we continue to repeat the sorts of actions that brought such grief to so many in so many different ways over 80 years ago. This book adds an important chapter to the Holocaust narrative and its culture-centered subset. It plays a noteworthy part in the effort to restitute memory—that most significant feature that makes humans human. 

Photos courtesy of wikimedia.

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.