Last month,.in honor of the 70th anniversary of D-Day, BBC Radio 4 rebroadcast the news bulletins from 6, 7, and 8 June 1944. These bulletins which chronicle the progress of the Normandy Invasion feature Benedict Cumberbatch, Sir Patrick Stewart, and Toby Jones. Each segment is accompanied by image of the original transcripts.
I wrote the post below on 20 March 2012, but somehow it never got published. Must be Gremlins. In the meantime, I am happy to report I have been hard at work on my book, client research, writing articles, and actually did some research on my Swedish Family. The end of my subscription to ArkivDigital was pretty strong motivation.
Not much news on the Monuments Men movie front. There is a brief mention of it at the Monuments Men Foundation blog (6 June 2012). And I mean brief, about five words; but there is a picture of Robert Edsel with Grant Heslov and George Clooney. I also found something of an introduction to the Monuments Men by Edsel on YouTube (see above). It's not riveting video, but if you don't feel like reading all the books to find out who Monuments Men were, it's worth a look.
One aspect of the narrative that was useful for me that it taught me just how awful the Nazis were. I know you are thinking: how could I think otherwise about people who organized the mass murder of six million people. This I do know, in addition to Hitler's exploitation of Germany's economic woes. What I didn't know is that there more ways in which they could be awful. I learned that Hitler had his idea of what was appropriate art and if he didn't like it, it was "degenerate" and not fit for Germany. Works deemed degenerate were purged from national collections and usually sold or destroyed. Not only were the works removed, but the artists who painted them were "encouraged" not to paint anymore. The line between what people can see and create and what they can say, think or do, I would imagine is very fine. I guess what I didn't realize is that Nazi control of the German population extended as far as what paintings could be viewed at a Museum. I also didn't realize that in addition to being war-mongers they were also thieves. From the Jews in France they stole everything from art work to furniture to teddy bears.
This book is not for the feint-hearted as it is almost impossible to keep track of all the German officers who collected art, the Jewish art dealers who were swindled out of their businesses by non-Jews, the families whose collections were confiscated for "safe-keeping", not to mention the artists and their works. The stories of theft, confiscation and destruction are heart-breaking. I almost couldn't read anymore when I read that the precious items from the Museums and Archives of Naples, Italy were moved to Monte Cassino. A few pages later I learned that the Germans moved the collections before the monastery was bombed to smithereens by the Allies.
On the other hand, if the intricacies of the art world or restitution are your thing, then this is the book for you. Nicholas' exhaustive account details Nazi planning (they made lists of art works they wanted to steal years before the war started), their schemes for acquiring these works, and they ways in which the Allies got much of it back and returned what they could.
Sidney Kirkpatrick based his novelized account of Dr. Walter Horn's search for royal regalia of the Holy Roman Empire on various historical documents including 30 hours of oral history interviews with Dr. Horn conducted at the request of Jackie Kennedy Onassis.
Horn, who earned a PhD in art history in his native Germany, left for the United States before the War and ended up as an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley. He became an US citizen and enlisted in the US Army in 1943. With his background he was a perfect fit for the Monuments Men. His quest was to find the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire which had gone missing at the end of the War. The story details the intricacies of Horn's investigation, his back story, and his rescue of his mother and half-sister from the Soviet Sector. Kirkpatrick also highlights the cult-like aspects of the Nazi regime. He can't be the only individual to have made this connection, but I'd never thought of it like this before. This interpretation was particularly striking to me as I had just finished reading The Rape of Europe which detailed the ways in which Hitler and his followers controlled the art world in Germany
The only thing that didn't seem to fit was the "conspiracy theory" about the Spear of Destiny (reported to be the spear from the Crucifixion) and it's connection to a secret order of Nazi Knights. It's hard to tell from the text whether Horn believed these stories or whether Kirkpatrick highlighted them to make his book more sensational. Other than this minor flaw, the book and Horns search is fascinating and worth a read.
Did I scare you away from The Rape of Europa by Lynn H. Nicholas with descriptions of its complexity and endless details? Fear not, because in 2008 a documentary film of the same was released. The documentary focuses on the role art played in the Third Reich; the plight of art works in Italy, France, the Soviet Union and Poland; and recent efforts at restoration and restitution. Included are interviews with victims and Monuments Men.
I think this 117 minute film is a great introduction to art looting during the Second World War and restitution of such works. It would be great addition to European Art History course or any class or unit on the War. For the latter it provides much of the same background as any standard documentary on the Nazis, but focuses more on their cultural impact as opposed to battles won and lost. There is also a three-disk version with much more material, which I've not seen. Visit the website here.
Last
month, I read this notice, that reported the book Monuments Men will be adapted for the big screen by George Clooney.
To be honest, I clicked on the link because of Mr. Clooney, but I checked out The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in Historyfrom the library because
it totally sounded like my thing – people rescuing Europe’s cultural heritage
from the Nazi’s at the end of WWII.
I
used give a lecture on history and film which came to mind as I was reading
this book. It was the first book I have ever read knowing it would be made into a movie. Historians (myself included) quite often
become all bent out of shape over Hollywood interpretations of historical
events. Often with good reason. On the other hand, many historians don’t
have a firm grip on how filmmakers “work.” Everything I know about film and
history, I have learned from Robert Brent Toplin, John E. O’Connor and Robert A. Rosenstone.
Historians
write books and paint their stories and arguments with words. They can keep going until the publisher tells them to stop. In these lengthy books, historians
have the time to examine the background of an event, the event itself, and then
its aftermath. Historians can also investigate abstract historical events, like
the history of an idea (democracy) or struggle (emancipation). Monuments
Men which falls somewhere between a proper history book and a novel, is
over 400 pages. Filmmakers have at most 2 hours and 20 minutes.
Filmmakers
may have a STATEMENT to make, but they also need to entertain their audience. Unlike
the historian, they cannot present a movie about the causes of Great Depression
(which start in the 1920s and are numerous), but they can tell the story about
a person during the depression. So the first object of a filmmaker is to reduce
history to a story about a person or small group of people. Because filmmakers
tell stories there must be a beginning and an end. Of course, life and history aren’t like this. A movie might end with VE Day in May 1945; but in reality life
kept moving on to VJ Day and then the Cold War. To make their stories engaging to
the widest audience filmmakers take the past and make it more personal and more dramatic. They also simplify it by collapsing or combining historical
characters, condensing time, focusing on only a few moments of a crisis, and
leaving out “extraneous” details. They
also create the past visually, and this, I think, is the benefit of history on
film over history in a book.
Filmmakers
use traditional story telling methods to turn their chosen historical event into
a film. The two main ones are stories told in three acts (exposition,
complication, and resolution) and applying a genre (buddy, war, romance, etc.)
For the former, Toplin (I think) provides a simple example: of exposition - put
the man in the tree; complication - throw rocks at the man; resolution - man is
rescued from the tree. Genre, as best I
understand it, provides the rhetoric or framework for the story. Audiences expect and
anticipate different plots and results in a Romantic-Comedy then a Buddy Movie.
The
next time you watch an historical film, think about the different mediums of
historical books and historical film and consider whether the tools used by the
filmmakers were in a sense “true” to the past or not.
