The scavenging jackals of the Third Reich
Anne Applebaum
THE FAUSTIAN BARGAIN: THE ART WORLD IN NAZI GERMANY by Jonathan Petropoulos Allen Lane, £20, pp. 395 Crooked lawyers, evil bureaucrats, fas- cist journalists: somehow one is not sur- prised by most tales of corrupt, collaborationist professionals in Nazi Ger- many. But art historians? That civil ser- vants or businessmen were enthusiastic Participants in the Holocaust doesn't seem exceptional. Perhaps illogically, it is never- theless far more difficult to imagine how a man whose primary preoccupation in life is the early Gothic art of the Ile de France could, with very slight provocation, turn into a thief and a blackmailer of Jews.
And yet Dr Hermann Bunjes, an expert on that very subject, could and did. In exchange for academic success and profes- sional accolades — he became director of the racist, pro-German Art Historical Research Institute in occupied Paris — Dr Bunjes collaborated in the plundering of the art collections of the Jews of France, the re-writing of art history with a German bias, and even in the failed attempt to steal the great French mediaeval masterpiece, the Bayeux tapestry, and transfer it to the Fatherland. Rather to his credit, Dr Bunjes appears to have later recognised his guilt: while being interrogated by American investigators, he poured out 'volumes of information' and begged to be offered safe- conduct to Paris, where he hoped to finish his work on 12th-century sculpture. When his request was not met, he killed himself, along with his wife and child.
But his regrets made Dr Bunjes the exception rather than the rule. On the con- trary, upon finishing this carefully researched book, the lasting impression is that of the rather startling postwar success- es enjoyed not only by Nazi art historians, but by Nazi critics, curators, art dealers and even artists. Ernst Buchner, wartime direc- tor of the Bavarian State Paintings Collec- tion — in which capacity he oversaw the 'He got that green by mixing viridian with absinthe.' theft of the famed Ghent altarpiece, and assisted in the purge of 'degenerate' mod- ern and 'Jewish' art from the museum's collections — was reappointed to the same job in 1953. Arno Breker, Hitler's favourite sculptor — his works included the monu- mental 'Torch Bearer' and 'Sword Bearer', subsequently renamed 'The Party' and 'The Wehrmacht' — continued to receive lucra- tive commissions from leading businessmen and politicians up until his death. The pat- tern is nearly universal: notes Jonathan Petropoulos, who has meticulously tracked the careers of some two dozen art profes- sionals, as a rule they 'maintained contact with one another in a manner that protect- ed their own interests and impeded the restitution of looted artworks'.
Yet in some ways, as this book makes clear, that is not surprising either. For above all, those members of the German art professions who collaborated — as opposed to their many distinguished col- leagues who emigrated — appear to have been blinded by unusual academic and pro- fessional ambition, a personality trait which was hardly likely to disappear at the end of the war. One or two, Breker among them, may also have been tempted by money (his rewards included an 18th-century country house, and homes in Berlin and Paris). Kajetan Muhlmann, the art historian who led the plunder of Poland ('within six months almost the entire artistic property of the land was seized,' he bragged to Hitler) was also, at some level, genuinely attracted by Nazi ideology.
But while Petropolous offers some other explanations — anti-Semitism, the appeal of barbaric violence to intellectuals — the vast majority appear to have been drawn in to theft and blackmail simply by the promise of professional success and recog- nition in the art world: this was 'the Faus- tian bargain' of the book's title. The art world was a prestigious milieu in Nazi Ger- many. Famously, Adolf Hitler himself was a failed artist, and was acutely conscious of the role of painting and sculpture in the propagation of Nazi ideals. He took a per- sonal interest in everything from public sculpture to the affairs of museums, and was personally close to art historians, art dealers and artists, offering them financial support and the glamour of appearing to be close to the leadership. Nazi law even stipulated that at least 2 per cent of all expenditure on public buildings was to be devoted to artistic decoration.
In most cases, that was all it took. Although some later claimed otherwise, there is no evidence that any of these edu- cated, scholarly men were in any way forced to support Hitler. Failure to toe the line did not, for non-Jews, usually mean death or a sentence to a concentration camp. It might, however, have meant loss of a university professorship or the failure to win competitions or prizes — and that, it turns out, was too much for most artists and intellectuals to bear.
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