Hitlers Sonderauftrag Ostmark: Kunstraub und Museumspolitik im Nationalsozialismus by Birgit Schwarz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hitlers Sonderauftrag Ostmark: Kunstraub und Museumspolitik im Nationalsozialismus by Birgit Schwarz Katherine Arens Birgit Schwarz, Hitlers Sonderauftrag Ostmark: Kunstraub und Museumspolitik im Nationalsozialismus. Schriftenreihe der Kommission für Provenienzforschung 7. Vienna: Böhlau, 2018. 236 pp. This volume continues the recent tradition of intensive, archive-based, and grant-supported reports on Nazi interventions in the Austrian cultural sphere, [End Page 116] an ongoing stock-taking of how the historical record preserved within particular institutions and disciplines needs to be corrected. Brigit Schwarz is an expert on NS art policies and politics (with a 2014 book Auf Befehl des Führers: Hitler und der NS-Kunstraub, which places the Austrian art thefts in the context of Hitler's Europe). Hitlers Sonderauftrag Ostmark is about the Führer's project of redistributing art expropriated from Austrian Jewish collectors to museums in his "Greater Germany" and to a depot in preparation for his own museum planned for Linz. Her compelling story is superbly written and documented, thanks to its origin in a research project conducted between 2014 and 2016 under the aegis of Austria's Kommission für Provenienzforschung, which was founded in 1998 by request of the Bundesministerin für Unterricht und kulturelle Angelegenheiten and which, in twenty years of work, has established the provenance of over thirty thousand objects and returned them to owners and heirs. Schwarz outlines the exact planning and logistics of this expropriation, starting with a June 8, 1938, directive that gave Hitler the exclusive rights over confiscated artworks, most of which had been in Jewish hands. After a few false starts, Hitler took over personal command of the project, and in 1939 named as executive advisor the director of the Gemäldegalerie Dresden, Hans Posse, a well-connected and-respected museum professional and art historian as well as a former student of Franz Wickhoff's in Vienna. Posse, as Hitler's "Sonderbeauftragter für Linz," and his assistant, Gottfried Reimer, eventually "distributed" five thousand valuable artworks that had been taken as Jewish property, using the Wiener Denkmalbehörde. Vienna was the center of interest for these confiscations not only because of the city's extensive collections but because of a law for protecting monuments that had been enacted in 1923, which had made it difficult for owners to move their collections out of the country. It seems that, after 1937's Munich Entartete Kunst exhibit led to the destruction (or sale abroad) of Germany's art, Hitler hoped to burnish his reputation as an art collector, and so conceived of Führerspendungen, "donations" made to German museums out of the stolen art to enhance their collections. The "gifts" were to be publicized only after the war; since that did not happen, the museums who had eagerly competed for the best works were able to simply bemoan their losses of modern art and, until such recent research, overlook or deny the provenances of some of "their" iconic works. As competition intensified, works were moved into storage at important cloisters and [End Page 117] monasteries, even over the protests of NS-organizations that were trying to use them for other purposes, such as housing refugees. Aside from this volume, the project also has put extensive information about lost and displaced art into international databases, assembled thanks to the discovery of Posse's work notes, which probably survived because he died of cancer, almost without warning, in 1942. (Schwarz is currently editing his travel diaries, which have also survived and which fill out the available information.) This project had access not only to Posse's correspondence but also to his notebooks that documented the work on the project, which were similarly preserved because of the sudden circumstances of his death. The documentation assembled is heart-wrenching and compelling. Collections like those of Louis Rothschild in Vienna were removed to the provinces and broken up; others were "purchased" in the occupied territories and also dispersed. Posse traveled extensively to catalogue and evaluate holdings and to collaborate with his director-peers. He presented lists to Hitler, who personally approved plans for the holdings—and sometimes reward his museum directors by filling orders on their "wish lists." The book is organized...