Restaging “Degenerate Art”: The Politics of Memory in the Berlin Sculpture Find Exhibit

Abstract

In January of 2010, excavations near the Rotes Rathaus in Berlin yielded a surprising discovery: workers unearthed a cache of sculptures stored in a forgotten depot of the Nazi Reichspropagandaministerium. Although these sculptures, damaged during the aerial bombardment of Berlin, recalled ancient artifacts, they were actually among those works of modern art censored as “degenerate art” by the Nazis. In this article, I examine the subsequent exhibition of these sculptures in the Neues Museum and explore the place of so‐called entartete Kunst and the classical collections of Berlin within the cultural landscape of contemporary Germany. Through the juxtaposition of entartete Kunst with classical artifacts, the curators of the “Berliner Skupturenfund” exhibit project an art historical narrative that allows visitors to see entartete Kunst in a new light. At the same time, they obscure the long and troubling history of classical appropriation, which played a large part in the Nazi campaign to censor modern art as “degenerate.”