The ‘Return of Beauty’? The politics of restitution of Nazi-looted art in Italy, the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria, 1945-1998

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines how cultural restitution was presented and debated in public discourses in the three main post-fascist countries of Western Europe, i.e. Austria, Italy and (West) Germany, from the end of the Second World War to the 1998 signing of the ‘Washington Declaration on Nazi-confiscated Art’. The study focuses on the role played by restitution in the process of memory-building vis-à-vis the development of these three countries’ Vergangenheitsbewältigung, their ‘struggling to cope with the past’. In particular, it examines the transition from a mild Vergangenheitspolitik, ‘the politics of the past’, typical of the early post-war period, to later attempts at a more fully fledged Vergangenheitsbewältigung that characterized the détente and especially the post-Cold War years. Building on a selection of Austrian, British, German, Italian and US printed primary sources, the paper investigates in comparative and transnational fashion how liberal-democratic narratives surrounding the three countries’ dictatorial past were constructed in order to tackle one central question: what role did cultural restitution play in the construction of post-war memory politics, and, vice versa, how did the memory and legacy of fascism impact restitution debates during and after the Cold War? Far from constituting a mere exercise in cultural diplomacy, the restitution of cultural property played an integral role in these three countries’ attempts at rebuilding a sense of national cohesion designed to overcome the ghosts of their fascist past. This often happened at the expense of an in-depth processing of their involvement in the Holocaust. Indeed, restitution came to perform a central function in the shift from amnesty to amnesia of the early post-war years in that it often reduced Wiedergutmachung to an economic transaction through which these countries could ‘make amends’ without effecting any deeper political and social defascistization.