Now available from Netflix, “The Rape of Europa” is an outstanding
documentary on the theft or outright destruction of some of Europe’s
greatest art during World War Two. Based on the 1995 book of the same
name by Lynn H. Nicholas, who is one of the film’s many interesting
interviewees, it focuses most of its understandable outrage against the
Nazis but the allies are by no means angels in the 20th century’s
greatest calamities. Notwithstanding the film’s penetrating and
scholarly examination of the topic, you are left with the feeling that
taking the spoils of war is deeply embedded in “civilized” behavior, a
perspective that the film flirts with but never adopts.
The movie begins with the struggle of Jewish survivors to reclaim art
that had been stolen by the Nazis, or in the case of Gustav Klimt’s most
famous painting taken “legally” by the Austrian fascist government.
Despite its illegal seizure by the fascists, the gold-leaf portrait of
Adele Bloch-Bauer was only turned over to the Bloch-Bauer family after
an intense legal and political campaign was mounted.
Klimt was a typical “decadent” artist despised by the Nazis but they
were not above hoarding their masterpieces in cellars as booty. Two top
leaders of the Nazi party, Adolph Hitler and Herman Goering, amassed
enormous collections of stolen art in their respective castles,
including works by decadent artists, but their preference was for Aryan
art or pre-modern masterpieces. This was a particular obsession for
Hitler who started out as an aspiring artist but whose career came to a
crashing end when an Austrian art school decided he was too mediocre to
accept. One of the interviewees speculates that WWII and the Judeocide
could have been prevented if Hitler was a somewhat better artist but it
is more likely that the capitalist economic collapse would have
precipitated some other madman’s rise to power.
Once the war begins, the Nazis make a point of seizing art in the
conquered territories including Poland and France. Just before the siege
of Leningrad begins, Russian museum workers in that city make a heroic
effort to relocate the work away from the fighting.
When art was not stolen, it often went up in flames as bombs and
artillery shells had their sickening effect. Throughout Europe, some of
the most beautiful and irreplaceable architecture found itself
inconveniently in the path of advancing armies and became “collateral
damage”. One of the most egregious examples of such destruction came at
the hands of the allies in the battle of Monte Cassino in Italy, an
episode that looms large as example of allied malfeasance in the Ken
Burns PBS series on WWII.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/the-rape-of-europa/
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