Between material culture and “living room art”: Historicizing the restitution of fascist-looted art

Abstract

In April 1942, former carpet manufacturer Felix Ganz wrote to his daughter Annemarie with a sketch of their new home. After their business had been forcibly Aryanized and they were evicted from their family home in the spring of 1941, Felix and his wife Erna were coerced into moving to smaller and smaller quarters three times, until their deportation to Theresienstadt in the late summer of 1942. Both would be murdered at Auschwitz the following year. In his letter, Felix illustrated how they had furnished the one-room apartment with what was left of their furniture and artworks. Stripped of most of their cultural belongings – including Felix’s gramophone and record collection – the couple had attempted to keep the pieces of material culture most significant to them, such as a Persian lamp and a few family portraits. Theirs was not a prominent art collection but, rather, a brilliant exemplification of Wohnzimmerkunst – that “living room art” of more modest artistic quality that fulfilled a central social function for the upper middle-class milieus of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as illustrated by Emily Löffler in this issue.1 It was a visual and material marker of their social status, of their level of education, and also of their family as well as individual identities. Besides the evident economic intent of fascist plundering, it was precisely this sense of self and of belonging that the Nazis (and the Fascists) set out to annihilate.2 Ever since news of the “discovery” of the Gurlitt trove first broke in 2012, the restitution of cultural property has been on the crest of an apparently unstoppable wave. Besides the well-established provenance research into Jewish-owned cultural property, postcolonial restitution has increasingly become the epicenter of fierce disputes, as in the case of the contested Benin Bronzes or the repatriation of the Cape cross stone to Namibia. The public and scholarly disputes that have ensued reveal just how contested the field of looted art still is and how much art as a unique form of property engages the fantasy and interest of the public and academics alike. As a result, the restoration of material culture has now risen to one of the central facets of post-authoritarian justice, which historians have yet to analyze in more comprehensive terms. This collection of articles results from one central question that underpins our work as historians dealing with restitution matters: what role does research into fascist-looted art play in the bigger picture? How, if at all, does it enhance our knowledge of twentiethcentury history, and how does it contribute to our understanding of broader historical