Author: F. J. HoogewoudPublisher: Symposium Books
ISBN:
Category : Archives
Languages : en
Pages : 138
Book Description
The Return of Looted Collections (1946-1996)
Author: F. J. HoogewoudPublisher: Symposium Books
ISBN:
Category : Archives
Languages : en
Pages : 138
Book Description
A Mortuary of Books
Author: Elisabeth GallasPublisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479833959
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416
Book Description
Winner, 2020 JDC-Herbert Katzki Award for Writing Based on Archival Material, given by the Jewish Book Council The astonishing story of the efforts of scholars and activists to rescue Jewish cultural treasures after the Holocaust In March 1946 the American Military Government for Germany established the Offenbach Archival Depot near Frankfurt to store, identify, and restore the huge quantities of Nazi-looted books, archival material, and ritual objects that Army members had found hidden in German caches. These items bore testimony to the cultural genocide that accompanied the Nazis’ systematic acts of mass murder. The depot built a short-lived lieu de memoire—a “mortuary of books,” as the later renowned historian Lucy Dawidowicz called it—with over three million books of Jewish origin coming from nineteen different European countries awaiting restitution. A Mortuary of Books tells the miraculous story of the many Jewish organizations and individuals who, after the war, sought to recover this looted cultural property and return the millions of treasured objects to their rightful owners. Some of the most outstanding Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century, including Dawidowicz, Hannah Arendt, Salo W. Baron, and Gershom Scholem, were involved in this herculean effort. This led to the creation of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Inc., an international body that acted as the Jewish trustee for heirless property in the American Zone and transferred hundreds of thousands of objects from the Depot to the new centers of Jewish life after the Holocaust. The commitment of these individuals to the restitution of cultural property revealed the importance of cultural objects as symbols of the enduring legacy of those who could not be saved. It also fostered Jewish culture and scholarly life in the postwar world.
A Time to Gather
Author: Jason LustigPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019756352X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
How do people link the past to the present, marking continuity in the face of the fundamental discontinuities of history? A Time to Gather argues that historical records took on potent value in modern Jewish life as both sources of history and anchors of memory because archives presented oneway of transmitting Jewish culture and history from one generation to another as well as making claims of access to an "authentic" Jewish culture. Indeed, both before the Holocaust and in its aftermath, Jewish leaders around the world felt a shared imperative to muster the forces and resources ofJewish life and culture. It was a "time to gather," a feverish era of collecting and conflict in which archive making was both a response to the ruptures of modernity and a mechanism for communities to express their cultural hegemony.Jason Lustig explores these themes across the arc of the twentieth century by excavating three distinctive archival traditions, that of the Cairo Genizah (and its transfer to Cambridge in the 1890s), folkloristic efforts like those of YIVO, and the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden (Central or TotalArchive of the German Jews) formed in Berlin in 1905. Lustig presents archive-making as an organizing principle of twentieth-century Jewish culture, as a metaphor of great power and broad symbolic meaning with the dispersion and gathering of documents falling in the context of the Jews' longdiasporic history. In this light, creating archives was just as much about the future as it was about the past.
Prologue
Author: The Fate of the Masterpiece
Author: Noah CharneyPublisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610394895
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 135
Book Description
This short e-book, adapted from Noah Charney's book Stealing the Mystic Lamb, tells the dramatic story of the rescue of The Ghent Altarpiece from Nazi pillagers. As the Nazis stormed across Europe during the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of artworks disappeared in their wake. A group of Allied officers set off on the trail of Europe's vanished art treasures -- they were known as the Monuments Men. The investigations of the Monuments Men combined old-fashioned detective work, personal bravery, ingenuity, and a dose of good fortune. This is perhaps best exemplified in the story of the race to save the 12,000 stolen masterpieces that were kept in a secret art warehouse hidden deep inside a converted salt mine in the Austrian Alps. There awaited the treasures destined for Hitler's planned "super museum," which would contain every important artwork in the world. The prize of the collection, and the painting most desired by the Nazis, was Jan van Eyck's 1432 masterwork, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, also known as The Ghent Altarpiece. This massive masterpiece is considered the most influential painting ever made, and it is also the most-frequently stolen. This e-book single is adapted from Noah Charney's acclaimed book Stealing the Mystic Lamb: the True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece. It contains all of the material from that book on the Monuments Men and Nazi art theft during the Second World War, as told through the story of two Monuments Men, Robert Posey and Lincoln Kirstein, as they raced to save the Mystic Lamb and the other works in the salt mine from an SS officer who was determined to destroy all 12,000 masterpieces.
Nazi Looting
Author: Gerard AaldersPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360
Book Description
The Nazi looting machine was notoriously efficient during the Second World War. In the Netherlands, 8.5 million citizens suffered losses estimated at 3.6 billion guilders. Approximately one-third of these losses were borne by Jews, who comprised only 1.6% of the total population. In todays terms, the German occupiers stripped the Jewish population of assets worth $7 billion.Nazi Looting offers a comprehensive history of the Dutch experience and demonstrates how reputable indigenous institutions acted as willing collaborators. Beginning with a survey of international law and various definitions of 'looting', the author shows how the Germans systematically robbed Dutch Jewry through a variety of means that gave the outward appearance of honest trading. Forced to sell under duress and at unreasonably low prices, few dared refuse the German on the doorstep when threatened with prison or incarceration in a camp.The plundering was total and systematic. In May 1940, a team of highly trained art historians, linguists, musicologists and literary experts arrived immediately behind the victorious German troops to catalogue the vast collections for Hitler. From 1941, Jews were compelled to deposit all their money into a bank called Lippmann, Rosenthal Co. The name of the bank itself was a cynical ploy since it was taken from a respected, Jewish-owned Amsterdam bank and presented as a new branch. This bank, however, simply channelled money into the Third Reich with the help of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, insurance brokers and other well-established Dutch banks. Once the Jews were deported, their houses were emptied and the contents used to re-furnish bombed out areas of the Reich. In common with many other formerly Nazi-occupied countries in Europe, the Netherlands has been unable to retrieve many of its pre-war assets. More than fifty years after the wars end, 20% of its most important pre-war museum exhibits and approximately 80% of the less important works remain untrace
Gershom Scholem
Author: Noam ZadoffPublisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1512601136
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Book Description
A new intellectual portrait of a prominent twentieth-century philosopher
Comparative Criticism: Volume 23, Humanist Traditions in the Twentieth Century
Author: E. S. ShafferPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521808071
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 412
Book Description
Comparative Criticism addresses itself to the questions of literary theory and criticism. This new volume looks at the Humanist Tradition in the Twentieth Century and articles will include: The Book in the Totalitarian Context; Lorenzo Valla and Changing Perceptions of Renaissance Humanism; Hitler's Berlin; Civilisation and barbarism: an anthropological approach; Walter Pater to Adrian Stokes: psychoanalysis and humanism; Art History and Humanist Tradition in the Stefan George Circle. The winning entries in the 1999-2000 BCLA/BCLT translation competition are also published.
Information Hunters
Author: Kathy Lee PeissPublisher:
ISBN: 0190944617
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Book Description
The country of the mind must also attack -- Librarians and collectors go to war -- The wild scramble for documents -- Acquisitions on a Grand Scale -- Fugitive Records of War -- Book Burning-American Style -- Not a Library, but a Large Depot of Loot.
Dutch Jews as Perceived by Themselves and by Others
Author: Chaya BraszPublisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004498044
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 479
Book Description
How did Jews in the Netherlands view themselves and how were they viewed by others? This is the single theme around which the twenty-five essays in this volume, written by scholars from the Netherlands, Israel and other countries, revolve. The studies encompass a variety of topics and periods, from the beginning of the Jewish settlement in the Dutch Republic through the Shoah and its aftermath. They include examinations of the Sephardi Jews in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Jews in the periods of Emancipation and Enlightenment, social and cultural encounters between Jews and non-Jews throughout the ages, the image of the Jew in Dutch literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the churches' attitudes toward Jews. Also highlighted are the second World War and its consequences, Dutch Jews in Israel and Israelis in the contemporary Netherlands.