A film I saw last week (German Sons) illustrated well where memory in contemporary Western society has arrived. It presented the recollections of two men whose fathers were on different sides during World War II. One was a German soldier, the other a Jewish resistance fighter. A friendship has now developed between the two sons and their shared exploring of the past is at the heart of the film. This has become a well-tested formula over the last twenty years or so but it contains dangers for our understanding of the twentieth century.

This kind of highly personalised memory has developed unprecedented validity. As I sat watching this film I wondered what motivates audiences to watch such films. I had a disquieting feel that it is somehow voyeuristic, something like memory-porn. In such films history and memory have become the subject of the voyeuristic gaze that lies at the heart of the pornographic. World history is reduced to the microcosmic individual and we watch people doing remembering as cinematic entertainment.

The West's understanding of the conflicts that dominated the first half of the twentieth century has reached a post-memory stage. The number of people who were older than children during the two world wars is now so small that our social knowledge of these momentous and world-shaping events is almost entirely mediated. Hardly any of us were there. What we know we learned from books, films, TV, museums or recollections of individuals. This makes the role of storyteller or in this case documentary-maker that much more freighted with responsibility.

But filmmakers are generally not trained historians. In the case of German Sons the two subjects were insignificant figures in the global conflict. The film was a loose pastiche of platitudes with the historical accuracy and authority of a home-movie. That seems to be where historical narrative has arrived. Our preference for anecdote over analysis, our postmodern inability to see the wood for the trees and our desire to reduce the complexities of the world to individual personal narratives leaves us ill-equipped to grasp and comprehend the really large forces that have shaped our world.

Germany's first Hitler exhibition opens

The first ever German exhibition about Adolf Hitler opens in Berlin today. Under the title Hitler and the Germans, Nation and Crime the show is being hosted by the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.

The exhibition is divided into sections dealing with the relationship between Hitler and German society, the Nazi state and the dictator's rise to power. In an article published in the magazine Der Spiegel the curators describe the great caution they have taken to ensure that the exhibition does not present any opportunities for perverse "hero worship". They have aimed to achieve "critical distance" to their subject and none of the items on display are thought to ever have been touched by Hitler.

Nevertheless, the exhibition marks a new milestone in the historical treatment of the genocidal dictator. With the passing of time, the proportion of the German - and European - population with first-hand experience of Nazism is below ten percent. Germany has become a "post-memory" society; at least as far as the Third Reich and World War II are concerned. People today only "know" Hitler and his regime from history books, films, family recollections, site visits and the education system - including museums. At the same time the Nazis have moved into the realm of popular culture and there is a risk that the full horror of Hitler's regime will slowly be lost on future generations for whom Hitler is little more than a mythical symbol of evil. To some extent that is an unavoidable result of the march of history. But it is also something that well-curated exhibitions can help prevent.

Image: Ruins of buildings and vehicles lie in Berlin's Mohrenstrasse after the Anglo-American air attacks on the 3rd of February, 1945, (source: German Federal Archive)

Politics and memory

The German city of Dresden suffered a series of the most destructive bombing raids of World War II between 13 and 15 February 1945. The exact number of casualties will never be known, but reliable estimates range between 25,000 and 35,000 people. Today the bombing of Dresden remains one of the most controversial operations of the allied air forces in World War II.

Sixty-five years later commemoration of Dresden's suffering has become a political hot potato. A 2006 two-part TV mini-series titled Dresden The Inferno helped raise German awareness of the city's fate, even though the film was burdened with a fictional and highly unlikely love story between a British pilot and a German nurse. The commemoration of the dead from Dresden began in the first years after World War II and was politically charged from the beginning. When Germany was divided in 1949 the city found itself in communist East Germany and Dresden became a symbol of American capitalist imperialism. In 1950 signs with slogans such as "We Hate the American Warmongers Who Murdered Dresden".

Today the controversy remains and this weekend's commemoration looked like it would be overshadowed by extreme-right political groups who were keen to push a neo-Nazi agenda and portray the bombing as an attempt to destroy German culture. Last week a German court overruled the City of Dresden's ban on a march by extreme-right groups to commemorate the attacks. Police warned of violence as the Mayor of the city called for a human chain around the city to stop the rally. Eventually the rally was called off and the day passed without any major incidents.

Dresden remains symbolic for the political charge contained in many historical events from different parts of the world. The way we remember, commemorate and interpret the past remains one of the most important elements of our present and future.

Image: Wanderer above the Mists , Caspar David Friedrich (1818) Kunsthalle, Hamburg

Balancing acts required

The Nazis left Vienna with three enormous concrete flak towers that were used as platforms for anti-aircraft guns during World War II. At the end of the war they were left as silent reminders of the Third Reich and all its inhuman madness. They are still standing today and are an ongoing source of discussion among politicians and urban planners. One of the towers has been used as an aquarium since 1957 and in 1991 the US artist Lawrence Weiner painted a text on the upper section as part of the Vienna Festival in that year. The text reads "Smashed to pieces (in the still of the night)".

Now the aquarium's owners want to expand it and to paint the outside of the tower with appropriate undersea motives. But these plans have been called into question by Vienna's culture minister, who does not want any development to affect the integrity of the artwork.

It is another interesting example of the seemingly eternal conflict between preservation of the past (even when, as in this case, it is a past many would rather forget), development and commercialisation of valuable urban space and the integrity of public art. The balancing act required is as delicate as ever and creative but sensitive solutions are the only way out.

1933 art auction in dispute

For sometime now there has been an ever-growing list of cases of people lodging claims for the return of artworks and artifacts they claim were stolen or sold under duress during World War II. These snippets from a tragic historical drama of immense proportions often feature complex narratives and the outcomes are rarely clear-cut. A number of countries have set up special commissions or committees to deal with the decisions on who is entitled to disputed works.

Britain's Spoliation Advisory Committee has recently delivered its verdict in a very murky case involving eight drawings that are now in London's Courtauld Institute. In the early 1930s they had come into the possession of Professor Carl Glaser whose heirs last year claimed they had been sold under duress and should be returned to them. Glaser auctioned most of his substantial art collection in May 1933 after the Nazis came to power and removed him from his position as Director of the Staatliche Kunstbibliothek (State Art Library) in Berlin. Glaser was born to Jewish parents but had converted to Catholicism in 1914. The drawings were bought by Count Antoine Seilern and in 1978 they were part of a bequest that ended with the Courtauld in London.

The Courtauld argued that the Berlin auction was not a forced sale as a letter survives from Glaser to the painter Edvard Munch in which he describes having 'freed myself of all my possessions, so that I might start over again completely new' after the recent death of his first wife. The prices for the works were in line with market expectations at the time and Seilern was known to be an anti-Nazi who never attempted to hide the provenance of the drawings.

In its argument, the Courtauld concedes that Nazi persecution was a factor in the 1933 but argues that the decisive factor was Glaser's own "free choice". In its judgement the Spoliation Advisory Committee decided that 'the claimants’ moral claim is insufficiently strong to warrant a recommendation that the drawings should be transferred to them.'

Glaser's heirs have now reportedly appealed to the British culture secretary to have the Committee's decision disregarded.
The Art Newspaper also has a story on this case here.

Like so many before it, this case proves how difficult it is to deal with disputed transactions that took place sixty or seventy years ago. Nevertheless, the difficulty of reaching a correct decision should not deter people from attempting to find a just outcome. Recent high profile cases such as that surrounding Maria Altmann's successful claim to famous gold portraits by Gustav Klimt have thrown the spotlight on this shady corner of twentieth century history and it will be a while yet before all of the proverbial skeletons are out of the closets.

© Brian Long 2009