Within months of taking power, Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda and public enlightenment, announced plans to create a Reich Chamber of Culture to regulate everyone connected with the arts. But already it has uncovered long hidden sources of German folkways, has opened paths to that new consciousness which up till now had been borne half unawares by the brown battalions: namely the awareness that all the expressions of life spring from a specific blood…a specific race!… Art is not international.… If anyone should ask: What is left of freedom? He will be answered: there is no freedom for those who would weaken and destroy German art…there must be no remorse and no sentimentality in uprooting and crushing what was destroying our vitals.”
We stand in the first stormy phase of revolution. Shortly after Hitler became chancellor, the Nazi-affiliated Combat League for German Culture had set forth the regime’s outlook on culture, which indicated what was to come: “It is a mistake to think that the national revolution is only political and economic. The auction was used to raise foreign currency for the Nazi war industry. These works, denounced as “degenerate art” by the fascists, included Picasso’s Absinthe Drinker, van Gogh’s Self-Portrait from Munich, Chagall’s Maison bleue, and Gauguin’s Tahiti. The Rape of Europa begins in 1939 with a Christie’s auctioneer selling off masterpieces gathered from Germany’s leading public museums: Munich, Hamburg, Mannheim, Frankfurt, Dresden, Bremen and Berlin’s Nationalgalerie. In 2006, a deeply moving film based on the book was produced as well. Nicholas in 1994.Įxcept where noted, this review draws entirely upon Nicholas’s detailed research. The classic work on these tragic events is The Rape of Europa, written by Lynn H. This attempt to deprive the population of access to art and culture and seize works of art for the personal pleasure of the rich recalls the greatest art plundering in history: the looting of occupied Europe by the leaders of the Nazi party. The threat to sell Detroit’s artistic and historical patrimony to pay off the banks has been set into motion by an unelected emergency manager, a transparent front man for the financial aristocracy.
The London-based auction house Christie’s is pricing the priceless collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts for sale. The city’s bondholders-including Wall Street banks, hedge funds and credit insurers in the ever-growing financial industry-are demanding payment. The unprecedented use of bankruptcy courts to enable the large-scale seizure of public art in Detroit is a fundamental attack on the rights of the working class everywhere.
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