“Too Soon?” (part 2)
More than just making jokes, there is an interesting “too soon?” question about when uncomfortable or discomforting history is represented in the dramatic, consumable media (TV, movies, museum exhibits).
On the 9/11 attacks:
On March 10, 2002, the first documentary about 9/11 was broadcast on television (In “9/11,” the filmmakers were in NY on September 11 as part of a documentary on a group of firefighters). An international film made up of 11-minute segments was released on September 11, 2002.
The national memorial site and museum were opened on September 11, 2011.
On the Holocaust:
The war documentary “Nazi Concentration Camps” was released in late November, 1945, portions of which were included in the 1961 epic “Judgment at Nuremberg.”
Judgment at Nuremberg (the film) had itself followed from the concise, stirring and rewarding production on television’s Playhouse 90 (April 16,1959).
Beginning in the 1960s, survivors outside of Europe and Israel also took steps to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust. The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust—the first of such institutions in the United States—was founded by a group of survivors who met in an English-as-a-second-language (ESL) class in Hollywood in 1961. The museum’s first exhibit consisted of survivors’ own mementos, written records, and photographs.
In the 1970s and ’80s other museums were founded in El Paso, Texas; Farmington Hills, Michigan; San Francisco, California; and Buffalo, New York; as well as in Montreal, Canada; and Melbourne, Australia.
In the 1990s, at the approach of the 50-year anniversary of the end of the Holocaust, there was renewed interest in establishing institutions to memorialize, research, and educate. Around the world several more Holocaust museums were founded, including the Fundación Memoria del Holocausto (1993) in Buenos Aires, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1993) in Washington, D.C., the Cape Town Holocaust Centre (1999) in South Africa, and the Holocaust Education Center (1995) in Fukuyama, Japan.
Later constructions include the Budapest Holocaust Memorial Center (2002) and, near Chicago, the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center (2009).
On the Nazi art plunder:
As of 2017, there is an estimated $37B in art treasures still missing from the Nazi plunder of Europe during WW2, which does not count the art that current sits in museums and private collections around the world that was possessed, repossessed, or sold, in public or in private, over the years. The US estimates that 20% of Europe’s art disappeared into the hands of the Germans.
A new multi-million dollar stash seems to show up every year or so, as people or families with whom some of this stuff was sequestered die. And some of the art, generated by those deemed as degenerates by the Reich, was destroyed in public burnings.
The topic is a complex one. Many of the major US museums have posted the items in their collections whose provenance is questioned, and in recent years a few of them have hired staff members to more proactively seek out the history of these pieces. When you visit the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, you encounter an impressive collection of impressionist paintings that were originally looted by the Nazis then claimed as spoils in retribution by the Russian army.
Perhaps most notable is the case of the five paintings by Gustav Klimt, long held by the Belvedere Gallery in Vienna, that were awarded in 2006 by a panel of Austrian judges to Maria Altmann, the 90-year-old Los Angeles niece of a Viennese Jew from whom the paintings were stolen in 1938. She subsequently sold the pictures, one of them—the famed Gold Portrait of her aunt Adele Bloch-Bauer—to Ronald Lauder for a record $135 million. This story is told in a terrific documentary “The Rape of Europa” (2008). Since then, the same story was dramatized with moderate success in the 2015 Helen Mirren film “Woman in Gold” (the documentary is infinitely better), and the 2014 “Monuments Men,” which should have been a lot better than it was.
The holdings of the Hermitage, and the push to restore ownership, are taken up at the end of “Europa” and the poignant point is made – while the sense of restitution still lives in the minds and experiences of the Russian people who are alive and still so strongly affected by WW2, perhaps it is best to simply wait a while before pursuing for justice in the return of these objects. Their conclusion: it is still simply too soon.