Rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture.
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
A Bad Sign
photo of Dachau sign by Dorsm365
There has been much reporting about the attempt of Jewish
families to reclaim works of art that had been pilfered by the Nazis. The
recent discovery of 1280 works of art in the Schwabing apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt the son of Hilldebrand Gurlitt, an infamous dealer who preyed on Jewish
collectors is one of the most famous examples of the phenomenon of Raubkunstor
stolen Nazi art (“The Devil and the Art Dealer,”Vanity Fair,4/14). The Times recently
reported on the theft of the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign from Dachau (“Gate Bearing Notorious Slogan Is Stolen From Dachau Site,"NYT, 11/3/14) According tothe Times this wasn’t the first time
this kind of theft had occurred. The sign which welcomed the doomed to
Auschwitz-Birkenau was stolen but later recovered in 2009.Such signs are artifacts rather than art, but
looting a concentration camp is a little like grave robbing to the
extent that it’s defacing a memorial to one of the greatest atrocities of human history. The Times stated that the
earlier Auschwitz-Birkenau theft had been the work of “a Swedish neo-Nazi and
two Polish accomplices.” Perhaps an inquiry into the intent of the earlier
theft can unearth a motive for this latest crime. If, for example, the current
perpetrators were also neo-Nazis, was the intent to remove evidence of the
Holocaust the way say a criminal removes the fingerprints and even a murder
weapon from a crime scene? Or were they some how revisionist Nazis who didn’t
approve of the euphemistic sound of the words of above the camp? In the best of
all possible worlds, where a sequel to the Holocaust, would someday begin again
would they have preferred the words Dante placed above the Inferno, “Lasciateogni speranza, voi ch’entrata,” “abandon all
hope, ye who enter here.”
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Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). His collection of parables, The Kafka Studies Department with illustrations by Hallie Cohen will appear in
September.
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