Re-imagining communities through cultural property restitition: the Austrian, Italian and (West) German cases, 1945-1998
Final Report Abstract
The project analyses the history of restitution of fascist-looted cultural property in post-war Italy, Austria and the Federal Republic of Germany from the end of WWII to the 1998 signing of the ‘Washington Declaration on Nazi-confiscated Art’. Conceived as a social history of restitution in the context of Cold War and post-1989 Europe, the project investigates the impact of restitution on local and national identities vis-à-vis the struggle to come to terms with the fascist past. As the project was able to determine through a vast array of Italian, Austrian, German, US and British archival sources, restitution played a pivotal role in the cathartic rebuilding of the Italian, Austrian and West German communities after WWII. Especially between the immediate aftermath of the war and the late 1950s, the rhetoric of restitution represented an extremely useful means of staging a clean cut with the fascist past while at the same time placing all blame onto Nazi Germany (in the case of Italy and Austria) or the NSDAP leadership (in the West German case) in order to exculpate the state apparatus and the Italians, Austrians and Germans who had actively taken part in the expropriation of their fellow citizens. As a result, at least until the late 1960s restitution was often implemented as a way of actually avoiding having to deal with the Holocaust and its aftermath, both in social and political terms. Despite the staggering efficiency of the Fascist and Austro-fascist confiscation machines, for decades the rights of the legitimate owners (or their heirs) were thereby not only forgotten but sometimes even, once again, violated. Even when restitution to Jewish citizens or communities did take place, in fact, the process sometimes turned into yet another instance of discrimination or loss (human, as well as material), or, in the best-case scenario, provided an alibi that reduced the process of Wiedergutmachung to a simple financial transaction, devoid of social or political meaning, a transaction that could even be questioned, as testified by the Hans Deutsch affair. Equally importantly, while at least until the 1960s all three countries usually resorted to restitution as a way of distancing themselves from their fascist past without effecting any deeper social and political reckoning nor tackling the persistence of anti-Semitism – in their leadership as in society at large – Italy took it one step further: in postwar Italy, cultural restitution quickly came to represent one of the main facets of the total whitewashing of Fascist crimes and the construction of the victim myth, on one side, but also of the political use of heritage in (re)building the national community through a conception of heritage that showed remarkable continuities with its Fascist predecessor. It was only after the end of the Cold War that the country would take the first steps toward a more comprehensive processing of fascist crimes, but this phase was to be remarkably brief.
Publications
-
“Una riflessione sulla storia contemporanea”, Questioni a cura di Giulia Albanese, Storica 74, XXV (2019), pp. 75-89
B. Gaudenzi, E. Asquer, F. Bartolini, E. Bini, M. Bresciani & M. Di Donato
-
Crimes against Culture. A Companion to the Holocaust, 191-208. Wiley.
Gaudenzi, Bianca
-
Between material culture and “living room art”: Historicizing the restitution of fascist-looted art. International Journal of Cultural Property, 28(3), 333-341.
Gaudenzi, Bianca & Niemeyer, Lisa
-
Historicising the Restitution of Nazi-Looted Art, 1945 to the present, Special Issue of the International Journal of Cultural Property 28, 3, pp. 333-477
Gaudenzi, Bianca & Niemeyer, Lisa
-
The ‘Return of Beauty’? The politics of restitution of Nazi-looted art in Italy, the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria, 1945-1998. European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 28(2), 323-346.
Gaudenzi, Bianca
-
Die “Rückkehr der Schönheit”? Geplünderte Kunst im Italien der Nachkriegszeit’, Historische Urteilskraft. Magazin des Deutschen Historischen Museums, Nr. 4 (2022), pp. 44-45
B. Gaudenzi
-
‘The restitution of fascist-looted cultural property in Italy, 1945- 1991’, in Network of European Restitution Committees on Nazi-Looted Art Newsletter, N. 13 (spring 2022), pp. 39-45
B. Gaudenzi
-
Competing memories? The Holocaust and colonial atrocities in German history. PASSATO E PRESENTE, 41(118), 18-52.
Gaudenzi, Bianca
-
Cultural Restitution and the ‘Rediscovery’ of the Holocaust in Italy, 1989–2003. Journal of Modern European History, 21(3), 377-394.
Gaudenzi, Bianca
-
Cultura materiale e memorie del colonialismo italiano dal secondo dopoguerra a oggi. Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 104(1), 3-14.
Gaudenzi, Bianca
