Plunder, Restitution, Emotion and the Weight of Archives: A Historical Approach

Abstract

On March 31, 1955, ten years after the end of the war, the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union announced its intention to return the artworks that bad been removed from the Dresden Painting Gallery in 1945 and transported to the USSR. Two years later, in May 1957, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union also decided to return the museum holdings that had been confiscated in Berlin. The following winter, from early September 1958 to mid-January 1959, hundreds of rail cars containing millions of artworks from Moscow and Leningrad arrived in East Berlin. For cultural life in Berlin and East Germany, this large-scale restitution was an unusually important event: for a whole decade, the special depositories where the Soviets kept the museum holdings from Germany bad been totally inaccessible; the return of the artworks was meant to give impetus to the painstaking rebuilding of Museum Island, which bad been destroyed by war. From November 1, 1958 until April 1959, the island was the setting for the exhibit Schätze der Weltkultur von der Sowjetunion gerettet (Treasures of the World Cultural Heritage retrieved from the Soviet Union). The exhibit, mounted with clear political intentions, marked the end of the 13-year exile of German artworks in Soviet depositories. However, it was far from the end of the so-called "looted-art debate" revolving around the artworks not returned by the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, this debate developed into an affair of state between the then unified Germany and the no longer Soviet Russia. In a caricature by Horst Haitzinger in the Rhein Zeitung of April 17, 1997 (Fig. 5), an oversized Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, is depicted clutching bis diplomat's briefcase, standing in front of a grotesque recreation of the Laocoön sculpture that artfully embodies a naked Helmut Kohl in the center and two naked ministers, one on either side. The gigantic snakes they wrestle with are labeled "Pensions", "Budget", "Tc1iC Reform", and "Billion-Mark Deficits".-So with all that what do you need our looted art for? the Russian president asks the antique sculpture. What is implied is that anyone who already has a Laocoön (or is able to 1 This contribution is a synthesis of thoughts that have come to mind in the course of writing various articles for publication and through participation in the conference Wie das zweite Exil das erste zum Sprechen bringt. Moskauer Archive und die Kiinste in Paris 1933-1945 in Moscow. For their inspirational role, 1 would here like to thank Ines Rotermund-Reynard (Paris), Gilbert Lupfer (Dresden) and Uwe Fleckner (Hamburg). See ßenedicte Savoy, An ßildern schleppt ihr hin und her ". Restitutionen und Emotionen in historischer Perspektive, in:

Dakar’s Museum of Black Civilisations: Towards a New Imaginary of a Post-ethnographic Museum

“…The return of colonial artefacts is one of the major issues which Western museums have to grapple with in this century (Savoy 2015). As Bianca Gaudenzi and Astrid Swenson have recently argued, the debates on the restitution have materialised as a reaction to "challenges of reframing nations and the international order brought about by some of the central events of the second half of the twentieth century, " such as the Second World War, the Cold War and decolonisation (2017: 516).…”