Restaging “Degenerate Art”: The Politics of Memory in the Berlin Sculpture Find Exhibit

The question the visitor is faced with upon entering the Griechischer Hof at the Neues Museum in Berlin is not: where am I, but: when am I?1 Along the edges of the room are artifacts from the ancient world: reliefs from Egypt and Mesopotamia and a statue of the Greek god Zeus from Asia Minor. Looking up, one sees a frieze spanning three walls, commissioned for the grand opening of the museum in 1855, depicting the destruction of Pompeii. Beneath this frieze, the damaged facade of the courtyard, left unrestored during the renovations of the museum, serves as a reminder of a more recent tragedy, the firebombing of Berlin during the Second World War, which left the museum a ruin. Finally, in the middle of the room stands a set of smaller figures in terracotta and bronze, which, at first glance, also seem to be relics of the ancient world, like the statues and reliefs around them. These figures show signs of heavy damage, and the bronzes are covered by a light green patina. As the authors of the catalogue to the exhibit put it, they appear as though they had "bereits Jahrhunderte im Boden gelegen" (7). As one moves closer, however, one begins to discern shapes, lines, and contours that could not have originated in the ancient world. A table with information at the back of the room indicates that these sculptures are, in fact, among those works of modern art which were confiscated and held up to ridicule by the Nazis as entartete Kunst. Archeologists discovered them injanuaiy of 2010 in the course of excavation work in front of the Rotes Rathaus, one of the oldest and historically richest areas of Berlin. They had been buried and forgotten beneath the rubble of what was once Konigstrase 50, a building destroyed by the allied bombing campaign. This was a mystery: no one knew how the sculptures had come to be there. In 2011, however, after the exhibit had opened, it came to light that this building once housed a depot of the N azi Reichspropagandaministerium in which confiscated artworks were stored.2The sculptures make up an exhibit at the Neues Museum titled Der Berliner Skulpturenfund. 'Entartete Kunst"im Bombenschutt? In this essay, I discuss the exhibit as it was staged from November 2010 to March 2012.4 Above, in my description of a first visit to the exhibit, I highlighted the effect of temporal disorientation it produces in the visitor-the uncertainty about when the sculptures were created, which only resolves itself upon closer inspection of the artworks and the placards below them. This, however, is not just a neat trick.5 It is rather part of a larger strategy that the curators of the exhibit employ to cast the phenomenon of entartete Kunst va. a new light, by juxtaposing the different histories of the statues that make up the exhibit, the classical sculptures and reliefs around them, the Griechischer Hof itself, and the Neues Museum as a whole. Also juxtaposed to these artworks is the film, Venus vor Gericht (1940), which aystallizes the particular classically oriented aesthetic philosophy that the Nazis used to justify their persecution of modern artists, whose work they labeled "entartet." By offering a different means of engaging with Germany's National Socialist past, the exhibit figures in what Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove have called a "memoiy contest," a "highly dynamic public [engagement] with the past [...] triggered by an event that is perceived as a massive disturbance of a community's self-understanding" (2). As Fuchs and Cosgrove recognize, "individuals and groups advance and edit competing stories about themselves that forge their changing sense ofidentity" (2). Two such "competing stories" encompass the historical and art-historical moments the Skulpturenfund exhibit brings together by evoking the Nazis' persecution of modern artists together with the classical tradition and the long histoiy of its reception in Germany. According to one conventional narrative, art histoiy is seen as essentially disjunctive, with modern art representing a real break from the classical tradition, a tradition that was subsequently derailed by the appropriation of classical styles and techniques by the artists and architects supported by the Nazi regime. …