by Susan Ronald
Yet Hitler was awarded an Iron Cross first class, on August 4, 1918—a highly unusual distinction for a mere corporal. While the official history of the List Regiment is silent on Hitler’s military exploits, it was claimed that he single-handedly captured fifteen (others claimed ten or twelve) French soldiers. Or was it Englishmen?5 Their nationality seemed immaterial to the honor, just like his reasons for refusing promotion.
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Hildebrand Gurlitt provided an unusual insight into his wartime struggle.6 By February 1916 at Verdun, the war of attrition had firmly set in and German impatience was laid bare. Operation Gericht—or Judgment—was set in motion against the French on what was to become aptly known as Mort-Homme (Dead Man’s) Ridge. Hildebrand’s regiment moved on from the Second Battle of Champagne to Verdun—the longest battle of the Great War. The Battle of Verdun lasted over ten months, costing the lives of more than a million men. Only the attempted push at the Battle of the Somme by the British and Commonwealth soldiers gave some relief from starvation and death to the French.
Then February 1916 brought salvation. Unsurprisingly, given the conditions at Verdun and Gurlitt’s obvious reluctance to fight, he seemed to be suffering from some sort of psychological breakdown or shell shock, and was sent home to rest. In a letter to Wilibald dated May 14, 1916, Hildebrand is quite chatty. Still based at his parents’ home some three months later, he writes cockily, “I am faring much better, the war, which so far has cost me little time (I was spared ¾ of a year of school and the year of service) and has not torn me away from work.”7
Hildebrand’s arrogance becomes more tempered when he is trying to excuse himself to his brother for not writing. “Apart from a certain laziness” becomes a familiar refrain in all his letters; Hildebrand blames his silence on the gulf of “experiences that lie between us.” Then, confusedly, he explains this away with “at least essentially you have not changed as any change would separate us even more, but as long as I can remember you have always been reliable, unchangeable. But for me it’s different.”
Hildebrand had changed. He “had to go through a time of self-discovery, conscription, first term at university and war” and grew “from a pupil who had to be afraid of every teacher, to becoming a lieutenant.”8 Consumed with a desire to be close to his siblings again, he tries to speak to Wilibald through music: “Every sound, every piece of music reminds me of you and I am not forgetting that your Bach Organ Sonatas imparted a first understanding of music to me.”
Speaking of his sister, he says, “Things are more difficult for Eitl. She expects more from others than I who can tolerate anything from anybody. And you also know that her assuredness and independence have made her confessor for all the miserable torments of the soul of the other nurses and the young volunteer war carers.” Still, Hildebrand fears that “she is now alone again in the endless space known only to her.”
Turning to his future, he says, “I want to seek my salvation in art history and initially as a museum administrator. I am trying to gain a lot of knowledge about paintings and buildings in my spare time. Unfortunately one can and may not make any plans.… I have no greater wish than to be together with my two siblings.”9
It would be years before any of Hildebrand’s wishes would come true. Returning briefly to his regiment at Verdun, he was overwhelmed by the inhumanity and destruction surrounding him and sustained “another light wound.” This time, it was to a finger on his writing hand, and he was home, yet again, for the summer. “My finger has almost healed and I am able to write.” It was August 1916 when he wrote to Wilibald, “I am almost feeling ashamed, when I am sitting at home at my desk and think of my two siblings.… It might sound incredible to you, but everything will still be here, when you both return.”10
The letter invites the question: Was his injury self-inflicted? Given the horrors of Verdun and the length of time that Hildebrand was home, it is probable; otherwise more than his finger would have been wounded. Still, he would never return to full combat duty. Instead, he was seconded to a heritage-conservation unit in Belgium as one of Germany’s Monuments Men, charged with safeguarding art in the occupied territories, just behind the front line. While hardly assuring his personal safety, as protecting art was a perilous business, it was a vast improvement on trench warfare.
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How did he get so lucky? In the years leading up to the war, his father had been working with the leading force in conservation heritage in Germany, Paul Clemen, professor of art history at University of Bonn. Clemen was the German chief of Art Preservation and Monuments, actively working in Belgium with a specialist colony of German art historians and artists to preserve architecture and artifacts from destruction. It was on Clemen’s model—described in his groundbreaking work of 1919, Kunstschutz im Krieg (Art Preservation During War)—that the heroic World War II Monuments Men were conceived. Until very recently, Germans from the Great War were worshiped with the same veneration as their later Allied colleagues.11
“The German Monuments Men [of the Great War] were no art looters like Denon,”* wrote a German historian in 1957, “but were men who found themselves first on the scene with the purpose of protecting art, and whose integrity is beyond doubt, as they never thought about self-enrichment, not for their museums nor their universities, not even for the State.”12
Indeed, Clemen and Cornelius Gurlitt both worked in Belgium without remuneration. Young architects received five marks as a per diem, often advanced by Clemen personally.13 During the carnage on the western front, these men of the arts—artists, art-history students, art dealers, writers, archivists, librarians—all formed a hyperactive colony cataloguing everything in public collections in the occupied territories of France and Belgium while “protecting monuments.” With some reason, they also returned to Germany everything that was deemed to have been stolen from the German principalities during the Napoleonic Wars, a century earlier. It was an example that stood Hildebrand in good stead for the future.
Yet Clemen, Cornelius, and others who documented the efforts of the Great War’s German Monuments Men omitted such salient facts as the theft of church bells and intentional destruction of the library at Louvain—that ancient and great seat of Catholic learning since the days of King Philip II of Spain (1527–1598). The historic library had been purposefully targeted as an act of vandalism and immolation in August 1914 in reprisal for Belgian sharpshooters resisting the first onslaught of German troops.14
Clemen and Gurlitt knew about that act of barbarity and others, too. Nevertheless, the intended propaganda uses to which the kaiser wanted to put their “preservation” program meant that they looked the other way. Both were devoted Pan-Germanists. Both knew that art was the bedrock of any culture. Both believed that German culture surpassed all others combined.15 Ergo, no criticism of their work on the western front was considered appropriate.
Nonetheless, reproach was leveled at these “altruistic” art saviors by the French. When in 1870–71 the German soldier looted by gourmandise, in 1914–18 “the professors of art—historians, museum curators, national librarians—the intelligentsia of Germany—looted with a single-mindedness settled between them before the war began.”16 There was little pillaging by the lowly private in the Great War. Few wall clocks or jewels went missing in an unexplained fashion. Instead, this more understandable and opportunistic crime was replaced by a military system and order that led directly to spoliation. Hitler, too, took note.
In Saint-Quentin, located in the occupied province of Aisne, in France, works of art “safeguarded” by a German soldier were restored to the town only in 1998. The museum at Douai located the painting La Fille du Pecheur (The Fisherman’s Daughter), missing since the Great War, at a Swiss auction in 2000.17 In what becomes a repetitive act of reinstatement, most artworks were restored to these occupied towns by the vigilance of those searching for them—not by the actions of those who claimed to have safeguarded them.
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In
Belgium, unlike France, the image of the officer-looter was far more prevalent—with the Ghent Altarpiece* standing as the most outrageous example of state-sponsored spoliation. Originally painted by the van Eyck brothers in the early fifteenth century, the altarpiece is deemed to be one of the most important works of art ever created.
First stolen by Napoleon’s army in 1812, it was restored to the Ghent cathedral after the Battle of Waterloo. Two of the painting’s wings (not including Adam and Eve) were pawned by the diocese that same year to raise funds for repairs to the historic fabric of the building; but when the cathedral failed to redeem the panels four years later, they were sold to an English collector. Eventually, he offered them to the king of Prussia. When it was exhibited in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin nearly a century later, the kaiser decided unilaterally that the rest of the altarpiece should be reunited with its two wings.
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Clemen set up shop in Brussels and swiftly assembled a colony of military and nonmilitary art experts. A monthly scholarly journal, entitled Der Belfried (The Belfry), became the propaganda tool and the primary instrument of Germany’s Flamenpolitik (Flemish cultural politics). Between 1915 and 1917, Cornelius Gurlitt published several articles in Der Belfried specifically addressing the significance of Walloon art† and Cistercian monasteries. Together with Clemen, he also wrote The Cistercian Monasteries in Belgium. A Commission from the Kaiser’s German General Government in Belgium.18
Always leading the way, and seemingly omnipresent, Clemen was soon joined by scores of archaeologists, like Gerhard Bersu; architects and art historians, including Cornelius Gurlitt and Wilhelm Hausenstein; and museum curators, such as Edwin Hensler (also from Dresden), Wilhelm Köhler from Weimar, August Griesbach, and Carl Epstein. While the great art-history professor Heinrich Wölfflin was “too busy” to join his former students in Brussels and The Hague, he profited nevertheless from their intimate knowledge, publishing his textbook on art history.
Hildebrand, a mere art student and junior officer, would have been allotted duties not dissimilar to those of the junior Monuments Men of World War II: rescuing art from bombed-out buildings or precarious places, assisting in assessing which buildings should be marked as off-limits, and cataloguing the artifacts on the orders of his commanders.
He would have been among those whom Clemen approved to give talks on Flemish versus French (Walloon) visual arts to Belgians—so it was claimed—to demonstrate the Germans’ philanthropic purpose. Oblivious of the Belgian viewpoint, Griesbach wrote after one such talk, “Brussels seems perfectly calm and quiet, and even towns which have suffered greatly like Louvain, their ruins seem far less terrifying than before. Besides, the more you get used to them, the more I believe these objects could well serve a future tourism industry.”19
The administrative head of this group of art connoisseurs was the art dealer Alfred Flechtheim, who was in many ways the most knowledgeable of them all, and the least likely to succumb to petty academic jealousies. More significantly, Flechtheim’s knowledge across artistic schools, his international reputation, his affable manner, his understanding of the world art markets, his ability to train art connoisseurs and dealers alike, and his impeccable taste made him a natural for the position.20 Flechtheim would become one of Gurlitt’s first victims in the 1930s.
Hildebrand would have met Flechtheim several times during the course of his Belgian sojourn. As a junior officer and an art student, he should have equally stood in awe of such an acknowledged expert. Gurlitt’s thirst for knowledge about art, his time at the art colony in Brussels—and particularly at Flechtheim’s knee—would prove to be an extremely useful learning experience in the next war.
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Belgium was also a home away from home for German artists. They proliferated among the Red Cross: Erich Heckel, Ernst Morwitz, Max Claus, Otto Herbig, Curt Glaser, and the renowned Max Beckmann to name some. Women art dealers, too, like Grete Ring (who later emigrated to England), and Paula Deetjens, the official photographer for the Folkwang Museum in Hagen, headed up the list of female notables working directly under Clemen. Their task was to catalogue and comment on everything.
As incredible as it may seem, their stated purpose was to mark out acquisitions for Germany after the war was won. The word “acquisition” was to be interpreted as a prelude to annexation by Germany. Karl Ernst Osthaus, founder of the Folkwang Museum, published a reply to his Flamenpolitik colleague Henry van de Velde in an open letter in the Frankfurter Zeitung that it was senseless to hide Germany’s annexation aims in Belgium; that Walloon or French culture was not a pale copy of German culture, as van de Velde pretended; and that Flamenpolitik’s sole purpose was to legitimize the perception at home, in Belgium, and abroad. The permanent annexation of Belgium was considered nothing more than reuniting “Germans of blood.”21
Flamenpolitik segregated all art and architecture in Belgium as either French Walloon or Flemish—a first step in indoctrinating the Belgians to the notion that the Flemish were German by culture. The Flemish art of Breughel, van Eyck, Bouts, Bosch, Ensor, Rubens, and others was deemed superior to the Walloon equivalent.
According to Cornelius Gurlitt, “failing to find a veritable school of art they [Walloons] exiled themselves abroad.” Whether by “genetic disposition” or by “intellectual flexibility” or their “penchant for novelty” or “openness to the Renaissance,” the Walloon artist “certainly distinguished himself from the Flemish artist, but he fears to insist on making the important ethnic differences between himself and the French, which also separates him from the Fleming … and this is due to his fear of reviving and supporting his German origins.”22 Cornelius’s remarks are among the first to classify Flemish art and architecture as essentially German in origin, and base the difference on race and nationality.
This dismemberment of French Walloon from Flemish art ignored history. It discarded local influences; the shared Burgundian origins with Lorraine; the fusion of what was “Latin” or “Germanic”; the origins of modern Belgium as a Spanish Habsburg colony at war against its overlord Spain for nearly a century before its independence; and international influences beyond France or Germany. To be German and be part of German culture was to be superior in the occupier’s eyes; to have other origins made the Belgians, and their art, inferior.
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At a stroke, fine art, as the most visible form of culture at the time, became the foundation and silent battleground for propaganda on both the western and eastern fronts. In the War Press Office, art historians and art critics were drafted to head up operations. The colony of art historians in occupied Belgium and France fed information back to Berlin, to men like Hermann Voss, assistant curator at the Leipzig Museum prior to the war, for his onward dissemination to the army and the public. On the eastern front, art critic Paul Fechter, feuilleton editor of the Deutschen Allgemeinen Zeitung, headed up the War Press Office in Vilna.23
These Monuments Men, with the combined efforts of the War Press Office, headquartered in Berlin, were a reflection of the golden thread running through Wilhelmine Germany, proving that Germany merited its place at the head of the table of great nations. Yet Pan-Germanism would not allow any other culture or race its own merits. By the time Hildebrand had been seconded to the German art unit in Brussels, the first hint of ingrained German anti-Semitism was already under way: the Judenzählung, or census of Jews in the military. Jews like Flechtheim were good enough to fight, but were never real Germans.
The Judenzählung took place in the wake of the 1916 article by the Nazi philosopher Bruno Bauch entitled “On the Concept of the Nation,” in his journal Kantstudien. Jews were called fremdvölkisch—an alien people who would find it difficult to love a German homeland as much as true Germans. He understood why earlier generations had barred Jews from owning land and other property. When the inevitable furor erupted among German philosophers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, Bauch resigned his editorship and position in the Kant Society, balking
at the idea that he was somehow anti-Semitic.24
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The Gurlitt sons were not part of the Judenzählung despite having a Jewish grandmother. In fact, Hildebrand was entirely oblivious of the problematic issue of “Jewish blood” coursing through his veins and continued blithely cataloguing Belgian art and architecture as a true son of German soil.
Hildebrand wrote breezily to Wilibald on September 17, 1917, shortly after his twenty-first birthday, “After short, accidental and aimless expeditions as the war brings … I’ve arrived at the impression that I have seen much: Paintings—(Memling, Rembrandt, Breughel, all German, modern French, Expressionists) Architecture—(in Belgium, Bamberg, Würzburg, Cologne) and many cities where I have lived for a while (Posen, Augsburg, Würzburg, Brussels, Sedan).”25 Of course, his letters were censored by the military, so any further detail would have been struck out with a thick black marker even if it was included.
A year earlier, in the summer of 1916, Cornelia wrote that Hildebrand was “often very depressed and sad” and helped himself out of his misery by writing in “mighty phrases.”26 Had he suffered a psychological relapse? His September 1917 letter to Wilibald shows signs of both, claiming, “I’m shoring myself up against the ‘big one,’ that epidemic of war diseases: going mad. I hope so far that certainly intellectually I’ve been able to maintain my alertness; not only in the field of battle and also now more and more elsewhere.”
His way of compensating was to isolate himself “with an ever greater loneliness.” In Dresden, “in discussions with our parents, Hanns,* Eitl or Gertrud that evidence of another life exists for me to lead, and that my sense of foreboding … is nonsense, and that I can think of my art and construct a life around it, yet this was nothing but an absurdity.”27
Reading voraciously, Hildebrand carried the works of Goethe, Hölderin, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, and the poet Rilke with him. “You will now ask what have you made from all those books, those experiences, those people and I could not even with the threat of torture answer you,” he wrote. “I have not been lazy, truly not.… I have always searched, throughout this dreary situation, and with my inquisitive eyes have considered, that I have used each free minute in search of an answer.… I have not really been lazy, honestly.” He continues in much the same vein for another half page, imploring his brother to believe again and again that he has not been lazy.