A charged biography of a notorious Nazi art plunderer and his career in the postwar art world   “[Petropoulos] brings Lohse into sharper focus, as a personality and axis point from which to explore a network of art dealers, collectors and museum curators connected to Nazi looting. . . . What emerges from Petropoulos’s research is a portrait of a charismatic and nefarious figure who tainted everyone he touched.�—Nina Siegal, New York Times   “Readers of art history and WWII biographies will appreciate this engrossing deep dive into one of the world’s most prolific art looters.�—Publishers Weekly   Bruno Lohse (1911–2007) was one of the most notorious art plunderers in history. Appointed by Hermann Göring to Hitler’s art looting agency in Paris, he went on to help supervise the systematic theft and distribution of more than thirty thousand artworks, taken largely from French Jews, and to assist Göring in amassing an enormous private art collection. By the 1950s Lohse was officially denazified but was back in the art dealing world, offering masterpieces of dubious origin to American museums. After his death, dozens of paintings by Renoir, Monet, and Pissarro, among others, were found in his Zurich bank vault and adorning the walls of his Munich home. Jonathan Petropoulos spent nearly a decade interviewing Lohse and continues to serve as an expert witness for Holocaust restitution cases. Here he tells the story of Lohse’s life, offering a critical examination of the postwar art world.

Whenever the British Press wants to attack the Royal Family, they make a jibe about a oetheir foreign rootsa . The Royalsa " as they saya " are simply a posh version of German invaders. But did German relatives really influence decisions made by any British monarchs or are they just an a oeimagined communitya, invented by journalists and historians? The Royal Archives at Windsor gave the authorsa " among others John RAhl, doyen of 19th century monarchical history a " open access to Royal correspondences with six German houses: Hanover, Prussia, Mecklenburg, Coburg, Hesse and Battenberg.

..".a useful addition to Holocaust historiography and literature. It is accessible for students and teachers as well as the general reader. It provides a taste of what the world of Holocaust scholarship is actively engaged in--the constant exploration and understanding of the history of the murder of the Jews of Europe and the ongoing effect of these events on the world today. Hopefully, this book will stimulate others to read further and deeper." . H-German Few essays about the Holocaust are better known or more important than Primo Levi's reflections on what he called "the gray zone," a reality in which moral ambiguity and compromise were pronounced. In this volume accomplished Holocaust scholars, among them Raul Hilberg, Gerhard L. Weinberg, Christopher Browning, Peter Hayes, and Lynn Rapaport, explore the terrain that Levi identified. Together they bring a necessary interdisciplinary focus to bear on timely and often controversial topics in cutting-edge Holocaust studies that range from historical analysis to popular culture. While each essay utilizes a particular methodology and argues for its own thesis, the volume as a whole advances the claim that the more we learn about the Holocaust, the more complex that event turns out to be. Only if ambiguities and compromises in the Holocaust and its aftermath are identified, explored, and at times allowed to remain--lest resolution deceive us--will our awareness of the Holocaust and its implications be as full as possible. Jonathan Petropoulos is the John V. Croul Professor of European History and Director of the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, at Claremont McKenna College. John Roth is that Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, at Claremont McKenna College.

Few essays about the Holocaust are better known or more important than Primo Levi's reflections on what he called "the gray zone," a reality in which moral ambiguity and compromise were pronounced. In this volume accomplished Holocaust scholars, among them Raul Hilberg, Gerhard L. Weinberg, Christopher Browning, Peter Hayes, and Lynn Rapaport, explore the terrain that Levi identified. Together they bring a necessary interdisciplinary focus to bear on timely and often controversial topics in cutting-edge Holocaust studies that range from historical analysis to popular culture. While each essay utilizes a particular methodology and argues for its own thesis, the volume as a whole advances the claim that the more we learn about the Holocaust, the more complex that event turns out to be. Only if ambiguities and compromises in the Holocaust and its aftermath are identified, explored, and at times allowed to remain--lest resolution deceive us--will our awareness of the Holocaust and its implications be as full as possible.

A charged biography of a notorious Nazi art plunderer and his career in the postwar art world "[Petropoulos] brings Lohse into sharper focus, as a personality and axis point from which to explore a network of art dealers, collectors and museum curators connected to Nazi looting. . . . What emerges from Petropoulos's research is a portrait of a charismatic and nefarious figure who tainted everyone he touched."-Nina Siegal, New York Times "Readers of art history and WWII biographies will appreciate this engrossing deep dive into one of the world's most prolific art looters."-Publishers Weekly Bruno Lohse (1911-2007) was one of the most notorious art plunderers in history. Appointed by Hermann Goering to Hitler's art looting agency in Paris, he went on to help supervise the systematic theft and distribution of more than thirty thousand artworks, taken largely from French Jews, and to assist Goering in amassing an enormous private art collection. By the 1950s Lohse was officially denazified but was back in the art dealing world, offering masterpieces of dubious origin to American museums. After his death, dozens of paintings by Renoir, Monet, and Pissarro, among others, were found in his Zurich bank vault and adorning the walls of his Munich home. Jonathan Petropoulos spent nearly a decade interviewing Lohse and continues to serve as an expert witness for Holocaust restitution cases. Here he tells the story of Lohse's life, offering a critical examination of the postwar art world.

A penetrating inquiry into the motives, moral dilemmas, and compromises of Walter Gropius, Emil Nolde, and other celebrated artists who chose to remain in Nazi Germany "What are we to make of those cultural figures, many with significant international reputations, who tried to find accommodation with the Nazi regime?" Jonathan Petropoulos asks in this exploration of some of the most acute moral questions of the Third Reich. In his nuanced analysis of prominent German artists, architects, composers, film directors, painters, and writers who rejected exile, choosing instead to stay during Germany's darkest period, Petropoulos shows how individuals variously dealt with the regime's public opposition to modern art. His findings explode the myth that all modern artists were anti-Nazi and all Nazis anti-modernist. Artists Under Hitler closely examines cases of artists who failed in their attempts to find accommodation with the Nazi regime (Walter Gropius, Paul Hindemith, Gottfried Benn, Ernst Barlach, Emil Nolde) as well as others whose desire for official acceptance was realized (Richard Strauss, Gustaf Grundgens, Leni Riefenstahl, Arno Breker, Albert Speer). Collectively these ten figures illuminate the complex cultural history of Nazi Germany, while individually they provide haunting portraits of people facing excruciating choices and grave moral questions.

The political elite of Nazi Germany perceived itself as a cultural elite as well. This work explores the elite's cultural aspirations by examining both the formulation of a national aesthetic policy and the content of the private art collections held by high-ranking Nazis. The author demonstrates that these leaders manipulated public policy and their own collecting patterns to articulate fundamental tenets of Nazi ideology. The work begins by tracing the evolution of aesthetic policy from the purges of museum staff and academics labelled as ""undesirable"" in 1933 to the confiscation of Jewish-owned artworks in the late 1930s and the organized plundering of art from occupied areas during the war. The author then reconstructs the collections of prominent Nazi officials - including Hitler, Goring, Goebbels, Himmler, Speer, and Ribbentrop - and argues that their private holdings defined their relationships to one another within the Nazi hierachy in addition to reflecting their racist and nationalist beliefs. According to the author, art collecting offered the political elite a way to achieve legitimacy and social standing, thereby providing a common cultural language for the leaders of the Third Reich.

Nazi art looting has been the subject of enormous international attention in recent years, and the subject of two history bestsellers, Hector Feliciano's The Lost Museum and Lynn Nicholas's The Rape of Europa. But such books leave us wondering: What made thoughtful, educated, artistic men and women decide to put their talents in the service of a brutal and inhuman regime? This question is the starting point for The Faustian Bargain, Jonathan Petropoulos's study of five key figure in the art world of Nazi Germany.

Petropoulos follows the careers of these prominent individuals that like Faust, that German archetypechose to pursue artistic ends through collaboration with diabolical forces. Readers meet Ernst Buchner, the distinguished museum director and expert on Old Master paintings who "repatriated" Van Eyck's Ghent altarpiece to Germany, and Karl Haberstock, an art dealer who filled German museums with works bought virtually at gunpoint from Jewish collectors. Robert Scholz, an art critic in the Third Reich, became an officer in the chief art looting unit in France and Kajetan Muhlmanna leading art historianheaded looting agencies in Poland and the Netherlands. Finally, there is Arno Breker, a gifted artist who exchanged his modernist style for monumental realism and became Hitler's favorite sculptor. If it is striking that these educated men became part of the Nazi machine, it is equally is striking that most of them lived comfortably after the war.

Based on previously unreleased information and recently declassified documents, The Faustian Bargain is a gripping read about the art world during this period, and a fascinating examination of the intense relationship between culture and politics in the Third Reich.

The German-speaking world has spawned some of the most extreme contrasts between products of culture--the endlessly fascinating, if cliched, Beethoven-Hitler dichotomy--and thus provokes compelling questions about culture and identity. "A User's Guide to German Cultural Studies" is an invitation to explore the rapidly expanding scholarship in cultural studies within the German context.
This collection brings together more than twenty-five essays from top-notch scholars and astute cultural critics who examine diverse questions in both broad outlines and specific instances. A literary scholar investigates multiculturalism in German literature; a political scientist asks which past Germans live with after reunification; a historian studies the revival of Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" in 1829; a journalist wonders how we learn to stop hating the Germans.
More than just a sampler of current work, however, the volume aims at practical applications. Through introductory and linking comments by the editors, essays by expert practitioners, and a unique section devoted to resources for teaching, the book offers a variety of new approaches to studying and teaching German culture and illustrates by example the potential of cultural studies generally.
Previous cultural studies readers have fallen short of the interdisciplinary ideal they imagined for themselves. Growing out of long-term collaboration between its editors and contributors, "A User's Guide to German Cultural Studies" is a model for this kind of work. The essays speak to each other because their authors have done just that. Together they take advantage of a particularly auspicious moment to reconsider crucial theoretical andpedagogical issues relating to things German.
Scott Denham is Associate Professor of German, Davidson College. Irene Kacandes is Assistant Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College. Jonathan Petropoulos is Associate Professor of History, Loyola College in Maryland.

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Memory, History, and Responsibility: Reassessments of the Holocaust, Implications for the Future "contains the highlights from the ninth "Lessons and Legacies" conference. The conference, held during the height of the genocide in Darfur, sought to reexamine how the darkness of the Holocaust continues to shadow human existence more than sixty years after World War II left the Third Reich in ruins.

The collection opens with Saul Friedlander's call for interdisciplinary approaches to Holocaust research. The essays that follow draw on the latest methodologies in the fields of history, literature, philosophy, religion, film, and gender studies, among others. Together both the leading scholars of the Holocaust and the next generation of scholars engage the difficult reality--as raised by editors Petropoulos, Rapaport, and Roth in their introduction--that the legacies of the Holocaust have not proved sufficient in intervening against human-made mass death, let alone preventing or eliminating it.