Objects of War

The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement

Leora Auslander,Tara Zahra

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501720093
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Historiographie

The book, Objects of War, illuminates the ways in which people have used things to grapple with the social, cultural, and psychological upheavals wrought by war and forced displacement. ? Utah Public Radio

Historians have become increasingly interested in material culture as both a category of analysis and as a teaching tool. And yet the profession tends to be suspicious of things; words are its stock-in-trade. What new insights can historians gain about the past by thinking about things? A central object (and consequence) of modern warfare is the radical destruction and transformation of the material world. And yet we know little about the role of material culture in the history of war and forced displacement: objects carried in flight; objects stolen on battlefields; objects expropriated, reappropriated, and remembered.

Objects of War illuminates the ways in which people have used things to grapple with the social, cultural, and psychological upheavals wrought by war and forced displacement. Chapters consider theft and pillaging as strategies of conquest; soldiers' relationships with their weapons; and the use of clothing and domestic goods by prisoners of war, extermination camp inmates, freed people, and refugees to make claims and to create a kind of normalcy.

While studies of migration and material culture have proliferated in recent years, as have histories of the Napoleonic, colonial, World Wars, and postcolonial wars, few have focused on the movement of people and things in times of war across two centuries. This focus, in combination with a broad temporal canvas, serves historians and others well as they seek to push beyond the written word.

Contributors:
Noah Benninga, Sandra H. Dudley, Bonnie Effros, Cathleen M. Giustino, Alice Goff, Gerdien Jonker, Aubrey Pomerance, Iris Rachamimov, Brandon M. Schechter, Jeffrey Wallen, and Sarah Jones Weicksel

Part I

States of Things

The Making of Modern Nation-States and Empires

Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra

The essays in this section of the book all focus on the forced mobility of things in the context of war, on the use of stolen objects and antiquities by warring states. The plundering of publicly held artworks and cultural goods more generally as well as the expropriation of individual property have been a central strategy of warfare. These acquisitions have enriched the collections of state museums and royal palaces. This is therefore not only a story of state expropriation and restitution in the immediate context of war. These essays also demonstrate that the importance of things to individual and group identification continues well after the war “ends.” In the aftermath of war or ethnic cleansing, restitution cases have turned battles over objects into fierce sites of political contestation, memorialization, and individual and collective struggles for justice and recognition. Throughout the modern era, states have also engaged in heated diplomatic conflicts over the theft and return of stolen objects and cultural patrimony that often last for decades or centuries.

The statues, paintings, furniture, china, tapestries, and architectural fragments themselves have often resisted such theft and redeployment. The fragile materiality of artwork—its propensity to shatter or break in transit—has confounded the political projects assigned to them by humans. They break or tear in transit or capsize the ships used for their transport. Even when they reach their new homes intact, or in a state that allows for repair or restoration, they often don’t quite settle in but continue to bear the traces of their earlier lives.

In chapter 1 of this section, “The Honor of the Trophy,” Alice Goff explicates how and why during the Napoleonic wars, French armies expropriated artwork from across Europe to be displayed at the new Louvre Museum in Paris in the name of Enlightenment universalism. Focusing on a single work, the bronze statue known as Adorans that had been discovered in 1503 in Rhodes and brought to Venice, whence it circulated through noble and royal private collections until it was captured by the French and put on public display in the Louvre. Prussian administrators subsequently repatriated the statue (along with other objects) to serve their own idealistic vision of art’s transcendent spirit. The bronze statue was damaged a number of times along this trajectory, so damaged that even fundamental questions such as whether the boy’s arms were extended heavenward in supplication or in some other posture became the subject of intense debate. Goff ultimately argues for the importance of the object’s materiality and also for the crucial role of its human captors and interpreters. Restorers could not quite eliminate the telltale scars on the statue’s body, but the statue did not get to decide if it was praying or not, or how or where it would be displayed, or to what purpose.

Shifting from the context of continental to overseas empire, Bonnie Effros explores how the French discovery of Roman ruins in Algeria was used to legitimate its annexation of the territory. Intellectuals and politicians argued that the Ottoman Empire was illegitimate; France was the true heir of the shared Latinate civilization created by the Roman Empire. The new French Empire would simply reunite the Mediterranean world. Bureaucrats argued further that that Roman heritage had been neglected and abandoned; the French had an obligation to Western civilization to preserve and restore its remains. These efforts were, however, thwarted by both human and material actors. Parisian museum administrators thought that the North African finds were of low quality and not of much interest. French colonists argued, by contrast, that the Roman artifacts should stay in Algeria, to help build a French imperial identity. And the things themselves resisted; they broke when soldiers tried to extract them and their weight sank the ships used to transport them. Alice Goff and Bonnie Effros both suggest, then, that nineteenth-century campaigns to steal, export, and re-signify art and antiquities sometimes fell short of their ambitions.

In the final essay in this part of the volume we move from the nineteenth century to the twentieth and from bronze statues and stone fragments to domestic furnishings, albeit luxurious ones. Cathleen Giustino analyzes how four successive regimes in Czechoslovakia made use of stolen things to reinforce their power between 1938 and 1958. Each regime used this property to legitimate their rule, reward loyalty, and construct new historical and national narratives. Chateaux that had been the residences of Czech nobles were appropriated first for Nazi use, then reclaimed immediately after World War II and transformed from enemy property into a form of national patrimony that symbolized the cleansing of Germans from “Czech” space. They acquired yet another life under the socialist regime, becoming retreats for writers whose work was sanctioned by the state. Each of these redeployments of the buildings required reallocation of their contents and a reconceptualization of whether those household furnishings’ purpose in life was to be used in the present or preserved for the future.

In all three of these chapters the powerful investment of the modern state, whether imperial, monarchical, republican, or socialist, in the wartime seizure not only of territory but also of movable property becomes clear. Those appropriated goods were then redeployed to serve the states’ political and material interests. French, Prussian, German, and Czech regimes discovered, however, that they had less power over these mere things than they thought they had. The things themselves did not always behave—they broke, wore out, or bore scars that raised questions—and people did not always react to them as they were intended to react. The traces of violence had their costs.

1

THE HONOR OF THE TROPHY

A Prussian Bronze in the Napoleonic Era

Alice Goff

Protect me from the surging horde

That pulls us against our will toward the maelstrom

No, lead me to the quiet corner of heaven

Where new joy blossoms for the poet alone….

—Goethe, Faust, 1808

In November 1806, the members of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin gathered to draft a desperate plea. France had defeated Prussia a month earlier at the battles of Jena and Auerstadt, and Napoleon and his army were now occupying the city. In a by then well-established feature of French military policy in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the occupiers sought out objects of cultural value from the vanquished state to transport back to France. The director of the Musée Napoleon, Dominique-Vivant Denon, led the endeavor, selecting works of art, coins, books, maps, and curiosities from the royal palaces and galleries in Berlin and Potsdam to enrich his museum’s collections in Paris. As the objects were readied for transport, the distraught members of the Academy in the Prussian capital decided to intervene with the French emperor himself.¹ In the resulting petition, the members invoked one of the threatened objects to represent their plight. The most prized antiquity in the Prussian collections, an ancient bronze boy just over four feet tall with head raised and arms stretched upward, implored the mercy of its captors.

The only monument of the collection that could merit the honor of being taken away as a trophy is the …image of an Adorans. He raises his eyes and his hands as if to implore the great and generous spirit of the victor. This beautiful bronze represents so well the state of the supplicant, and portrays so well our situation, to which we cannot add anything to express more strongly and more deeply our prayers and our hopes.²

It was a strange formulation. The artwork, with its arms outstretched, pleading to the French captors to spare it, was at the same time a worthy trophy. Stranger still, the Academy seemed to concede that the very gesture that made the boy such a fitting representative of their supplication also assured its own capture. The allegory of the praying statue had overshot its target. By embodying so perfectly the plight of the conquered, the statue was the perfect emblem of the conqueror. By interceding on its own behalf, the Adorans condemned itself.³

Figure 1.1. Bronze statue of a young man (Adorans), late 4th century BCE. Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen Berlin, Sk. 2. Erich Lessing, Art Resource, New York.

This figurative sacrifice was too evocative for the classicist Aloys Hirt, a drafter of the appeal. To concede that “the only monument …that could merit the honor of being taken away as a trophy” might give the impression that the sculpture was a fair prize, Hirt cautioned.⁴ While the bronze boy might be a fitting trophy, what that status should entail need not be so blatantly explicated. He thus proposed excising the mention of the act—“the honor of being taken away”—and replacing it with the more abstract “the honor of a trophy.” “I believe it is better to wrap these matters in a kind of chiaroscuro,” Hirt wrote to his colleagues. “Besides, if the conqueror were to leave this ancient trophy in our hands, would this not be just as fitting a memorial to his victory and his greatness?” The director of philology at the Academy agreed, amending only the grammaticality of the construction into idiomatic French.⁵

For all their quibbling about language, the Academy members remained silent on the boldest aspect of their invocation of the Adorans, which is that they should call this object an Adorans at all. The statue, perhaps the most famous work in the Prussian collections, was widely known at the turn of the nineteenth century not as Adorans, but as Antinous, the favorite youth and lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian. By calling it an Adorans, an unnamed individual in an act of worship, the Academy was claiming an entirely new identity for the ancient bronze. In their last-ditch effort to save their collections from the French occupiers, why should they not only invoke but literally invent an artwork whose prayers would go unanswered? More than unanswered, an artwork whose prayers secured the very thing these strove to prevent? Of all the rhetorical tools, of all the metaphorical figures at the disposal of the most learned men of the Prussian capital, why this deeply flawed and, as Hirt himself recognized, deeply risky one?

This question, which will concern the following pages, is larger than it seems. Through the figure of the bronze statue made to pray, the Academy’s petition contained an argument about the power of art in a moment of political instability, material uncertainty, and upheaval. The devastating losses to the French in October 1806 and the subsequent two-year occupation created a crisis within the Prussian state, exposing the ineptitude of its military, the fragility of its economy, and the vulnerabilities of its government, which was fractured by local traditions and privileges.⁶ Drawing on the aesthetic theory of the eighteenth century, the learned bureaucrats addressing these problems in the aftermath of Prussian defeat saw the arts as a means of both social reform and spiritual uplift.⁷ The creation of the Adorans as such conveyed not only the position of the Academy mem...