[CPProt.net] Cultural divide exists over Russian war loot

Tue May 17 05:32:57 CEST 2005

Cultural divide exists over Russian war loot

By Steven Lee Myers The New York Times

TUESDAY, MAY 17, 2005

MOSCOW A week ago, on the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II,
Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and President Vladimir Putin appeared together
on Red Square in a symbolic nod to the historical reconciliation between
Germany and Russia. Yet a few blocks away, a museum exhibition suggested how
the war's dark legacies continue to divide the two countries.

Shortly before Victory Day, as it is known here, the State Pushkin Museum of
Fine Arts put on display 552 ancient works of art - including Greek bronzes,
vases and amphorae, Etruscan figures, fragments of Roman wall paintings and
Coptic amulets carved from bone, all meticulously restored.

None have been seen in public in more than 60 years. All are the spoils of
war, seized by Soviet troops from the ruins of Berlin in 1945 and carted
back to Moscow. The exhibition - especially its timing - could easily be
viewed as a memorial to the ravages of war or a taunt of a boastful victor.

"This can hardly be understood - not only by the German public," Germany's
culture minister, Christina Weiss, said after the exhibition opened on April
26.

Russia and Germany have long sparred over the fate of tens of thousands of
artworks that the Soviet Union captured and then claimed as compensation for
the incalculable damage caused by the Nazi invasion in 1941. For the
Germans, each new exhibition is a painful reminder of the artistic and
cultural heritage that was lost.

Irina Antonova, the Pushkin's director, said the exhibition's critics should
be grateful instead.

"I think this is proof of our good will," she said in her office, not far
from the three rooms where the exhibition is on display. "We have carried
out a colossal amount of work. Why should people be upset about it?"

The exhibition's title - "Archaeology of War: The Return from Oblivion" -
hints at the Russian pride that has been an undercurrent of the anniversary
commemoration this year. For all the flaws of the Soviet Union, the thinking
goes, its victory over Germany was an unassailable achievement. The museum's
curators and two dozen restorers spent five and a half years inventorying
and restoring the works, which were salvaged from the ruins of a bunker near
Berlin's Tiergarten. (Which side destroyed the bunker is a matter of
dispute; the museum blames German troops, while German officials say records
suggest the cache was still intact when Soviet troops arrived.)

After the war, they spent decades in boxes - mixed with ash and soot - in
storage in Sergiyev Posad, a city north of Moscow.

"Most of the objects were picked up with shovels," said Lyudmilla Akimova,
the exhibition's curator and head of the museum's department of antique art
and archaeology. "They were mixed with dirt and covered with tar. Whatever
we managed to restore to this date, we included in the exhibition. There is
still more work to do."

Much of the pottery, for example, had been reduced to shards that restorers
pieced together, in some case incompletely. A Greek red-figure vase -
depicting the murder of Aegisthus by Agamemnon's children, Orestes and
Electra - has regained its form, though significant gaps had to be patched.

A stunning bronze sculpture, the Zeus of Dodon, made in the 4th century B.C.
had been badly charred by flames, Akimova said.

While restoration may have brought the works back from "oblivion," their
provenance is not nearly so obscure. Virtually all the works once belonged
to Germany's state museums in Berlin. Akimova said that research traced some
of the works to specific collections amassed in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries and that several of the works were well known to art historians.

"I feel joy, of course, that these objects are back in the world," she said,
showing visitors around the exhibition's three halls the other day.

The anniversary of the victory in World War II, celebrated in the Soviet
Union and now Russia as a major national holiday each May 9, has revived the
debate over looted art as well as territorial disputes and the Soviet
Union's postwar domination of eastern Germany.

But despite hopes that the passage of time and even the personal friendship
of Schröder and Putin could lead to the return of more art, Russia's
cultural officials have steadfastly refused to reopen the issue. They cite
Russian law that allows the return only of trophies taken without
authorization - as opposed to those officially seized as compensation - and
works belonging to anyone who suffered from Nazi repression.

Antoly Vilkov, deputy chief of the federal agency that preserves cultural
heritage, said in a newspaper interview in February that Russia has 249,000
works of art, as well as 260,000 archive files and more than one million
books, that were taken from Germany as war compensation.

The most famous is "Priam's Treasure," a collection of gold recovered by the
German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in 1873 in what he believed to be
ancient Troy. The Pushkin displayed the treasures in 1996 and has since
dropped any question of its return. The gold is back in storage.

"Everything that the Soviet Union took as compensation, which includes
Schliemann's gold as well, is not subject to return," Vilkov told the
newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets.

 MOSCOW A week ago, on the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II,
Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and President Vladimir Putin appeared together
on Red Square in a symbolic nod to the historical reconciliation between
Germany and Russia. Yet a few blocks away, a museum exhibition suggested how
the war's dark legacies continue to divide the two countries.